A cake shop from the time of the Profumo affair: Maison Bertaux reviewed

Amid the bronze cladding of Soho, with its pop-up, suck-down restaurants – the Cadbury’s Creme Egg Café was a nadir – Maison Bertaux hangs on, the oldest French patisserie in the UK, and 151 this year.

It was founded by Monsieur Bertaux, a Communard fleeing France with a book of recipes. Their loss, our gain. Perhaps in 2173, if we are still here, there will be a similarly beloved patisserie in Rwanda. Let us hope so, for their sakes. He came here because Soho was polyglot, though it isn’t now. It’s an impersonation of a former Soho because that’s the fashion now: destroy something, pretend to lament it and build a tinny echo of that which you killed. Karl Marx’s haunts are cocktail bars. The Colony Room Club is someone’s flat: the social cleansing of alcoholics.

This is real: a glass frontage under two early Victorian houses next to the Coach & Horses on Greek Street in what used to be a Little France.