A careful parody: Noble Rot Soho reviewed

Noble Rot sits in Greek Street, Soho, on the site of the old Gay Hussar, which squatted here from 1953 like a rebuke. Some people loved this Hungarian ‘left-wing’ restaurant, with its terrible food, its library of Labour-themed political biographies, its raging cartoons and fond memories of Harold Wilson. But you can’t eat political biographies — not if you have taste. An attempt to save it by a ‘Goulash Collective’ failed, because the Gay Hussar was a themed restaurant whose theme — a sort of politicised London Dungeon — ran out. In an exquisite metaphor, it closed in 2018, at the height of Jeremy Corbyn’s self-hating — and self-thwarted — grasp for power.

Now, instead, we have Noble Rot, the second of that name; the first is in Lamb’s Conduit Street, Bloomsbury. I love this name because it is ambivalent: noble rot is a fungal infection that afflicts grapes. If managed carefully, it produces wines of great sweetness and depth. If left to itself, it is destructive, and that is a fair metaphor for adventures in Soho still.

The owners are mindful that this restaurant is near Hazlitt’s, the hotel for adulterers who re-enact the Enlightenment in soft furnishings, and other black-hearted Soho relics, and have created a restaurant that feels ancient, and therefore interesting, but with food you might actually eat. That is not something you could say about the Gay Hussar, which used to serve haunting roast duck and fat red chillies in what looked like ash trays: nibbles for masochists. The postbox-red frontage is gone — it is now an oily green — but there are no picture windows or pale woods after renovation; that is, it does not look like a Carbis Bay fungalow, or a branch of John Lewis after a robbery, as is the current fashion.