A culinary wasteland

The Allis is a restaurant inside the new Soho House at White City — it is called White City House — and it is every bit as ghastly as it sounds. I do not really object to Soho House’s attempt to colonise the entire planet and furnish it with purple velvet armchairs, which are now being replicated in people’s homes, leaving us in a sort of velvet fun palace you cannot escape, while silently crying. It also feels like a poor model for capitalism, even late capitalism. I quite like the one in Dean Street — if you can ignore the people, that is, which you can because they don’t lift their eyes from their MacBooks to your hideous face. But the BBC HQ in White City — shabby and charismatic, like a half-eaten brick doughnut — is not an abandoned warehouse to be pounced on with wallpaper and silks and repopulated by adults who like ball-pits.