A great chef at his best: Lisboeta reviewed

In 2014, Nuno Mendes, a chef from Lisbon by way of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchens and his own Viajante in Bethnal Green, opened a restaurant at the Chiltern Firehouse hotel. This is a redbrick Edwardian castle in Marylebone, which used to be a fire station, but no longer is. This restaurant was skilful: both blessed and cursed. I thought it was Gatsby’s house, inhabited by people looking for something they would never find because it does not exist: self-acceptance through the incitement of jealousy, which is the emotional purpose of being rich.

People went for the empty pleasure of being seen at the Chiltern Firehouse because the prime minister David Cameron, among others, came for Caesar salad with chicken skin, which was presumed to be interesting like he was. Skin aside, the food was less important than the performative presence of what calls itself society inuring itself to its own hubris, and rot.