A perfect feast with Roger Allam

J Sheekey is one of Richard Caring’s older, and better, restaurants. Since he has dowsed the suburbs of London in multiple outposts of the Ivy (there is one in Wimbledon, another in Richmond and presumably one pending in Penge), J Sheekey increasingly feels like an island in a sea of pointlessly aspirational green. The rise of the Ivy — the original celebrity brasserie, which is code for an indifferent restaurant full of awful people eating shepherd’s pie — is an inevitable consequence of the rise of celebrity culture. This is anti–culture, and the Ivy is, therefore, an anti–restaurant. So many celebrities, and now so many Ivys to put them in. The age of narcissism has many tentacles.

J Sheekey lives in an alley between the Charing Cross Road and St Martin’s Lane; it is not Soho then, but the more depraved and interesting Charing Cross. It is long, latticed and red, like a painted nail on a finger of necrotic flesh.