A small victory in a bad year: José Pizarro at the RA reviewed

Piccadilly is losing its patina of dirt, its cadaverous character. It is overpriced and over-renovated,a meeting place for luxury goods. Perhaps I cannot forgive it for not actually containing Dracula’s ‘malodorous’ house; but who has a resentment against a street except this column and Hillary Clinton, who set a terrorist attack here in her new novel State of Terror (written with Louise Penny), which describes her resentment towards Donald Trump through the prism of genre fiction? Piccadilly does, though, now have three excellent restaurants: HIDE; the Wolseley; and José Pizarro at the Royal Academy of Arts, which opened this summer.

I am used to good art and bad food: one can’t have everything. The National Gallery café has so little imagination (it is called the National Café) that you must stare at Rembrandt’s face to cleanse yourself of sandwiches that are, quite literally, cynical, and imagine he shares your disdain. After all, that is surely what portraiture is for: agreement. Like Twitter. It is better to bring your own food, wrapped in greased paper, if that is still permitted.

The Royal Academy has the opposite problem in that the Summer Exhibition is still on. There is good art here. They have the splodges (or ‘Studio Experiments in Colour and Media’) of its first president, Joshua Reynolds, which make me yearn for a crazed and badly behaved Joshua Reynolds, rather than the immaculate Joshua Reynolds we have. (I think the same about Hans Holbein. I can never look at a Holbein without wishing he would drink a tequila slammer, then go to work on the eighth Henry and his rotten soul.) Yet it is overwhelmed by the tinny, explosive colour of the Summer Exhibition, which runs until January, as if time itself is broken.

But there is also José Pizarro in the Senate Room: a restaurant so good-natured and charming that you can imagine, while in its embrace, that all is well with the world beyond the door, even if Hillary Clinton stuck a bomb in it, mistaking it for Trump.