All mirrors and monochrome: Mister Nice reviewed

Mister Nice is not so much a restaurant as a pre-dawn thought flung into the drag between Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street. Mayfair is becoming a drug for me, in that I both hate it and can’t stop eating here: a recent review was so poisonous that the owner telephoned, with fake bonhomie, to ask what I thought his next Mayfair site should be. Social housing, I replied: he won’t telephone again.

Here is the next one: Mister Nice. It sits opposite 21 Davies Street, which houses Lynch Pest Control Mayfair, and has a motto from Louis de Saint-Just etched into the stone: Les mots juste et injuste sont entendus par toutes les consciences. And ‘Too many laws, too few examples’. Say what?

I couldn’t find a menu or prices online: perhaps these don’t matter. Instead, there is a piece of testimony – well, drivel – in capital letters with no punctuation, from some Gatsby ghoul called Mister Nice, a wanderer in café society, who only seeks a café in which to lay his spoon. ‘IT IS THERE, WHEN THE CITY OF LIGHTS ALIENATES, WHEN I CAN FINALLYTHINK OF GOING HOME. I CAN ALREADY SEE THE GREEN FIELDS AND GET GREY MIST FROM THE WINDOW UPON LANDING. PERSONALLY, I HAVE ALWAYS PREFERRED TO SURROUND MYSELF WITH PEOPLE LIKE HOSNI, WHO ALWAYS CARRIES ME FROM THE AIRPORT AND THROUGHOUT THIS SHORT TIME IS ABLE TO PORTRAY THE MOST INSANELY WONDERFUL STORIES ABOUT THE PEOPLE HE HAS TAKEN IN THAT TAXI.’ (Forgive the shouty caps. I am trying to give a sense of how much coke these people don’t do.) The Instagram feed is no more helpful: it is Sean Connery eating spaghetti, but at least he isn’t writing poetry to his Uber driver.

Of course, I would never say that the people who make places like this – and visit them – are high on coke all the time, and want only mirrors in which to see themselves, and never food, because it is not part of their dreamscape.