Among the best puddings I’ve ever eaten: Richoux reviewed

Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in a haunted mirror in which the only thing that matters is your survival. This duplicity is important to understand, because the road from Cicero to Caesar is so short it may lack potholes. Cake is less urgent, but at least cake won’t lie to you. And here is Richoux, still filled with cake, if you can afford it. It is, for many people, marvellous and theoretical cake.

Richoux was a cake shop on Piccadilly – a street I can never eat in without thinking of Alexander Litvinenko sitting, doomed, in Itsu, when it still pleased Vladimir Putin to kill people individually – for so long it was forgotten. It is 113 years old, or one seventh of Yoda. People walked past it as if it were a tramp, or a piece of lazy monumental statuary, or a ghost.