An inedible catastrophe: Julie’s Restaurant reviewed

At Julie’s at the fag end of Saturday lunchtime, Notting Hill beauties are defiantly not eating, and the table is covered with crumbs. Restaurant Ozymandias, I think to myself. This is no longer a district for the perennially wracked, or unrich. The Black Cross – Martin Amis’s ideal pub in London Fields – is now a sushi joint. Of course it is.

Julie’s, which is named for its first owner, the interior designer Julie Hodgess, mattered in the 1980s. I don’t trust restaurant myth-making – let longevity be the judge, and this is the third Julie’s on the site – but it was for a while the sort of place that glossy magazine people wrote about when glossy magazines mattered: like Langan’s, the Grill Room at the Connaught and Le Caprice. Julie’s was an idea really: that by occupying a space Mick Jagger had occupied, you were somehow, if not Mick Jagger himself, then close enough.

This third Julie’s has been kindly reviewed. Possibly it is nostalgia – the first Julie’s was good, it sold sausages and mash – but, as you know, the nostalgic is not yearning for place but for himself when he was there. He is reviewing himself, when young. Because this is ashes: the worst meal I’ve had since Langan’s, and it is no coincidence. You can’t eat myths, and left to themselves myths get lazy.

The interior is flouncy florals – pretty enough, like Notting Hill is pretty enough: with its own distinctive culture, invented by Richard Curtis in his film Notting Hill, it is now less place than aesthetic. When Americans who watch European rom-coms think of London, they think of Notting Hill and Mary Poppins and Paddington. Unreal places don’t need real people or real food.