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.