At the Chiltern Firehouse, smugness should be on the menu

Here then is Gatsby’s house, after an invasion by the Daily Mail. It is called the Chiltern Firehouse. It is a restaurant in a newly opened hotel in a Victorian Gothic former fire station in Marylebone, a proud and grimy district in total denial about its shocking levels of air pollution. The building has a fairytale intensity, with red brick turrets; it is a Roald Dahl prison repointed to its extremities by the man who made the Chateau Marmont in LA. The chef is Nuno Mendes, formerly of Viajante.

But what else? Ah — now we are sucked into a wind tunnel of paps and buzz; like so much nonsense, this is media-led, the media having so little to do that they must write about the Chiltern Firehouse. In this, I am complicit. What is the critique, limp or spirited, but another revolution in the cycle of churnalism, nepotism and ennui?

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Outside there is a gate — an actual, non-metaphorical and enormous gate — and a huddle of freelance photographers, with staring bystanders and dazzled diners getting in and out of people carriers.