I wouldn’t normally visit Coq d’Argent, which I think means the chicken of money. It is a moderately famous restaurant in a pink and brown tower in the City of London, once owned, as so much has been, by Sir Terence Conran, and now by D&D, specialists in soulless food barns. As restaurants go, it feels unlucky. It has — how to put this? — a circular roof garden from which people sometimes throw themselves off. One was a restaurant critic, but his last meal was not at Coq d’Argent. That was at Hawksmoor in Spitalfields. He had good taste, then, and he quoted Samuel Johnson on Twitter as he left: ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’
How true. I am at Coq d’Argent because it is near the Roman temple of Mithras, which has been rebuilt under Bloomberg — an image that almost defies words — and rebranded as the London Mithraeum. I have tickets to this temple and the Coq d’Argent serves breakfast, and that is enough. Pagan London! There isn’t enough of it; what is left should be treasured by mass media corporations everywhere. Perhaps the Daily Express should uncover, and renovate, a bathhouse to wash itself clean of its sins; perhaps the BBC could have a gladiatorial amphitheatre, in which to feed freelancers to lions. (They pay only £50 for a contribution, and you have to ask for it, so eating us presumably comes next.)
I think often of the city beneath the City, no, the multiple cities beneath the City and the mulch of plague victim and coinage; of the River Fleet, which rises on Hampstead Heath near the ponds, and helped to put London where it is.
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