Back to the future: Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill reviewed

The west end of London is still pale and necrotic, but there are points of light. Hatchards the bookseller is open and its memorial to the Duke of Edinburgh is relatively, blissfully, restrained: a portrait in the window, with minimal text for a writer to trip up on his own sycophancy. People are buying whisky on Jermyn Street. The greasy spoon Piggy’s in Air Street survives and if before you merely loitered outside restaurants and ate your food from a bucket you can now sit down, though a strange sort of duck marshal lurks in St James’s Park, and I do not trust him. I do not think he is really watching the ducks.

I celebrate the end of this lockdown at Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill in Swallow Street. I choose Bentley’s because it is famous, relatively ancient (established in 1916) and the food is reliable. I want to know who, besides myself, is credulous enough to eat outside on a day when it has also snowed.