Bob, booths and buttons

In January, you could go to Bob Bob Ricard in Soho. I do not know why it is called Bob Bob Ricard; and I do not really care. I am currently reviewing cars for another magazine and cars’ names make restaurants’ names sound reasonable. Perhaps Bob Bob Ricard is always slightly drunk and needs to mumble its name — ‘Bob?’ — for fear of forgetting it, like the people in the VIP field at Glastonbury. I do know that it is a restaurant for affluent halfwits, of which there is an infinite supply in Soho. I wonder if it might have been Jimmy Savile’s favourite restaurant.

It occupies the ground floor of a dull brown block on Upper James Street, in the ‘functional’ part of Soho. It may be Edwardian, but probably isn’t. It doesn’t matter. This is all about reinvention; about champagne; about the nearby London Palladium, which I also think about in Bob Bob Ricard.