Boulestin has nothing to do with Marcel Boulestin — but could entice Mary Berry

Boulestin is a pretty restaurant on St James’s Street, between the posh fag shop (Davidoff) and the old palace, which the Hanoverians thought so ghastly that they moved out to Kensington Gardens, a fresher hell full of squirrels. This is one of the more fascinating West End streets because it is 300 years old and is, as such, the only street in the West End in which the ancient nobility look safe, or even human; you pass tourists, rats and also dukes wafting towards White’s gentlemen’s club, which is duchess-free and where a grown man can be treated like a baby, and not in a perverted way.

So Boulestin, named for the famous French chef and photographer Xavier Marcel Boulestin, who looks, from my swift research, like Major Strasser from Casablanca, but fat. Perhaps I cannot see through the moustache? Boulestin became a chef due to dinner-party racism; he was in interior design and was introduced to a publisher, who assumed that because he was French he should write a cookery book.