Breakfast for idiots

I couldn’t find Gazelle. I walked up and down Albermarle Street, in which Oscar Wilde once plotted his own doom in the Albermarle Club, and I couldn’t find it. I had to go to Caffè Nero opposite the Ritz Hotel and email my dining companion — where are you? Are you there? Does Gazelle exist? Or is it a modern European restaurant and cocktail bar so exclusive that it exists only in the imaginings of the International Private Jet Set who have turned Mayfair into something so ugly it could only be purchased at Harrods? Is it an imago that serves breakfast?

It’s not an imago that serves breakfast, he replied, via Caffè Nero’s free wifi, which is always useful when you wonder if restaurants are semi–mythical. It’s next door to John Murray, publishers of Lord Byron; his memoirs were burnt there, either because they were so scandalous they couldn’t be printed or — and this is a hack’s theory — they just weren’t that good.