Cora Pearl’s conundrum

Cora Pearl is the new, and second, restaurant from the people who made Kitty Fisher’s in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. Kitty Fisher was a celebrated 18th–century courtesan, as the saying goes, and Cora Pearl, whose shrine is in Covent Garden, was likewise the happy and well-paid whore of myth. (Her real name was Emma Crouch, she was from Ply-mouth and she died broke and working as a common prostitute, with not a pearl, if you will, to her name.) I suppose the raging second-wave feminist in me should mind that fashionable restaurants are named for women whose daily work was so bitter and intimate I can’t even detail it here, and that is fair enough, because I am reviewing dead, not living flesh.

But feminism is a swiftly sinking ship and it has better — I mean worse — things to do than mind wealthy Londoners dining on the graves of an unfortunate woman who was very clear on how much she hated men.