Diary – 19 July 2003

An eagerly anticipated lunch-date with our sainted proprietor’s wife. A la page as always, Barbara wanted to try the restaurant above Mourad Mazouz’s blindingly chic nightclub Sketch in Conduit Street. The Lecture Room notoriously costs about a million a mouthful, but they have dreamed up some wonderful and weird ways of making you feel it’s worth it. There’s something called a ‘walking upstairs policy’, which means that no one is allowed to walk upstairs unless they are accompanied by a member of staff. I had arrived before Barbara, who was made to wait until someone could escort her up to join me, while I waited. A gobbledyspeak-trained comis brought some salty thingies to try ‘while you’re wasting your time’. For all the hifalutin palaver about the ‘chef’s inspiration for the day’, most of the sludge-coloured food tasted as you’d imagine the froth around horses’ mouths would. But the room is rather wonderful and weirdly, at those astronomic — note the missing ‘g’ — prices, was almost full.