Fairy food for fairy wives: Julie’s Restaurant reviewed

Julie’s is a 50-year-old restaurant in Holland Park, London, newly emerged from three years of closure as plushly renovated as its customers. The website calls it ‘a Holland Park favourite, neighbourhood classic and hangout for the Hollywood set, high society and rock stars since 1969’. Whenever I hear the words ‘high society’ I reach for my water pistol, as Hermann Goring didn’t say, but I do remember a birthday party at Julie’s 20 years ago when it seemed pleasingly decadent. It was designed by the owner, Julie Hodgess, the designer of the Biba boutique. I remember a series of deeply coloured rooms and dusty curtains and a faint and thrilling sense of mystery.

Now it is reborn, and it suffers from the disease of the reborn as detailed, say, in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary which is not technically restaurant criticism but I include it anyway: they have broken it.