Rules is the restaurant where Edward VII ate himself to death and, in a way, it looks like him. It is spacious and regal and covered in velvet. His personal dining room upstairs is a cocktail bar now, with a lump of Stilton as focal point and memorial. Downstairs there are stags’ heads and a painting of Margaret Thatcher as Britannia, with pointy breasts. From a distance, it looks as if she is topless.
The customers are the sort of people who like to watch powerful women topless. That is, they are powerful men, in groups or, quite often, alone. Rules has single booths for these lonely creatures — well, they can accommodate two small people, or one very fat man, and it is always one very fat man who is there, wiping the blood from his mouth with a blinding white napkin. They all have grey hair and grey suits and grey newspapers. But the waiters are camp, and this leavens the atmosphere; should a psychotic customer attack you, a melodramatic waiter would throw himself in its path, screaming ‘No’. There are also tourists who have lost The Lion King and seem bewildered, and toffs, who come here because the menu, with its lumps of meandering cow, reminds them of home.
Rules has been here since 1798. I once tried to calculate how many cows had been slaughtered for its kitchen, but when I got to 77,000 I gave up. They specialise in British Food. Not Crappy Modern British Food with its insincerities and collusions and fears — yes, I’m comparing Rules, though very subtly, to Nick Clegg, who I would quite like to eat, and fiscally speaking, may soon have to — but proper, earthy, beastlike british food.
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