I cannot review the Gay Hussar every time the Labour party behaves like a self-harming teenager (‘I don’t want to be elected, anyway!’) so I went to Portland instead.
Portland is a spectral restaurant on Great Portland Street; it is a good place to feel numb. The name is neutral, bespeaking nothing beyond a vague acknowledgement of its surroundings, which is Fitzrovia and its traffic pollution; Portland, on the whole, is so understated the critic struggles to get a grip on its mysteries, as if sliding down a glacier towards ducks. Even its Twitter presence is ambiguous: when I attempted to follow it, I mistakenly followed the loveless bastard whose job is to tweet the weather in Portland, Oregon (‘Cloudy’) — but that is my punishment for seeking fact without opinion on Twitter, and I will bear it.
So a restaurant in Fitzrovia, palely loitering; for some reason I think of John Keats playing busboy. The floor is blond, the walls white, the chairs tan, the banquettes grey, the paintings bloody and emaciated (one critic said she thought she saw Theresa May on the wall). It is faintly Swedish industrial, but spindly: it could be the world’s chicest cafeteria. It is co-owned by Will Lander of the Quality Chop House (son of the FT’s restaurant critic) and Daniel Morgenthau of 10 Greek Street; the chef is Merlin Labron-Johnson of In De Wuld near Ghent.
None of this is my style particularly. A says my ideal restaurant would be owned by the Phantom of the Opera and Billy Bunter and specialise in 10ft sausages, but I am too moral to dine in Stringfellows, which is probably the closest London can offer to such a mad fantasy. My Spectator colleagues would tell me the technical term for my quibbling is ‘being a Feminazi [who cannot take a compliment] and wears dungarees made of gravity’.
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