The Union Street Café is in a dismal, dingy part of London; dismal dingy Southwark. Southwark, in fact, is almost charismatically dingy, a land of despairing streets and brick arches and railway tracks heading suicidally for southern suburbs. Even the churches (small, brown, bricked, almost bricked-up) look apologetic, as if they know they have failed.
But it is here, on the junction of Union Street and Great Suffolk Street, that Gordon Ramsay, the second most charismatic of the original celebrity chefs — after Marco Pierre White, now selling stock cubes to old ladies with his swiftly receding sexual charisma — has built his new restaurant. It is his tenth in Britain. It was to be a co–venture with David Beckham, the ex-footballer and human thong, but Beckham pulled out; perhaps the restaurant was not thin enough for his terrifying wife Victoria?
The cuisine is Italian, but food was never the point of Gordon Ramsay; it was always about his anger, his face, and his chomping desire for an empire; and also the fact that he was cynical enough to attempt haute cuisine while punning, at Heathrow airport, with the appalling Plane Food.
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