I am fretting about this restaurant column’s election coverage and then I alight on something superficially grand and lovely, which has been hollowed out and is now useless and barely able to function: a shell. It is the Wolseley 2 – the Wolseley City – and this is perfect.
I name it the election restaurant, and Tories should eat here while they still have their shirts
Few restaurants are important, though I treasure Martha Gellhorn’s description of an operating theatre for the wounded of the Spanish Civil War which was once a restaurant in a grand hotel. But was it any good? Tales of society folk eating are self-serving: real history happens nowhere near them, says the Marxist in me – and PR is, well, PR. But the Wolseley, which opened in a former car showroom by the Ritz in 2003, expressed London’s confidence, though in retrospect this confidence was mostly based on stolen Russian money, paid for with our pride. That Lamborghini? It’s a power station in the Urals, miniaturised, spray-painted orange and driving down the Cromwell Road to nowhere special.
Even so, it was fine: a grand café that sold bacon sandwiches and coffee cake to Lucian Freud and people who knew themselves to be normal, and that was its secret. For all its frontage it knew there is no life without variety, and because the staff were joyful the restaurant was too, and there’s a lesson here. I ate here very late, in a sympathetic rainstorm, the night Elizabeth II died, and it felt magical, even if – or perhaps because – it is named for an Edwardian motor company that hasn’t built a car for 49 years.
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