Gymkhana is morally disgusting – and fortunately the food’s disgusting too

Gymkhana is a fashionable Indian restaurant in Albemarle Street. It was, according to its natty website, ‘inspired by Colonial Indian gymkhana clubs, set up by the British Raj, where members of high society came to socialise, dine, drink and play sport’. This is revolting, in the same way that eating in homage to apartheid South Africa or to commemorate the genocide of native Americans is revolting. Not that this is exceptional, of course; these days no crime is so calamitous it cannot be seconded into an entertainment experience or themed meal. There is, after all, a cafeteria at Auschwitz which received the following review online: ‘They have a range of foods, from snacks, drinks, ice cream, hot dogs, burgers and meals. Plenty of seating.’ Ah, plenty of seating. It may be in the Talmud — the redemptive power of plenty of seating. Or maybe not.

Most popular

James Tidmarsh

The African cardinal who terrifies Macron

The critics love Gymkhana. It has a Michelin star — not that this indicates anything beyond a skill with tiny hobbit food — and is national restaurant of the year in some stupid restaurant awards, known to human beings as poisonous PR puff, that I have retrospectively boycotted.

It looks, first, like an over-polished pub; a J.D. Wetherspoon in which an obsessive-compulsive has been let loose with Pledge. It is an ugly and depressing plethora of dark woods and leathers, which invites comparison with eating in a five-star or maybe seven-star coffin, in the company of the heads of dead animals, brought to you by the shotgun of some Maharaja of Jodhpur; a Vanity Fair death, if you will. There are photographs of cricket teams and polo teams on the walls alongside them; more death, in sepia. Further in there is deeper hell, near the loos — an engraving of a white couple carried around by Indians, who look as miserable as engraving, not the greatest of the visual arts, can convey; and it is all the sadder for it.