‘I pity MPs more than ever’: the Cinnamon Club, reviewed

The Cinnamon Club appears on lists of MPs favourite restaurants: if they can still eat this late into a parliament. It lives in the old Westminster Library on Great Smith Street, a curiously bloodless part of London, and an irresistible metaphor wherever you are. When once you ate knowledge, you now eat flesh, but only if you can afford it. Now there is the Charing Cross Library, which lives next to the Garrick Theatre, and looks curiously oppressed. Perhaps soon it will be a falafel shack and knows it. There is also the Central Reference Library, which could be a KFC, and soon will be. Public spaces are shrinking. They will all be online soon, and we will see how that goes. (It will be bad.)

It is smooth, to be sure: that is the point of it. The exterior is red brick with pinnacles: a late Victorian stage set for a light opera about imperial power. It still says ‘Westminster Public Library’ in stone: it is grave and grave-stone. The interior is municipal plus money, lots of it: the Cinnamon Club is, among other things, a perfect paradigm of Blairite dreams – it arrived in 2001, as if in homage to that ideal. There is a lobby with a shop selling mortars and pestles for £30 and tea towels at three for £20 (slightly more than Sainsbury’s). The dining room has bright white plasterwork, high ceilings, eerie lamps like glowing planets, pale parquet floors and blue banquettes with grey chairs. That is, it looks like the Conran Shop. It is filled with books at least: above my head I find James Herriot’s Yorkshire, Sons and Lovers, and The Comedies of Plautus. Their cataloguing system is a mess. But if you wish to eat self-conscious and expensive Indian food while reading The Comedies of Plautus near parliament, this is close to an ideal.

I like my Indian food fierce and gaudy but, like Gymkhana in Mayfair, this restaurant, which identifies as ‘fine dining’ and specialises in game and fish, seeks finesse.