If you review restaurants professionally you would not think Britain wanted to leave the EU. You would think she wanted to live happily in the twinkling golden stars of Europe like Emily Thornberry’s neck fat, eating, semi-eternally, at a European-style brasserie.
British restaurants are a silent acknowledgement that native food is not very good unless you really like cabbage. Please don’t write to me about fungus from Maidenhead. I don’t care. Our cities reflect it; every-where I see European-style brasseries glinting with the promise of European–style bliss. Where is the courage of our seething psychological imperatives? Why don’t we put our madness where our mouths are?
I daydream about a new Brexit-themed restaurant in Britain, but I have yet to see it. It is true that some people are talking about Spam, but they are clearly insane. I imagine this fantasy restaurant as an allotment in Wiltshire starring a pig that you get to kill yourself because you are really a Spartan at Thermopylae. Even if you actually live in Wiltshire. I wonder if it should be called Patriotic British Cuisine: Presenting the Turnip and its Friend, the Pig, and their Friend the Nuclear Deterrent?
But I cannot review what does not exist. I cannot even review its ghostly parent, which is School Dinners, a restaurant entirely designed for Jacob Rees-Mogg’s growling Id — I heard there was bottom spanking after apple crumble but I don’t believe they had the nerve — which is now closed. So instead here is yet another European-style brasserie called Moncks of Dover Street in Mayfair.
There is, I must say, absolutely nothing wrong with Moncks. It is only that I have been here before. It looks like every other brasserie that has opened in London in the past 20 years.
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