Lanes of London is dining for Martians

Lanes of London serves street food to people who hate streets; that is, it exists to soothe the still-curious mouths of lazy, wealthy paranoiacs. This is the character of the dishonest age: you can ride in a gondola in Las Vegas, ski down a mountain in Dubai, visit a wizard’s castle in Watford Junction, and enjoy the Notting Hill Carnival in Mayfair while sitting down. (Other options include staying in a five-star faux shanty-town hotel in South Africa, complete with corrugated iron shacks and authentic ‘poor people’s rubbish’). It is not for me to call this madness, or to say that as funds grow more grandiose, worlds invariably shrink; or that the whole abominable schtick is entirely self-hating, and the opposite of true adventure: an anti-Phileas Fogg quest which ends with coffee and a mint behind double glazing on the fag end of Marble Arch. I leave that to wiser heads, and Alain de Botton. Lanes of London is under the cream-puff Marriott Hotel on Park Lane, which is itself a deeply confused hotel — it is forced to pose the philosophical question: can one be posh so near to the Marks & Spencer end of Oxford Street? — on a deeply confused lane. How many authentic London lanes have a glut of traffic, a taxi rank, mad royal gates with a unicorn and lion, a hotel for footballer orgies — the Grosvenor House — and a memorial for the dead animals of war, about which I would love to hear Michael Gove’s opinions; in this case at least, will he admit, were donkeys led by donkeys? In the Marriott here is a lovely marble fireplace, there a random bit of chipboard posing as a drinks table for giants. Not that I don’t love the Marriott chain, with its world-famous mattresses and its designated TV channel starring J.W.