The Ivy is a Playmobil-style faux-medieval restaurant in a triangular building opposite The Mousetrap; of the two, The Ivy is more ancient and threatening. It has mullioned windows, a photogenic lamp post and a parking space for paparazzi to shoot people who want to be shot, as in early Martin Amis novels. It has been refurbished for its 100th birthday, in the manner of an ancient dowager empress seeking new fingers. Of the ‘celebrities’ or ‘notables’ or ‘people who are better than you’ who used to dine here I cannot speak; but apparently it was a live-action re-enactment of a Nigel Dempster diary. Christopher Biggins blah. The pig from Babe blah.
It is, you must understand, a ‘legendary restaurant’. It is, with its new fingers, currently engaged in some made-up PR-created ‘war’ with the Chiltern Firehouse in Marylebone, fought on the papery battlefields of the style pages. My spoons! My money! My quiche! I loathe the brittle spells of PR witchery.
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