Northern Europe doesn’t get salads: Claro reviewed

Claro is at 12 Waterloo Place, St James’s, and, when I tried to find out what it used to be – it has the energy of a bank – I found an advert from the Crown Estate offering the lease for a ‘retail or wellness opportunity’. 12 Waterloo Place was pictured in pen and ink, with a woman holding a yoga mat idling past, and a woman in cycling shorts hanging back. I wonder why the Crown Estate is pushing wellness, which I think is being rich, bored and female while not dying. (I have never heard a woman with a good book talk about wellness.) The price is upon application. I looked further: 12 Waterloo Place is 20th-century Baroque pastiche, it was a bank, and it wants to be a wellness opportunity. It should talk to the ducks in St James’s Park. They live inside a wellness opportunity.

Instead Claro is an Israeli-owned restaurant specialising in eastern Mediterranean food, and too understated to ruffle the maniacs who walk past at weekends, shouting in praise of murderous dictatorship – because this is a decadent age where former banks push wellness opportunities and former leftists push Hamas.

It is a vast banking hall decorated in the style beloved by the current rich, a form of gilded nothingness out of some-thing. Anti-culture. There is ancient brickwork, old marble floors which I suspect the designer would have gladly axed, and a glorious faux-Tudor plaster ceiling. This, though, is mixed with tables and chairs too small for the room (it should look like the Café de Paris and it needs showgirls and Trollope heroes) and meaningless, monied lighting designed for wellness opportunities. I know each wealth aesthetic washes through London like the tide.