Not worth its salt: Wingmans reviewed

I see this column as an essay on cultural polarisation: artisanal butter can only take you so far into wisdom. I cower in Covent Garden, mourning Tory romanticism, and stare, cold-eyed in St James’s, at oligarchic mezze. Sometimes I eat by mistake. I couldn’t get into the fashionable noodle place in Soho, whose Instagram-made queue stretched to Cambridge Circus on Saturday night. It reminded me of the crowds at royal weddings: both camp for dreams. So, I went to Wingmans instead. 

Wingmans – it lost the apostrophe, it’s a decadent age – calls itself ‘London’s best wings’. They are chicken wings, not angel wings, and this is Pottersville, not Bedford Falls. (Some people think Pottersville is more fun and that may be, but not here. This is not a wonderful life.) The name invokes watching your friend seduce a woman by smearing chicken on her. They have branches in Kilburn and Soho, and they sell sauces to take home.

The Soho branch is double-fronted, and black like fear. The view is fine. It is of Old Compton Street and tourists who, as ever, stare at the sky and wait to be surprised. Soho invites the finger of God: that’s its job. Is it chicken-smeared?

Inside are yellowish walls, an open kitchen and tables decorated with kitchen roll. I have not seen this before. Nor have I seen a restaurant where they offer rubber gloves before you eat, as if you were a murderer: or the chicken is. The gloves appear bunched on a chipped black plate, and at first I do not know what they are. Canapés? It’s possible. I suspect the inspiration for Wingmans is Salt Bae’s Nusr-Et Steakhouse in Knightsbridge, where they feed you steak off a sword for reasons only a psychiatrist can know.