Rivea: a London annexe to the world’s maddest expensive restaurant

Rivea (stupid name) is in the bowels of Bulgari in Knightsbridge, a hotel which looks like a vast Virgin Upper Class lounge. It sits opposite One Hyde Park (stupid name), an apartment block which looks like a vast Virgin Upper Class lounge and which I am fairly certain appeared two weeks ago in a very silly television show called Silent Witness, in which a plutocrat was murdered with scented gas after being chased by the FSB. Was he Litvinenko, or Berezovsky, who I think was murdered for suggesting that Vladimir Putin is really Dobby the masochistic elf from Harry Potter? Who knows, but it is always gratifying when the BBC drama department does the government’s work for them. Even so, with the super-rich (when did everything get so super?) I can never tell whether the joke is on us, or them. It is true they have, as a class, appalling taste; but that is little succour when dining in Rivea.