Social distancing in Soho: The French House reviewed

London is gasping — so where to go but Soho, which is so good at despair? It is often necrotic but now, of the central London districts, it feels the most alive. Mayfair is a pretty corpse — I pity the luxury services industry, for its clients are in hiding — but Soho’s restaurants have spread themselves on to the streets and it feels as interesting as it used to, a place that has found its purpose again. It has been over–gentrified — the renovation of Raymond’s Revue Bar is horrifying, because they closed the revue bar and kept the signage — but now it feels giddy and important: a home for the insensible and the brave.

Soho has known worse things, after all. In the Broad (now Broadwick) Street cholera outbreak of 1854, 127 people died in three days; by the end 616 were dead. All London is built on bones, but you feel it here, and that is why you feast.

The outbreak began at the Broad Street pump and was identified as a waterborne disease by Dr John Snow, who noticed that those who used the Rupert Street and Carnaby Street pumps did not get it, and nor did men who worked in breweries. There is a replica pump opposite Hearst Magazines, which feels odd, and a pub named for Snow in thanks.

It is strange to be a critic whose art form is floundering. I go to perfect restaurants to pray for their survival. The French House is one such and it is open for dining, at least as I write, but that may change again. It is a tall, red-brick rectangle on Dean Street hung with Union Jacks and French Tricolours — you need not choose here, there are more important things — and it is one of the ‘lethal triangle’ of pubs for dead artistic drunks, along with the Colony Room, which is now a presumably haunted flat opposite Blacks club, and the Coach and Horses, where my late colleague Jeffrey Bernard would file his copy from a puddle made of regrets.