The Portrait Restaurant lives at the top of the National Portrait Gallery, London. It is fiercely modern, but likeable. You ride an escalator into a void, glimpse the raging faces of the Plantagenets and take a lift upwards, away from dead kings and film characters walking the streets. (Downstairs, by the entrance to the National Gallery, two competing Yodas from Star Wars are posing for photographs. One is too tall to be a convincing Yoda. Tourists inhabit a different city.) In this long bright room there is no such anxiety; only clean windows to Trafalgar Square and happy women having lunch in a secret glade of stone and brick. You can see Admiral Nelson’s sub-Poldark bum; the fourth plinth (how I miss the immense blue cockerel, now replaced by a skeletal horse); the Ministry of Defence with its pale green roofs and many flags, flapping for I-don’t-know-what. You can peer down Whitehall, empty of politicians now, like a doctor performing a colonoscopy on a corpse.
I like to stare down Whitehall, and the view from here is good for humans, although pigeons have it better; would Charles I have liked the Portrait Restaurant? (Depends on the table.)
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