Stringfellows with fish instead of women: Sexy Fish reviewed

Sexy Fish is an Asian fusion barn in Berkeley Square, near the car dealerships and the nightingales, if they are still alive. It used to be a bank — NatWest! — and it still feels like it cares for nothing but money, even as it deals in sticky chicken, which means a good deal more than money to chickens. I wonder whether the blazing vulgarity of such restaurants — it has a large mirrored crocodile crawling up the wall, and that is the subtle part — will survive the terror of Covid-19, or whether it will go the way of the Russian Tea Room in New York City, which is empty apart from a glass dancing bear.

We are initially refused entry due to my companion’s flip-flops. This is ever the way with what I will euphemistically call our style: we do not look sex-ready in pin-heeled shoes and structured dresses, because we are not sex-ready. We are sticky chicken-ready and prose-ready. I don’t usually read restaurant websites — there are Vladimir Nabokov novels I haven’t read, so why would I? — so this designation of flip-flops as morally repulsive comes as a surprise. I explain we are here to wonder whether Sexy Fish’s particular brand of pointlessness will survive Covid-19, and it is essential he admit us, flip-flops or no, so the small graduations in the decline of western civilisation can be noted by surviving people willing to pay for words. I wondered if bare feet would be permitted; but I didn’t need to ask. Instead he collapses and we are inside the kind of restaurant I can enjoy — as you enjoy watching people on cocaine chomping their own lips — without being willing to spend my own money in it. A few days later the singer Jess Glynne announced she was refused entrance to Sexy Fish.