Locket’s is a new café from the owners of Wiltons in Jermyn Street. Wiltons is the restaurant that dukes visit when they have fallen out with White’s. It has a sign featuring a lobster that looks like Benjamin Disraeli wearing a top hat. When a bomb fell nearby in 1942, its anxious owner immediately sold it to the banker Olaf Hambro, who was sitting at the bar, by adding the price of the restaurant to his bill. It appeared, thinly disguised, in Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals as Walton’s, in which a fictional Tory minister plots the seduction of a woman called Amanda.
I like Wiltons, even if the female staff are dressed as Edwardian housemaids, which is the second worst uniform in existence after hessian smocks. So I had hopes for Locket’s as a sanctuary — a theme park — for Tory wets. I have hopes of Tory wets too, even if they spend most of their time on social media these days, sometimes with their parents, which is very weird. If your own father won’t endorse you, what are you? A Hanoverian king?
Locket’s inhabits a floor of the old Economist building in the old Economist Plaza which perches like a brutalist bird by St James’s Street. It is now named the Smithson Plaza after its architects Alison and Peter Smithson. To find it, you pass the window of White’s and watch men playing cards behind net curtains, which is also very weird.
If St James’s is old money — as Wiltons is, with its paintings of grouse and misanthropic tables-for-one — this is defiantly new money. Locket’s is golden like an Asgard: a shining golden bar slotted inside a tower where it does not belong, but came anyway — and why not?
This tower still feels like a place of work: that cannot be scrubbed out, because it is a tiny Canary Wharf, and that only makes Locket’s feel more ephemeral and weird.
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