Dorsia is the fictional restaurant in Bret Easton Ellis’s excellent novel American Psycho. The psycho, a banker called Patrick Bateman, longs to secure the 8.30 p.m. slot at Dorsia, but he can never get it; instead he walks through Manhattan killing other bankers, and sometimes prostitutes. Dorsia is like Jay Gatsby, an ever-receding metaphor, except it does breadsticks. And now it has opened in London, on the Cromwell Road, courtesy of a quartet of Swedes, whom a friend who understands clubland calls ‘ocean-going club fucks’. It is a private members’ club, with a nightclub in the basement and a bar above, but the restaurant will take anyone. You cannot telephone for reservations because they have no telephone yet, and so, foolishly, I email the PR.
It is an old grand house opposite the Natural History Museum, ruined by velvet ropes at the door. Why do this? Are there strippers here? It used to be a bar called Firehouse, popular with local idiots, but it went bad, and they fled to Boujis, like people who act like refugees but dress like sluts.
The dining room on the first floor is tiny, with rolls of purple wallpaper hung in swags; the menu is equally tiny, just ten dishes long. It is the fourth day of service and out comes the chef, Alexander Baillieu, all beads of anxiety, to say hello. I wish I could say that Dorsia stinks of massacre and avarice, but no. They do lotus root smoky bacon crisps. I order a mushroom ravioli of real beauty, although my companion does not like her salmon, because it is a lump and lumps, if made of fish, are evil.
We watch Annie Lennox walk to a table.
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