Pity the gilded restaurants of Mayfair, if you can: they are dying. Some have reopened; they ache on like men with no legs but a glut of polenta. Occasionally, a brave one will open for customers who simply do not exist and so hangs about like a character in a Vladimir Nabokov novel: interesting but superfluous.
Where are the rich? In Tuscany? On MS The World, the floating block of luxe flats? In the vault? Because they are nowhere to be seen: they are like plushly appointed Borrowers. A journalist wrote his report of the reopening of the Savoy Hotel in the Strand last month. They had six guests in a hotel reconfigured — for social distancing — for 100. Even so, Richard Caring opened his (unconsciously) Weimar Republic-themed bistro 34 with a mad political flourish: there were two Boris Johnson mannequins dangling on zipwires. What can it mean? Does Caring wish to lynch Johnson, or just to remind us of when he lynched himself?
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