Each suburban soul yearns for the Soho of their youth. It isn’t that Soho was better in the 1990s when I invaded the Colony Room, twitching, and took a fag off Sarah Lucas. It is that I was.
This was the view of a friend after I last wrote on Soho restaurants. We once ran holding hands through the sprinklers in St James’s Park laughing at Peter Mandelson, who was passing with his dog, and that is my memory of the Blair years.
So Soho, which is thick with metaphor anyway — its very name is a hunting call: death for one and ecstasy for another — is a district to measure your age. The new buildings barely matter in this reasoning, even if I hate them. The stones — and the possibilities — remain. You can’t erase the energy of that much bad sex. It is you that has changed. You are journeying to husk. An almost-corpse. That is why you are addicted to banquettes and sticky toffee pudding and waiters who pretend to care. You should begin to investigate grave sites.
Now, if she is right — and I am not sure she is yet — that is the reason that I hate Kiln.
Kiln is fashionable. I fantasise that whenever I type that word Spectator readers sigh and turn to Rod. Don’t go to Kiln. It won a meaningless award — best UK restaurant at the National Restaurant Awards 2018, actually — for being (and I admit I do not know what this means) ‘democratic’. Does this mean Rosa’s Thai Café — which I endorse for its natural light — is run by Viktor Orban but Kiln is run by someone more dedicated to the principles of social democracy? Aren’t all restaurants, like all newspapers, tyrannies?
I haven’t taken awards seriously since I covered the Rear of the Year and watched a woman with bright hair posing with her bum sticking out.
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