‘The interiors are happily insane’: Dear Jackie, reviewed

Dear Jackie is the restaurant in the new hotel Broadwick Soho on Broadwick Street in Soho, which is most famous, if you are an infectious diseases nerd, for being the site of the 1854 cholera outbreak and its cure. Dr John Snow isolated it to the street’s water pump, noted local brewers were immune, and proved cholera is not airborne. When children stopped dying, Soho eased into its time of moral rot.

This is a changeable thing. Drama fled Soho in the 1970s, and Broadwick Soho is an attempt to put it back. This is no generic hotel. The new building – high, with blackened brick and bronze facings, and a long crimson canopy spelling out Dear Jackie– could be in New York City in its Gothic stage. The interiors are (and I am happy to write it, since the Peninsula hung a lump of Concorde from the ceiling and would get the whole Titanic up there if they could) happily insane.