La Môme is the new ‘Mediterranean’ restaurant at the Berkeley, Knightsbridge’s monumental grand hotel. It has changed, as all London’s grand hotels have changed: it is Little Dubai in the cold and the chintz is on the bonfire. Fairy lights hang from the awning of the entrance, as if in an eternal Christmas. I barely recognise it, though I ate an impersonation of a mandarin in its overwrought Instagram-friendly bakery two years ago, and it was inferior to a real mandarin. I cling to that.
Designers must keep busy: this means grand hotels are always getting renovated – it’s life of a kind. The lobby feels gold, though that may only be an impression. The chairs are huge and furry – like friendly polar bears is my best guess – because the very rich do not want the chairs that others have, and here is the possibility of comedy. We need it. I feel we nailed chairs centuries ago – chairs are chairs, after all – but here they are, with their ridiculous polar bear chairs, preening.
These are beautiful people – I have never seen such good haircuts or subtle tailoring (style magazines call it ‘stealth wealth’) – and they know it, and record it, as if for some personalised Domesday Book. A slender, long-haired girl walks to the loo – it is icy blue, velvet and exquisite – filming herself. As she walks into the cubicle I wonder when she will turn the camera off: never? La Môme mirrors them, so they will be comfortable: identification through soft furnishing is a kind of validation.
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