What Soho House has got right: Electric Diner reviewed

Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior design and even its own restaurants. The Ned, its City hotel with ten restaurants, is genuinely insane, like Thorpe Park for people who are scared of roller-coasters; and no restaurant for adults should sell fishfinger sandwiches, even at Babington House, a Soho House hotel which is Clown Town for grown-ups but near trees.

But Electric Diner is much finer: the sort of restaurant that attacks its parent with a spade, like Oedipus. It is attached to a beautiful old cinema called the Electric – electricity was once exciting enough to name things, and may be again – and it sits on the Portobello Road in a very curious part of London: as much crossroads as hill. The Portobello Road used to be a farm track between Kensal Rise and the Kensington gravel pits, surrounded by orchards and named for a distant victory in a long-forgotten and very minor war.

It’s easy to forget how fascinating London is and could be again if we only had the imagination to preserve it: villages upon villages, cities upon cities. Notting Hill, which wanders through the class system north to south, like an illustrated guide for children, is in denial about this now, as if aching for some deadly conformity. Why it seeks to conceal its undeniable magic is my first question. I suppose money is the answer; it wants to hide near other money and cast out those who have little: security in numbers, like cows. Why no one ate the food in the restaurant scene in the film Notting Hill – they had gooey plates of pasta and just ignored them, as if they were spectral plates and somehow dangerous – is my next question.