The Ambassadors Clubhouse is on Heddon Street, close to Savile Row and the fictional HQ of Kingsman, which was a kind of privatised MI6. I wonder if the Kingsmen eat here, being clubmen. Heddon Street needs fiction because its reality is one-dimensional. It is an alleyway behind Regent Street, and it used to be interesting. There was an avant-garde café under the Heddon Street Kitchen called The Cave of the Golden Calf. Ziggy Stardust was photographed for his album cover outside No. 23; from Heddon Street you could hear the Beatles play their final concert on the roof of 3 Savile Row in 1969.
This is dense, fierce, very sophisticated food and it is all superb
But that is over. Heddon Street now has the awful sheen of the gormless tourist London which Richard Curtis invented, entirely unconsciously. It is still Victorian, but the brickwork is over-pointed, and the windows over-washed. It could be Diagon Alley at the Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden, or the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. It could be anywhere.
Its function is to be the café for the mall that is Regent Street, but that is central London now. Whole districts are hotel complexes with amenities, and they feel like it: they have the lifelessness of parts of Venice. Heddon Street has occasional plants, not trees, and a zigzag of grey paving, not granite. It feels constructed, as if in a rush for TV. It also has Gordon Ramsay’s Heddon Street Kitchen; Ziggy Green, named after Ziggy Stardust (do aliens eat?); the Starman public house (do they drink?); Piccolino for Italian cuisine; Fonda (Mexican); and the Ambassadors Clubhouse, which has gained a home but lost its apostrophe on the way.
You might think it is modelled on the Hans Holbein painting in the National Gallery – skull, Madam, or Ferrero Rocher? I would dine in this restaurant in a heartbeat, but this is Punjabi food from JKS Restaurants, three siblings and the owners of Gymkhana.
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