Some time in the 80s my mother came up with what she thought was a beezer idea for a restaurant: a place where in-house psychiatrists would give you therapy sessions over the coffee. She was going to call it the Freud Egg. Oh how we laughed.
Twenty years later and her idea has almost become reality. At 12th House in London's Notting Hill, you can order up your own astrological chart along with your starter, or you can have your tarot cards read. This, to me, presented the same potential risk as would have existed at the Freud Egg: with a shrink at your table there would always be the chance of being diagnosed with some Oedipus complex - a bummer if you were a bloke treating your mum to dinner. Few mothers would be charmed to discover their son was only picking up the bill out of an unconscious desire to get them into bed.
Likewise, it would cast a bit of a pall if, after pudding at 12th House, the tarot reader kept turning up 'the grim reaper'. There are many things one wants out of a trip to a restaurant. Intimations of your own death are not among them. We asked our waitress, Helen, if there was ever a risk of such gloomy predictions being delivered to the table. Not on the astrological charts, she said. The computer in the basement that produces them has been programmed only to be jolly.
I went with Observer wine writer Tim Atkin. We decided to order up charts, and studied the menu, which is pricey. It is the place to go after the astrological prediction you will come into money has come true. Starters are at £6 and main courses around £15. In one bizarre way this was reassuring. It meant the owners had recognised that the zodiac thing could only ever be an extra selling point. To work, it has to be a good restaurant first. Certainly they have gone to a lot of effort to make it look like one: 12th House is a cosy snug of a place, with a warm, velvet padded cell of a bar downstairs serving light meals during the day, and a small, more formal dining room upstairs.
Alternatively, they have recognised that there are a lot of suckers in Notting Hill with too much money who crave bogus spiritual nourishment and are willing to be separated from a lot of cash to get it. Because the food, while in no way bad, does not match the ambitions set for it by the press tags. Tim's roasted onion and goat's cheese tart starter was fine, if a little clichéd in London now. You could almost predict it would be on the menu, even without the aid of tarot. My salad of roast quail with green beans and crispy potatoes was less a salad in which all the flavours have been carefully combined than a pile of well-prepared ingredients.
The main courses were less workman-like. Tim's roasted monkfish with tomato tart and baby squid sounded great but was just a little underpowered. My slow-cooked duck was, frankly, overcooked; I craved the unctuousness of a full-on confit. There's nothing exactly wrong with the food. It just doesn't emboss itself on the memory. There is, however, a good, short wine list which Tim described as well thought out. He chose a Ramsay Estate Pinot Noir. Slightly chilled, it went down very nicely on a warm night.
And then our charts arrived. You should know that, technically speaking, I think astrology is cobblers. This is probably because I'm an uptight Virgo. My chart had Jupiter in Cancer, which apparently means 'You are concerned with the feelings and sensitivities of people and are sensitive to how they react to what you do and say.' Try telling that to the chef at the Lanesborough hotel. None of those are good qualities in a restaurant critic who must by definition be an unfeeling bastard. I'm also not convinced about the description of me as the type of person who makes lots of trips 'to the gym, dietician and beautician'. I think they were mixing me up with Jane Clarke. Mind you, the lighting was quite subdued.
Tim, also a Virgo, announced he was more convinced by his, but I think this was because he fancied the waitress. We wanted to have our tarot read, but apparently the reader was too knackered after a long session. She used to be a lawyer. For me, this questions her visionary skills. If she's so good at the predictions game, why the hell didn't she see that the law wasn't for her?
And please, Outraged of Totnes, don't bother writing to tell me I am a spiritual dullard. I'd only take it as a compliment. The fact is, astrological charts and tarot never tell you the things you need to know. As I walked home from the tube that evening, it began raining heavily, and I got wet. Now that's the kind of thing I want to be warned about by my chart at 12th House.
