When I was a kid, thirtysomething years ago, the British culinary landscape was quite awesomely unsophisticated - a place in which food was still considered to be fuel and chilblains could be acquired from an Arctic Roll - so when my parents took me to a little restaurant called The Home of the Heavenly Hamburger on London's Kensington Church Street in the early 1970s, I fell instantly and passionately in love.
Though I was still in single figures and lived in the 'burbs, somehow even I knew that THoTHH had the whiff of nascent west London grooviness about it: wood-chipped walls painted the colour of milk chocolate, framed posters, bentwood chairs, menus the size of broadsheets, skinny waitresses wearing Biba (it was just down the road) instead of aprons and serving exotic things called 'quarter-pounders' to equally skinny women wearing Ossie Clark...
How could all this not appeal when fast food had yet to be invented and the closest thing to fun, restaurantwise, meant egg and chips in the funky (albeit only in retrospect) formica-and-ceramic environs of a Golden Egg - or, on very special occa sions, a thrillingly-named 'Bender Brunch' at the Wimpy, starring a giant frankfurter the colour of Donatella Versace and the texture of a reconstituted ET which had notches carved out of it to make it, uh, bend. Yes, we made our own fun back then, often utilising tomato-shaped ketchup containers.
Now that free-range pork sausages in organic buns are so commonplace as to be available in London's parks, it is easy to forget that 30 years ago Dijon-mustard-with-bits-in was considered a pretty racy dining accessory, if not actually the culinary equivalent of Agent Provocateur knickers. Far from getting it together under the damask on a sticky Naugahyde banquette, for the most part in the 1970s the equally seductive and symbiotic worlds of Fashion and Restaurants had yet to be introduced by a mutual friend. But when they were, it was an air-kissing match made in heaven.
The fashion journalist Iain R Webb (among whose current professional bow-strings is the title Fashion Features Editor-at-Large at Russian Vogue ) recalls a predictably glamorous journey through some of the world's shiniest restaurants, kicking off in London while he was a student at St Martins, 'drinking cocktails on the chrome bar stools amid the neon glamour of Peppermint Park in 1978', via 'my first meal at Soho's L'Escargot, in about 1983, when I really felt I'd arrived. Then getting a job on the London Evening Standard in 1986 and celebrating at Mr Chow's, which was fashionable in the 1970s but somewhere I'd always wanted to go...' (and, though no longer at the cutting-edge of fashionability, Chow's still has a celebrity X-Factor: in recent months you could have dined on a table sandwiched between those of Simon Cowell and Woody Allen).
Webb's checklist of international haute-fashion dining chimes with my own, but he has had his own special moments in all the major fashion capitals, including New York, where he singles out 'the premier party for Bruce Weber's film Broken Noses at Odeon in the late 1980s, Sunday brunch at the Time Cafe - with Lauren Hutton head-to-toe in camel cashmere reading the New York Times at the next table, and queuing for the loo next to JFK Jr at the Bowery Bar in the early 1990s...' .
Then, of course, there's Paris, where I remember wildly drunken 1980s nights at Philippe Starck's Cafe Costes as a precursor to dancing at Les Bains Douches, where drinks cost a tenner each even then (to put this in perspective, a V&T at the Savoy will set you back £8.50 today), while Webb and I both share memories of perhaps the most absurd and absurdly fashionable of restaurants, Davé, a tiny Parisian Chinese (and that's just the owner).
'You didn't really go to Davé for the food...' explains Webb, 'it was its own VIP section. Eating there is like eating behind the red rope.' On an average night in the 1990s, for example, Webb recalls jostling for chopstick space with Linda and Christy, Helmut Newton, Jil Sander, Yohji Yamamoto and of course, le patron, the eponymous Davé ('are you a leedle hungry or a LOD hungry?'). For the last word on all things Davé, see page 20.
There have, of course, been fashionable restaurants for as long as there have been restaurants, but even if people had heard of them, the 1970s joints such as Langan's, Mr Chow's and Morton's were so far away from being the kind of place ordinary folk could aspire to visit that they may as well have had Bianca Jagger naked on a white horse working front of house.
In contrast, the past 20 years has seen the steady democratisation of fashion, with the result that what once belonged to the cool, opinion-forming elite is now available to anybody prepared to foot the bill. Just as a teenager in Top Shop can buy a frock 'inspired' by, for example, the season's hottest piece of Chloe, a Heat reader can see a picture of a celebrity papped as they leave Yauatcha, work out that that must be a pretty cool place for a meal and book themselves a table, too. Mind you, if the budget doesn't run that far there's always the option of sharing a table with Jude and Sienna at the entirely affordable Wagamama in Camden or Lemonia in Primrose Hill.
Although eating out should be a laugh, a treat and an escape, the equation Swanky + Fashionable + Pricey = Top Night Out doesn't always add up. At various times of my life any number of Gerrard Street dim-sum joints, cheap and cheerful Soho staples like Pollo, Jimmy the Greek, Bar Italia, and a selection of post-clubbing haunts such as Up All Night, Beigel Bake and Ranoush Juice have given nights at the Ivy a run for their fun.
Indeed one of my most miserable dining experiences was also one of the most fashionable and expensive: a multi-course meal in a private room at a restaurant called the Lexington, in Soho, at which my then partner and I were the only couple who didn't (couldn't, indeed, afford to) stump up cash to pay the bill for several pretentious plates of nouvelle nothingness and a pudding which had actually been gilded . This ended up costing us £100 - in 1988 - while also managing to leave us hungry.
It was a rite of passage - the first time either of us had gone ton-up in a restaurant - and though, in the cab home (another bloody tenner) I may have nearly cried with both shame and the prospect of looming penury - hey, I was also more fashionable than a size 6 LBD by Azzedine Alaia. How very 1980s. How very very wrong.
Indeed, if food and fashion now have a deeply co-dependent relationship (and the existence of this magazine is evidence enough) it's worth recalling the title of a 1966 article in Design magazine: the not entirely persuasive 'Eating Out Can Be Fun'. Actually, I suspect eating out in 1966 was an assault course, given that many restaurants of the era considered an avocado-half slathered with congealed prawns-of-restricted-growth in a marie-rose sauce an acceptably sophisticated hors d'oeuvres, and 'interior design' to be a waxy chianti bottle on a checked tablecloth underneath a signed photo of the proprietor with his arm around a Beatle. Even in the King's Road.
Fashionability and fine food make for an edgy, insecure, bitchy sort of a friendship, slippery and hard to define. If you're on a big night out wearing, for example, a brand new and fabulous pair of Georgina Goodman heels accessorised by a suitably expensive dress, you'll want to be seen, not seen to be stuffing your face. Which, in turn, calls for the kind of restaurant that won't make you feel like an installation shortlisted for the Turner Prize (ie subject to brutally unforgiving halogen downlighting) or anywhere that's very obviously and sadly part of a hi-concept chain (The Fashion Cafe was so never going to work, ever), or, naturellement, anywhere you're likely to be the plainest, fattest, poorest, oldest or least fashionable person in the room. Which is likely to narrow it down a bit.
Restaurant-owners throw a lot of money around to create the illusion of fashionability, but we all know there's more to style than this week's funky wallpaper, chandelier and leather banquette combo. A great, of-the-moment restaurant is a piece of pure theatre starring a cast of staff and clientele who know how, when and where to hit their marks - and it will have less than nothing to do with who designed the chairs.
It's practically impossible to guarantee a hit or hip restaurant from the outset, but you can certainly help things along with the right sort of chemistry. For example, any restaurant by Corbin and King is going to be worth a visit for the atmosphere alone, as is somewhere owned by Oliver Peyton or Alan Yau or Nobu Matsuhisa, because these guys (and, interestingly, it does seem to be a guy thing) not only understand the production skills required to create dining-room theatre but invariably know how to turn a hit show into a long-runner without relying on coach parties.
'To be fashionable a restaurant needs a buzz,' says Alan Yau. 'I remember the first time I went to Balthazar brasserie in New York a few years ago. I got a late flight and arrived around midnight on a Monday. I went there and I just thought "wow": the energy level was incredible. The Mercer, also in Manhattan, has a similar vibe. You can't create a so-called fashionable restaurant artifically - if you do, it feels superficial. You can control certain things, like the size of tables (they should never be too big) and the space between them (not too vast), and the lighting and music to enhance the dining experience but you can do all of that and still not create the right environment.'
For most of us a very good restaurant may be practically indistinguishable from a great one, but there will still be something missing - perhaps the cooking is a bit too variable, perhaps the service is a little too fussy and intrusive (or coolly louche), or the decor is, almost imperceptibly, not quite on the money. But again, for most of us, none of these things will matter hugely. Far worse, to my mind, is the sheer energy squandered by any restaurant that is pleasantly forgettable.
At the risk of sounding like a right swanker, the combination of a career in fashion journalism and a cool dad who has, since I hit my teens, treated me to some memorable meals (spoilt? Nah, I was just an only child) means that it's been uphill from Kensington's burgers for well over a quarter of a century, and many of the best (and indeed worst) days and nights of my adult life have involved restaurants.
From memorable birthdays - Odin's at 13 right through to the Wolseley at 40, via the Connaught Grill, San Lorenzo, Le Caprice, Kensington Place, Odeon (NYC) and the Ivy - to girls' nights out at Mr Chow's, Blakes, Groucho's, Quaglino's, Moro, Momo, J Sheekey's, Lindsay House, Hakkasan and E&O, to romance at Julie's, Odette's, Poissonerie de L'Avenue, the Criterion, Orso, the Orrery, Fortnum and Mason's Fountain Room, L'Escargot, Bibendum, Circus, the Atlantic, St John, the Berkeley, La Coupole, Bofinger... to working-and-playing at Christopher's, Locanda Locatelli, MPW, the Square and the Ritz - to a thousand other random, lairy, splashy, giggly, tear-stained booze-fuelled nights everywhere from the Savoy to Joe Allen's via a burger stand on Oxford Street; it's been a life of living it large while eating. Which partly explains why I was a size 8 at the Odin's birthday and a size 14 by the time I got to the Wolseley.
Technically, the best meal I've ever eaten was cooked by Marco Pierre White (at his restaurant in the Hyde Park Hotel) but the venue had all the style and atmosphere of a G8 summit. Until, that is, Marco emerged from the kitchen, shouted at some of the customers, sat himself down and proceeded to charm me into a puddle of doting girlie giggliness before presenting me with lilies and risking life (and presumably the wrath of his insurers) by running, in his whites, into the middle of rush-hour Knightsbridge to hail me a cab. I have, to this day, never entirely recovered from that afternoon in the mid 1990s - a moment when food and fashion and glamour and sex and power and money all collided to heady effect. The only other more glamorous-yet-intimate food-related event in my life occurred on a morning in early 1993 when David Bowie made me breakfast, but I digress.
Anyway, I think this explains why, even during my restaurant critiquing stint on this newspaper in the 1990s, I would gladly turn down the opportunity of a foodie love-in at the overpriced altar of a gastronomic god in favour of the possibility of a top night out at a restaurant that wasn't afraid to have a good time. A perfectly-executed crisp paupiette of sea bass served in a hushed atmosphere more suited to the confessional, or a close-up sighting of Posh and Becks and Elton and David over a couple of fine fishcakes? It's a no-brainer.
And all this time I've no idea if the Home of the Heavenly Hamburger was ever really fashionable, even if (to me at least) the clientele resembled clones of Marianne 'n' Mick - I just know it was more fashionable than any Wimpy, anywhere, ever, and that it had some sort of indefinably attractive attitude which, in retrospect - and given the period - might have been a stray 'vibe' just passing through. In fact, every time I've walked into a restaurant since then, I've probably been looking to find that vibe again.
OFM
