As a boy on the precipice of puberty, some time between the death of the three-day week and the birth of punk, I had a Christmas holiday job in the back room of my godfather's north London gift shop.
My task was to put together that year's novelty hit, the pet rock. I'd take a large pebble, and stick it in a box with some straw and an instruction manual. The pet rock hit a retailing nerve that yule, and we sold hundreds of them at about a fiver a pop... a fair whack at a time when you could buy the Ritz, six intercontinental ballistic missiles and much of Venezuela with £20, and still have change for a cab home.
Had anyone come up to me in the past three decades and asked, "What is the most fiendishly clever rip-off in British commercial history?" I'd have snapped back, "Ah, that would be the pet rock." But no longer: yesterday, a friend and I met an instance of chutzpah to make the pet rock seem a philanthropic gesture worthy of Lord Shaftesbury himself.
The one sadness about lunch at Le Relais de Venise L'Entrecôte was the absence of Arthur Daley. The man who praised Margaret Thatcher's entrepreneurial genius over the Chunnel - "'Ole in the ground! That woman's makin' millions from sellin' an 'ole in the ground!" - would have loved it. The scam is this: punters are crammed in at weeny tables, closer together than the average conjoined twins, and given no choice until the puddings. The menu, if this document deserves that title, states that "a green salad with walnuts" will be followed by a "trimmed entrecôte steak served with its famous secret sauce and French fries". The charge is £17.
That may sound reasonable for two courses in a fiercely trendy locale, but then it sounded reasonable to have David Blunkett as a senior member of government. I'll return to the pricing after a detour around the peripheral qualities of this stupendously ghastly branch of a Parisian favourite.
The large, square room is inoffensive in a cheap'n'phoney way, with faux-naif murals of Venetian tourist scenes, stained mirrors and maroon banquettes. The staff, all young French women in white aprons, react with weary good humour to the frequent incidence (it happened twice while we there) of people walking out when they see the non-menu.
At first, it seemed just a silly gimmick - a Left Bank student eating experience for the nostalgic professional classes of London. Then the salad arrived. By "salad", I mean five or six lettuce leaves, not wildly fresh, garnished with chopped walnut and dressed with a repulsive, oily dressing that would never get past the quality-control team at Kraft.
It was at this point that we began to obsess on the mark-ups. This dish, we reckoned, must have cost 20p at wholesale. Including a few pence for the bits of baguette, served without butter, let's go mad and say that, until the arrival of the steak, the ingredients set them back 30p.
Pricing the main course is trickier. What such abysmal beef costs I've no idea, because I'd rather ask the butcher for woodlice, but supposing we each had six ounces maximum of this wretchedly tasteless meat, we generously estimated it at a quid.
For the "secret sauce", a mustardbased crime against humanity (of course they keep it secret - if they published the recipe, Hans Blix would be out of retirement in five minutes), let us add 5p; and for the potato that gave its life for the lukewarm frîtes another 20p. A total, then, of £1.55. And for this you're charged £17. They won't take bookings or serve tap water, the eight wines on offer look more than treble the price you'd pay Majestic, the puddings (£4.25 for some barely adequate cheese) maintain the form, and ultimately we could do no more than bow in admiration of such a majestic fleecing operation.
Anyone interested in enjoying a similar non-menu will find a fine mixed salad with a delicious dressing, excellent Angus beef served with great chips, divine puds and a thoughtful, decently priced wine list at a steak house called the Popeseye in Olympia.
Those who delight in being taken to the cleaners, on the other hand, will join the sheep of Marylebone in flocking to this abhorrence, to emulate the only dining experience that has ever made me yearn for a fresh outbreak of BSE.
