THE PIGALLE CLUB, 215–217 PICCADILLY, LONDON W1 (WWW.VPMG.NET). MEAL FOR TWO, INCLUDING WINE, SERVICE AND SHOW, £120
I am not an unreasonable man. Unless you are late for me (what's so much more bloody important than me that kept you from turning up on time?). Or if you hold a noisy party on my street while I'm trying to sleep. Or if you work at a call centre and phone after 10pm offering me something I don't and will never, ever need. Or if… well look, most of the time I try to be reasonable. Which is what I want to be where the Pigalle Club is concerned. Reasonableness personified.
The problem is that, despite life laughing in the face of my sweet imaginings, I am also a romantic optimist. So what I really want is for the Pigalle Club, a dinner and cabaret spot at the eastern end of London's Piccadilly, to be like the ones you used to see in old movies: all glamour and heady perfume, syncopated rhythm and ladies in long white gloves, and the promise of martinis and furtive legovers. It has the potential to be all those things. Lurking down below one of central London's tattier corners is a terrific space, dressed in shadow and light, with a sexy bar and a proper stage, a great sound system and top entertainment. I have been recently to see Lenny Beige, king of the kosher crooners (his tribute to the New Romantics left not a dry seat in the house), and in terms of the show it is a jewel in London's crown. A kitsch, slightly sickly, spank-me-now-and-call-me-Alice, Liberace style jewel, but a jewel all the same.
When it comes to dinner and a show, however, it just isn't what it could be. There's a sloppiness to it, an unevenness, a lack of reliability, which makes the price tag sting. Dinner costs £35 a head, but as you can't have dinner without seeing the show it's going to be at least £50 a head, £60 with a modest drink. For that you expect special.
So let me first be the not-unreasonable Rayner. They face challenges: they are open for only one service a day, because there's no lunch trade. What's more, that service has to be completed between 7.30pm and 9pm, when the show begins, so the menu has to be manageable. They can't turn tables. All of that adds a cost. All they have to do is live up to it.
Which does not involve the man on the door ignoring you for three minutes while he deals with paperwork because "you can't go down anyway until someone comes to collect you". It does not involve bringing carafes of tap water that are on the sweaty side of tepid. It certainly does not involve taking three tries to bring the right starters. Blimey, there were only two of us and just four starters. How tough can it be?
The food itself is bizarrely patchy. A smoked salmon terrine was accomplished dinner-party food, as long as the dinner party was held in 1974. In Penge. Unexceptional smoked salmon, around a claggy filling, all of it trying to ignore the grapefruit segments. However, a plate of bresola, served at the correct temperature and cut generously so you got the big, sweet, meat-on-the-turn flavour, came with lots of fresh, peppery green herbs. It was a similar narrative at the mains. The dim lighting obscured the fact that a rack of lamb was so underdone it may not only have had a pulse but a consciousness, too. Still, it was good meat on a lightly fluffy pillow of mash, with a proper lamby sauce.
An overdone fillet of oven-baked cod was just odd, thanks to a crust which was minty and sweet, and therefore tasted only of toothpaste. Fishy toothpaste. It won't catch on, you know. At dessert an orange cake, though a little too recently fridge-bound, was moist. A creamy tiramisu was nothing of the sort, just an eruption of coffee-flavoured cream over a sponge figure in a tuile basket. And then the show began, the great Beige was among us and the evening perked up considerably.
In truth, the Pigalle is really not that bad compared to the catering at other cabaret offerings in London, but that's not the same as good. Generally, the best you can hope for with your show is singed things on bread at Pizza Express Dean Street or Pizza on the Park. And yet they have it in their grasp to be so much better. All they need is some charming door staff, cold tap water and uniformly good food. Is that such an unreasonable thing to expect? ★
