No doubt Nick Jones, the owner of private members’ club Soho House, will do a good job of making over Kettner’s, now closed for refurbishment. When it reopens in 2018, doubtless the restaurant will seem 10 times more sophisticated, if a touch ersatz. But still, I can’t help feeling mournful at the thought of the old place standing silent, even if only temporarily. In the days when it was operated by Pizza Express – since 2008, it has been some kind of French brasserie – it was a favourite haunt of mine, its restaurant affordable, its champagne bar an excellent place for trysts and job interviews alike. Actually, long ago, I was interviewed for a job on this newspaper there. I didn’t get it: drinking and talking coherently at the same time is not part of my skill set. But it’s not my failure I remember, so much as the way Kettner’s dusty glamour managed to convince me I was utterly fascinating and headed straight for the top.
Opened by Auguste Kettner, once a chef to Napoleon III, in 1867, it was, famously, one of the places where Edward VII liked to meet his mistress, Lillie Langtry, being close to the theatres where she worked, with only moderate success, as an actress. Kettner’s itself claims the king built a tunnel linking the restaurant, in Romilly Street, with the Palace Theatre on Cambridge Circus, the better that the couple could meet in the interval. But this seems unlikely to me. It wasn’t as if the king hid his relationship. Even after they were no longer lovers, he pointedly attended her first nights.
But I digress. When psycho-geography makes its big comeback, everyone finally having tired of books about badgers and eagles, I hope one of its hip practitioners will think about riffing on restaurants, pretentiously or otherwise, in the course of their urban ramblings. To me, they’re every bit as interesting as overgrown railway sidings and 1960s tower blocks. The old ones come with so many stories, true and untrue; the new ones speak volumes about aspiration, gentrification, immigration and fashion. If J Alfred Prufrock could measure out his life in coffee spoons, most of us can reckon up ours in restaurants, from Berni Inns (posh table mats and two button mushrooms with everything) to hipster dining rooms (exposed pipes and monk’s beard with everything).
The first restaurant I remember was the Golden Egg in Fargate, Sheffield, a branch of the 1970s chain that was a hangover from the 1950s coffee bar. It had a riotous yellow colour scheme and vinyl seats; the room was always fuggy, the windows steamed up, as if you’d unaccountably strolled into an episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? But I can’t – this is odd – remember anything I ate there. After this, there was indeed the Berni Inn, where I celebrated my ninth birthday with a rump steak and a pudding from a trolley. The first Indian restaurant I ever visited was called Nirmal’s (poppadoms and prawn purees); the first Chinese, Canton Orchard (“seaweed” and a weird “edible” – ha – basket in which there languished gloopy prawns and water chestnuts). When I got a place at university, my father took me to the poshest restaurant for miles around, the Old Vicarage at Ridgeway. There, I tried venison for the first time, and got very drunk.
The pace stepped up when I came to London. The city wasn’t so crazily expensive then, and even on a tiny salary, I could afford to eat out. Among the places, now extinct, from the 1990s that I still think of are 192 and First Floor in Notting Hill, and a place called Helter Skelter in Brixton. Were there puy lentils? I believe there were. Quaglino’s, the 1930s nightspot which Terence Conran reopened in 1993, is still with us, but in a repulsively vulgar incarnation aimed (it seems to me) exclusively at oligarchs. But it was great back in the day, a fantasy of louche-ness no wage slave could hope to resist.
Oh dear. It’s all so piercingly nostalgic. I do wonder, though, if someone hasn’t kept menus from all these and other places – and ashtrays, plates, napkins, old signs. Have they? As the first museum in the world to provide a restaurant for its visitors, it seems to me the V&A should think about a restaurant exhibition, or even a permanent gallery, without delay. How the crowds would flock. In its displays, they would find their younger selves, gorging on dishes that, though easy to mock now, seemed unimprovably delicious at the time: a taste of modernity, with all the grinning contentment that dubious word implies.
