Status Anxiety

31 January 2009

An unbiased review of the restaurant owned by my new employer at the Standard

It is what is known on Fleet Street as a ‘marmalade dropper’ — a story so surprising that the piece of toast you are eating as you read it falls from your hand. No, I am not talking about the news that a former KGB colonel has bought the London Evening Standard, but about a small detail buried in the fifth or sixth paragraph of that story. Apparently, Alexander Lebedev’s son Evgeny, who has been appointed a director of the Standard, is the owner of a London restaurant.

The reason this came as such a shock is that I am an ex-restaurant critic with a column in the Evening Standard. What if I had given his son’s restaurant a bad review? Revenge is a dish best served cold — particularly if the victim happens to be a food critic.

I immediately emailed my friend Anouschka Menzies, who runs a restaurant PR company, to find out the name of Evgeny Lebedev’s establishment. ‘Not you as well!’ she replied. ‘He is the main investor in Sake No Hana.’

I breathed a sigh of relief. Sake No Hana is an upmarket sushi emporium that opened last year, 12 months after my last restaurant column appeared (in the Evening Standard, no less). Anouschka would not tell me who her other correspondents were, but I suspect they included several of my former colleagues, not all of whom will have been happy to discover the name of the restaurant. Giles Coren, for instance, began his review of Sake No Hana with a call to arms: ‘It is time now to rise up against the greedy parasites who have descended upon our world-famous restaurant scene with the intention, as far as I can tell, of ruining it, us, and the whole damn country.’ He noted that it had Russian backers and went on to make jokes about ‘new money’, ‘escort girls’ and ‘polonium’. Clearly, he won’t be offered a job on the Standard any time soon. Not that there will be a vacancy. Fay Maschler, the paper’s lead reviewer, gave the restaurant an out-and-out rave, awarding it four out of five stars. ‘A sensuous, revealing experience,’ she concluded. Sake No Hana is situated in St James’s and when I was passing with a friend earlier this week I could not resist popping in. Rather spookily, the entrance is very similar to that of Northcliffe House, the headquarters of Associated Newspapers where the Evening Standard is currently located. In both places, you go through a pair of imposing doors, check in with a bored-looking attendant, then step on to an escalator that takes you up to the main reception area. At that point the similarities end — at least, I hope they do. The restaurant manager asked me to remove my shoes, a policy I would not recommend the Lebedevs adopt at Northcliffe House. If every member of the Evening Standard’s staff removes their shoes at the same time, the cloud of vapour that emerges from the rooftop will be visible from space.

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