Pleasing perversity: St Pancras Brasserie and Champagne Bar by Searcys reviewed

The St Pancras Brasserie and Champagne Bar by Searcys is as expansive as its name, but ghostly. It is an immense Art Deco restaurant spilling on to an empty platform at the station. When restaurants opened their patios and gardens, I fretted that they would be too busy to be enjoyed: a diner would cling to a square of Astroturf, fearing to sink. But not here: the people have been removed, and they have not returned.

Inside, it is empty if not shuttered: a great, golden brasserie with dark wood, dark leather and pale globes of light. The door to the loo is so tall I imagine they stole the idea from Mr Greedy (and the giant who loved peas). It is a pastiche of the great French interwar brasseries — London is filled with these, as if it knows something we don’t — but because it is in a station it feels more synthetic than pastiche. It is explicitly mad: a space waiting for a giant hen party or the fall of liberal democracy or, ideally, both together. The platform part, the Champagne Bar, is infinitely more thrilling, because it sits under an iron span roof that was the largest in the world when it was built in 1868. That roof is our ceiling; the floor is pale; there are vast plants, trying to invoke jungle; there are no walls (or boundaries).

Behind us is George Gilbert Scott’s insane red-brick gothic revival former Midland Hotel. In front of us are the tracks to Paris, the Midlands and Kent. I think this may be the platform where ghost Harry Potter met ghost Dumbledore over the evil baby body of Lord Voldemort in accidental horcrux form.