Redecorate the restaurant, but you can’t redecorate the clientele

Forty-five Jermyn St lives in the left-hand buttock of Fortnum & Mason (F&M), a shop whose acronym is slightly too close to FGM (female genital mutilation) for this column to be able to relax there for long periods, even though its Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon is excellent. Its name is part of a vogue for naming restaurants after postal addresses, and even street numbers (Richard Caring’s 34 in Mayfair). This is one of the more idiotic, if less gritty, consequences of the London housing crisis: an address — or even a house number — is a brand. The restaurant named after a postcode — and I suggest TW11 0BA in Teddington because there is nothing there — is surely pending. Go for brunch, lick the bricks, adopt a refugee.

45 Jermyn St — ‘old-school glamour meets contemporary London’ — used to be called The Fountain. This restaurant seemed to be composed entirely of flounces and it suited F&M, a peculiarly British palace of dreams that sells heritage relish across the globe. But like an ageing showgirl who married a duke, the Fountain had to be put down. Her flounces carried the tears of boys off to boarding school to lose their childhoods overnight; she smelt of lavender, talcum powder and Harold Macmillan. Did the tiny David Cameron come here, fill his tuck box, re-arrange his tiny face into a tiny smile?

I can’t type the name again because it makes me feel stupid, or like a postman. So I will say it is a bright and spacious brasserie in sage and orange, principally Art Deco, but lying down for a rest. It is a very chic Oslo Court, ripped up and reconvened: the bones are old, the eyeballs — and skin — are new.