A fictional Edwardian waif’s hungry fantasy: Fortnum & Mason’s food hall reviewed

I like a picnic weighted with history and class terror, which means Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly, which is historical re-enactment with dreaming. I have written about this for years or tried to: food is never just food, only fools say that. You can learn almost everything about people from the food they want. And here is St Narcissus in the form of a department store that works more powerfully as an idea than a mere shop, though it is a very effective shop. Fortnum’s sells a Great Britain that never was, designed for people who no longer exist, if they ever did. It has much to say to Brexiteers and worse, though in biscuit. 

Like its fantasy Empire and its grateful subjects, Fortnum’s practises a gritty and dedicated self-worship. It sells wooden advent calendars shaped like its facade – its Christmas shop outguns Tchaikovsky queasily – and you can buy your own Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon in instalments on the first floor. It stocked the Empire to its extremities, and now it mourns it, gaudily – or perhaps it is just very good at marketing. If so, the cynicism is both awe-inspiring and repulsive. I used to think Fortnum & Mason invented the condiment, but I apparently dreamt this: it only claims the invention of the ‘often imitated’ scotch egg in 1738. This is disputed by people in Whitby, who claim they invented the scotch egg, but the north is always forgotten.

The food hall is in the basement, a mesmerising dreamscape, and I would say that even if Bill Nighy hadn’t once addressed me at the cheese counter, seeking dreams of his own. It looks like a fictional Edwardian waif’s hungry fantasy. I think of Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox. I see myself and the things I want. No wonder Elizabeth II loved it. They were in the same business. It has held a warrant from every monarch since Queen Victoria, excepting George VI in the war years: rationing. They stock Queen Camilla’s honey.

You can buy a hamper, of course, but that doesn’t work for control freaks: I prefer to make my own. Then there are the condiments. I don’t want my picnic to fight me; the world is awful enough. The food hall has a salad bar, a bagel bar – when Diaspora Jews are gone will the bagel endure? – and a pasta bar. All are patronised by the kind of people – well-dressed, in finance – I assume to be psychopaths, and the servers overcompensate with avid charm.

I take a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel (there are six kinds of cream cheese); pastrami and salami cut to my specification (it cannot be too thin); bright strawberries; a scotch egg sitting beneath a sign noting its provenance, a sort of scotch egg blue plaque, though it is not as fine as the scotch eggs from Aunty May’s in Newlyn; a French stick; superb brie de Meaux; a bad new potato and sundried tomato salad; the Fortnum’s interpretation of the chocolate digestive and the Hobnob.

It is £100 with a small bottle of wine. This is twice the price you would pay elsewhere – far more for the biscuits – but it fills me with the crazed kind of happiness that feels borderline unsafe: because I am eating an idea. Fortnum’s, quite consciously, markets British triumphalism – condiments for the Empire – and British despair, because there is no Empire to fill with condiments now. It sells an internal Britain. Inside Fortnum’s, it is booming. Outside, it is cracking.