A French restaurant Glastonbury would be proud to host: Café Lapérouse reviewed

I am working my way around the restaurants of the Old War Office (OWO), now an acronym and Raffles hotel on Whitehall, because the swiftness with which the great institutions of the state have become leisure opportunities for the wrongfully rich is dark, mesmerising and, if you don’t mind too much anarchy, funny. I have reviewed the cold, painted Saison, and the lively Italian Paper Moon, which a kind reader wrote to say he loved and which I do not expect to survive. It is too joyful and well-priced for the wrongfully rich and their internal landscape of nude cashmere and paranoia. It squeaked through.

Here, now, is Café Lapérouse in the courtyard. If there were more Mercedes-Benz E-Class saloons in this courtyard it would be a carpark, but it isn’t there yet. It’s pre-carpark.

I wouldn’t call Café Lapérouse a good restaurant – not quite – but it is a fascinating one, and that must do for now. It is the child of Café Lapérouse in Paris, founded in 1766 in Place de la Concorde. (The one with the bloodied heads and crazed traffic: no obvious concord. Immaculate French spin.) There are fellow branches in St Tropez, Jeddah and, soon, Miami.

Again, it is mesmerising. If Glastonbury Festival needed an upscale French restaurant – and it will get there – it would look like this. It is a small, almost circular pod with a silver roof. It looks in danger, like the E-Class saloons, of departure. Either this café is a pop-up restaurant (does it know?) or the OWO is too solid in spirit for a hotel, and it needs a spaceship disguised as a French restaurant in a pre-carpark to give it that fleeting quality that monied adulterers require: 26,000 tons of Portland stone and 25 million bricks doesn’t lean to that.