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.
The transience of the exterior is not mirrored within. The opposite is true
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.
The transience of the exterior is not mirrored within. The opposite, rather, is true. Café Lapérouse is catching up. It is a flurry of Art Deco or, if you prefer, a pig’s breakfast. There are pale scallop-like chairs; palms; an alarming floral carpet; less alarming floral banquettes; a gaudy central bar with a roof of shells. This is the restaurant/lair of a divorced woman cleaving to maximalism, so heartfelt that it has the charm of a Romany caravan, or the house/shoe of the old woman (really a single mother!) in the fairy tale.
Inside this caravan/shoe not much happens: at lunchtime on a weekday, it is deserted. Whitehall is not exactly Santorini at the moment and I don’t blame the wrongfully rich for avoiding it. I wonder if the wealth curators of London – the lawyers, the log stylists, the Frieze Art Fair – now think that you can have too much inequality, it’s bad for business. Who knew?
Still, the food is immaculate. I have onion soup because good onion soup is a find in London and this one, at £19, is superb. (You can spend £140 on Dover sole for two, or £154 on beef Wellington, again for two, but we don’t. Café Lapérouse feels too whimsical for that.) My companion has the steak tartare (£29): equally pungent, sticky and rare. I’m not hungry after onion soup – who is? – but visiting a French restaurant and ignoring pudding is a crime to this page, and I sink to profiteroles for £15: again, superb, though I’m not sure they mix with soup. Then we sit and stare at nothing.
This restaurant is as swagged as an empress and as fleeting as joy. It’s an oddity, and if you want to drink soup in an oddity near declining power, it’s for you.
Café Lapérouse, Old War Office, 7 Horse Guards Ave, London SW1
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