A great Venetian confection

Caffè Concerto is a chain of Italian cafés sprouting, lividly, across London and the world. There is one on Piccadilly, one on Regent Street, and one on the Haymarket. There is one in Birmingham, and one in Westfield. (The precise address is an ungaudy unit 2000a, but presumably it is hidden behind florist-ry). There is one in Qatar. There is one in Saudi Arabia. There isn’t one in Venice, although the website has a photograph of Venice. It’s too Venetian for Venice.

The style is very Italian, in that it is a combination of great style and no style at all. (Not bad style. Just an absence, something forgotten or dropped.) It is a homage to the Italian custom of scrubbing your front step in a full-length fur coat. Or climbing a mountain in five-inch heels, which I have actually seen. That is, it looks like a mop and bucket inside a Caravaggio painting, or an Italian graveyard, and very happy with itself.

I am in the Haymarket branch, close to Eros and the Angus Steakhouse and the statue of dancing horses. The building is pale cream Edwardian pomposity — the architecture that summoned Brexit? — but everything English ends there. It’s very bright and cluttered, and almost transparent, the better to let tourists blow in and out. The walls are dark wood, as in Venice, the floors mottled, as in Venice, the chairs and tables are cheap wood, as in Venice. Flowers — white roses, mostly — are squeezed into the gaps. All that is missing is water, and death.

In the window are the famous cakes. They look like the hats in My Fair Lady, and they are grass green or blood red or ice white. They are so fantastical they barely look real, and I want to lie face down in them and wait for a deal.