Elizabeth II was a god and a commodity: now she is gone it is time for posthumous exploitation. Lilibet’s is a restaurant named for her childhood nickname at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, on the site of the house where she was born. It was inevitable that Elizabeth II would eventually get a personal restaurant. Princess Diana ate in the Café Diana – English breakfasts and kebabs – on the Bayswater Road and George VI is the inspiration for the superb Guinea Grill – mostly sausages, or rather it is the sausages I remember – near Lilibet’s. Because that is what the British do to our monarchs and their intimates. We eat them and call it love.
But seconds into Lilibet’s – the use of the diminutive is offensive to any feminist or restaurant critic – it is obvious this is not a British restaurant. It’s too camp, even for British monarchists. It is more a smorgasbord: cruise-ship dining, even a buffet. This is eating the monarchy of everywhere.
They don’t understand her, or it. Monarchy depends on a single, coherent myth, easy enough to do in fabric: go to the National Portrait Gallery to see Elizabeth I’s ‘Armada Portrait’. Not here. This looks like an explosion in a Sanderson warehouse and a lamp sale. Chairs are red or golden, for thrones; lamps are immense or tiny, scalloped or fringed; there are Venetian blinds, mirrors, carpet and tile; dried flowers in tiny vases. It is horrible, even for Mayfair.
The food is not terrible, but it is not good either. The menu manages to make it sound worse than it tastes, a kind of anti-spin: Fishes Royale (£175 for oysters, octopus, lobster, etc); a Fish Triptych (‘We celebrate the whole fish in three preparations’, one of which is served with ‘Dog Sauce’); ‘Unsung Heroes… underappreciated species of our oceans… cod, gurnard, halibut’. (Is cod unsung?) This copy-writing is the only true thing about Lilibet’s, though by mistake. It thinks it celebrates what it uses, as we do.
The menu puts us off fish famous and obscure, so we have, instead, an OK beefsteak; a heavy ricotta agnolotti with sage; a slightly charred garlic bread, which I order from pure ennui, and am faintly ashamed of, even though it is the best thing I eat here; broccoli; a crab tart, so as not to be rude. The puddings are pretty, and we order three because we are chasing receding joy: a Princess Cake; a chocolate mousse; a cheesecake. The chocolate mousse is fine, the cheesecake is bad, the Princess Cake is so alarming – it is green – I can’t remember what it tastes like.
Lilibet’s should, if it must exist, serve sausage and mash in front of electric fires
I wonder: what would Elizabeth’s true restaurant be? I think, and for some reason I land on the station café in Brief Encounter. It has all the elements I imagine she cherished: fantasy thwarted – or redeemed – by sacrifice; postwar Britain; good tailoring; railway infrastructure. But Lilibet’s, which should, if it must exist, be called Elizabeth’s, and serve sausage and mash in front of electric fires near old copies of Majesty magazine, wasn’t even who she was. It isn’t, as the copywriting shouts from the menu, ‘shaped by heritage re-imagined… home to an unexpected majesty’. It’s a hopeless grift. Perhaps republicans would like it.
And because I consumed her as much as anyone who ever licked a stamp, or now a piece of broccoli in her horrible themed restaurant, I feel chagrin on her behalf, because – and here is the awful contradiction – I owned her as much as anyone. Some restaurants are immoral, and some are bad. This is both.
Lilibet’s, 17 Bruton Street, London W1J 6QB; tel: 020 3828 8388.
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