Among the best puddings I’ve ever eaten: Richoux reviewed

Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in a haunted mirror in which the only thing that matters is your survival. This duplicity is important to understand, because the road from Cicero to Caesar is so short it may lack potholes. Cake is less urgent, but at least cake won’t lie to you. And here is Richoux, still filled with cake, if you can afford it. It is, for many people, marvellous and theoretical cake.

Richoux was a cake shop on Piccadilly – a street I can never eat in without thinking of Alexander Litvinenko sitting, doomed, in Itsu, when it still pleased Vladimir Putin to kill people individually – for so long it was forgotten. It is 113 years old, or one seventh of Yoda. People walked past it as if it were a tramp, or a piece of lazy monumental statuary, or a ghost. I remember Richoux from my ever-receding youth. It was for tourists and the ancient, and people who walked in by mistake. It belonged to the same class as Bella Pasta and Angus Steakhouse: the bad London restaurant.

Then it closed – a victim of pandemic crisis closure, not energy crisis closure – and reopened six months ago under new ownership. They brought it back to life on Piccadilly and this is fitting, because this is not only Litvinenko’s street, it is also Count Dracula’s street. He lived near the Hard Rock Café, if you believe in the existence of vampires. I would have said probably not before 2016, but now I’m not sure about anything.

So Richoux is remade, and it is pleasing in that generic modern style that looks like Weimar Germany for people who know nothing about Weimar Germany and would hate you if you told them about Otto Wels and the Enabling Act and the coming of fire.