An innate contradiction: Mount St Restaurant reviewed

The Mount St Restaurant lives above the Audley Public House on Mount Street, ‘a traditional neighbourhood pub, carefully restored, and where history and contemporary art collide’, and which once appeared in a Woody Allen film called Match Point. It is owned by Artfarm, founders of the Hauser and Wirth Gallery, who have created an art gallery above the pub and inserted a restaurant into it.

I have been rude about Hauser and Wirth in the past. Its Somerset gallery featured a recording of a cow mooing in a former cowshed, which was insulting to the cows, but people do terrible things to farms nowadays: perhaps we could pay for Jeremy Clarkson’s screams in his tool shed. Here, though, is real art, and it is for sale: in acknowledgement of this the King came to the opening. There is ‘Primrose Hill’ by Frank Auerbach, the most heartbroken of the late-20th-century artists, but he was a Kindertransport child; an absurdly tiny Picasso which looks like a framed stamp, or just currency; and a pleasing painting of an owl, which reminds me of my husband. There is also Lucian Freud’s ‘Self-Portrait: Reflection’ by the door, doing what Lucian Freud always does, which is pushing his rage into your face until you collapse to it, which I suppose is understandable if you were born a Jew in Berlin in 1922.

You climb a steep staircase, which is more cliff face than staircase. The dining room, which is long and low-lit, has a polished white bar and a fretted mosaic floor: it is very fine, and I think the artist – Rashid Johnson – drew his own face in it, called it ‘Broken Floor’, and invited guests to emote on it, which they would probably do unasked, it being a floor.