Beyond satire: Richard Caring’s Bacchanalia reviewed

Bacchanalia is the new restaurant from Richard Caring – I sense he would like me to call it a ‘landmark’ or ‘super-restaurant’, so I won’t – in the old Porsche showroom on the corner of Mount Street and Berkeley Square, and all nightingales have fled. Caring, who has doused Britain with his metal Ivys, is the Ludwig of Bavaria of Mayfair. If he hasn’t bought the silver swan tap at Neuschwanstein Castle, he should open negotiations. I will review his interpretation when it appears: what will he do with the Bavarian Alps? Marshmallows I suppose. Or mashed potato.

But here is ancient Rome during the festival of Bacchus, which Livy called decline, and this is apt: decline speaks to decline near the coloured Lamborghinis and rotting souls of W1. The exterior is plain: Art Deco without Art, and, as Giles Coren pointed out, the billboard during the construction featured a man with wings – Morpheus, Hades? – wearing knickers. I can’t see Hades buying knickers in the underworld. How prim the rich are in their hearts. It is possibility they seek, no more: I doubt that anyone having fierce sex would come to a restaurant called Bacchanalia. It is a displacement activity, and a depositary for money; even so, it is a truism that nowhere is lonelier than an orgy. 

The doormen are affable and clad in red and gold: refugees from The Nutcracker, toy men. But this is nothing. When I finally enter Bacchanalia at 5 p.m. – it is fully booked, as hell is fully booked – I am met in a hallway by young women in Roman-style dress with wreaths plonked on their heads. They are standing in front of a painting of fauns drinking cocktails: not Mr Tumnus and friends, but something more threatening. Some of the Roman-style women look very unhappy. I wonder what the going rate is for standing in Mayfair in Roman dress: not enough, I suspect. It is Up Pompeii! spliced with Spaghetti House. The effect is absurd to me, no doubt pornographic to others. These are clothes to imagine falling off, and that is deliberate, and I scowl at the idea of it: Merry Christmas, all sex clowns.

Then wondering ceases, because I am inside Bacchanalia and fretting: is making vulgar restaurants a progressive condition? He has spent fortunes on ancient Greek and Roman artefacts and thrown them on the Porsche showroom as if in anger. There are busts of cross women – and headless women so you can’t see how cross they are – being decapitated (is it a choice?) and women touching the breasts of yet more women. They cower in nooks, and under stairways. The marble men get heads and clothes. Statuary is a function of patriarchy: even in stone we are thwarted.

In a Caring restaurant there is always more to blind you. The floor is mosaic, as is the loo: the leaf pattern wanders across the speakers and walks out the other side. I have not seen a mosaic loo before, and it is impressive, if the definition of pointless, and surely that is the point. There is a terrible rage to decadence, especially performative decadence. There are metal snakes for sconces and a marble staircase and a vast golden wreath hanging above the bar. There is a wall of golden–coloured leaves and small glassy statues.

A painting of a Roman Bacchanalia covers another wall: but a Bacchanalia that reads Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat. A fat painted man wears an Apple watch and stares at a MacBook. Another takes a selfie. A woman tosses off a stiletto, and all in front of the Brooklyn Bridge: America, it says, stroking its paint chin, is the Roman Empire now.

This is the understated part. Above us, four vast pale sculptures by Damien Hirst, an artist whose personal greed mirrors an entire culture, are suspended from the ceiling: the Medusa; a unicorn with two lovers; a horse; a yawningly topless woman because what is two more? And more, because more is, by itself, the drug: Caring has also remade the Café de Paris. There are long galleries; tiny fabric table lamps; red velvet cushions; and a bar made of mirrors. How many ages of decline can be squeezed into one Porsche showroom?

Bacchanalia is easy to describe but impossible to satirise: like Donald Trump, it leaves no space for it. But it is not, I think, staring at the marble nudity and the gawping people, in any way sensual. It is commercial. 

The service is overzealous, but these are early days: the sommelier kneels to offer wine and the waiter seems hurt when we do not want to be told how to order from a menu. Are we too dour for the Bacchanalia, preferring Athena to Dionysus, or even Hephaestus? The only temple in the Agora of Athens that has a roof is his, and he is the god of roofers. In any silly mirror of the ancient world, you should know that, because it is very funny, at least to me.

The food is plain and good, and that is pleasing, because I don’t know what I would do if it wasn’t: punch a marble tit? Rip the knickers off a bird man? Cry? You can spend £935 on 125g of Beluga caviar, or £140 on wood-fired lamb or £100 on turbot or £135 on bone-in-ribeye or £15,000 on a 1989 Pétrus. But this is not my madness: I have another kind. Instead, we eat vitello tonnato for £24; burrata for £20; caesar salad for £20; rigatoni carbonara for £24.

It is expertly done by charming people: when I visit the kitchen, which is as ordered as the dining room is chaotic, they give me Greek yoghurt from a machine, with honey, and it feels like a piece of common kindness so luminous I want to throw myself into their arms. If he sought to, Caring could open an excellent Italian restaurant, like Shambles in Teddington, which I am moved to recommend to you this Christmas. But the age and the place merits this and he obliges. I marvel at it: that is what it is for. But there is something deathly cold to it.