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.