Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Bob, booths and buttons

In January, you could go to Bob Bob Ricard in Soho. I do not know why it is called Bob Bob Ricard; and I do not really care. I am currently reviewing cars for another magazine and cars’ names make restaurants’ names sound reasonable. Perhaps Bob Bob Ricard is always slightly drunk and needs to mumble its name — ‘Bob?’ — for fear of forgetting it, like the people in the VIP field at Glastonbury. I do know that it is a restaurant for affluent halfwits, of which there is an infinite supply in Soho. I wonder if it might have been Jimmy Savile’s favourite restaurant.

It occupies the ground floor of a dull brown block on Upper James Street, in the ‘functional’ part of Soho. It may be Edwardian, but probably isn’t. It doesn’t matter. This is all about reinvention; about champagne; about the nearby London Palladium, which I also think about in Bob Bob Ricard.

Inside it looks like Harrods, spliced in a weird machine by an evil -interior design genius, and remade slightly wrong because his calculations were inaccurate. The booths are red and gold. Too much gold. More gold than Rumpelstiltskin would covet. He’d scream off it, jump into recovery, spend some time with straw. I haven’t seen so much gold since I toured Ludwig of Bavaria’s palaces and saw his collection of carriages. There are velvet curtains and mad polished ceilings and a flinty bar, which looks like the kind of bar that prostitutes manifest if there is enough dirty money in the room. Do Russian oligarchs, for whom this place exists (the menu is exactly half Russian, like the Ukraine), know how camp it is?

The selling point — the zenith or nadir, depending on your perspective — is a gold button in each booth.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in