Brass tacks

The last time I reviewed a restaurant in Selfridges, a PR man rang up to ask what he could do to change my opinion of Selfridges. Don’t worry, I told him, Spectator readers don’t go to Selfridges to sit in a fake Cornish fishing village, because they are too busy eating the remnants of the Labour party. And they don’t care about shopping. You don’t dress a Spectator reader. You upholster it.

I felt guilty about mocking the stupid fake Cornish fishing village so I avoided the next themed restaurant in Selfridges, which was a fake forest on the roof (‘inspired by an autumnal forest’… because who can be bothered to go to a real forest if they even still exist?). But I had to review the revamped salt beef bar in the food hall. I love the Selfridges food hall, because it seems to be a fifth columnist at war with the rest of the shop. In most of Selfridges — ‘evil Selfridges’ — it is advisable to weigh the same as a chihuahua so as to fit into the clothes, or to be very beautiful, so you do not feel outclassed by a handbag that is marginally more attractive than you are, and yet still costs £3,000. In the food hall — or ‘good Selfridges’ — however, you can imagine you are participating in a Eurovision Song Contest for the obese, because they sell Indian and Italian and French and Jewish cuisine. (I am being polite calling it cuisine; it is, salt beef aside, another biblical Jewish curse.)

Historically Selfridges has always served the best salt beef in central London — despite everything I have already said, this still sounds like an astonishing cognitive dissonance — at the Brass Rail. I have only had better at Katz’s Deli in New York, which still features a sign saying, ‘Send a salami to your boy in the army’ and where Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally.