Cakes, bubbles and whimsy

Cakes & Bubbles is an unhappy woman’s restaurant. I thought it was a child’s restaurant, but I took a child there and he hated it and begged for a Double Decker. It is a patisserie and champagne bar inside the Hotel Café Royal on Regent Street. It sells sugar wound and smashed and spun — that is, it sells traumatised sugar — in front of a picture window featuring people looking for less inedible redemptions. It is, therefore, a place for people to get very slightly wasted after shopping at Liberty.

Last time I went to Liberty I met Jeremy Corbyn’s head of strategic communications James Schneider on the stairs. I always thought Liberty was Tory. Shouldn’t he be in Equality? (Even Corbyn’s Labour party aren’t dishonest enough to dream of Fraternity.) I looked for him in Cakes & Bubbles but he was spinning something else, something fairly close to sugar: fake socialism delivered by fools. The punchline wanders like a boulder over a hill.

Before it became a hotel in 2012, the Café Royal was a famous, flouncy restaurant that sold the imperial dream. It was another Brexit restaurant. A jumble of people came here — Aleister Crowley, Virginia Woolf, Diana, Princess of Wales — who had nothing in common except they ate at the Café Royal Grill Room.

The Café Royal is now a hushed, dim, modernist grand hotel with suites that overlook Piccadilly Circus, and the heart of Capital. It is a polished nowhere which smells of expensive candles. That is the very scent of modern wealth: Diptyque.

They took my credit card details in advance — a testament only to the whimsy of rich people, and Cakes & Bubbles is all whimsy, so I forgive it — and we sat in a golden room with chairs of red, like strawberries, and a champagne trolley: alcoholism on wheels.