Cuisine for cadavers

Politicians are having a terrible time of late, along with the rest of us — it’s not much fun watching the remnants of the post-war consensus shatter — and so here is Albert Roux consoling them with a new, glossy restaurant on the door-step of their rotting legislature palace. Food at the Palace of Westminster is not the best, although Corbynistas think it is. They think peers bathe in champagne while laughing and that MPs don’t have to butter their own toast. Well they will learn post-Revolution. They will learn to use a butter knife and how to talk righteously to a nationalised media.

It’s called Roux at Parliament Square, and it is, of course, from Albert Roux of Le Gavroche, the proudest and fustiest of Mayfair’s French restaurants. It’s not in Parliament Square but in Great George Street; this is an age of lies of every size. Even so, leave the palace — pray the masonry won’t decapitate you before your local party does — walk across the once grass (the grass has gone the way of the consensus), pass the statue of Benjamin Disraeli, snivel, and here is Roux at Parliament Square. Or Roux near Parliament Square. It lives on the ground floor of a tall brown-brick townhouse near the Spectator and it is, in looks, very like the interior of the palace it offers liberation from; that is, it was once very fine but is now a bit crabby. It is grand but not fun, as if eating three courses of food, even by Albert Roux, is hard work. And somehow joyless. A restaurant for politicians, then, the depositories of all our pain.

The walls are green, the floors are brown, the tables widely spaced and laid with white linen.