Dining in nowhere: Bar des Prés reviewed

The residents of Mayfair are misnamed: they do not really live here. They live in Mayfair like I live on the A30 roundabout near Morrisons or in dreamland. I am sometimes on the A30 roundabout near Morrisons and sometimes in dreamland but only -sporadically. It would be ludicrous to suggest that either is my permanent address, even if pretending it means that the people I stole my money from can’t steal it back.

Mayfair is a district with an itinerant population and when they are here, tidally like plastic, they dine conservatively, almost fearfully, in a series of restaurants so generic and dispiriting that they either righteously hate themselves, righteously fear us, or have — as anyone who’s ever been to a yacht show will know — absolutely no taste. Perhaps all are true, but in Mayfair nowadays I feel I am reporting not on a gaudy and once-interesting part of the city but on an ice floe fretted with bricks and bad art, floating away to the sea of rotting souls. It may have the restaurants it deserves — increasingly it does — but that is too small a thing to be called justice. It is the Nuremberg trials of restaurant districts, then; its descent towards hell is pleasing to watch but you know, even as you smirk, that it stops much too short.

Here is Bar des Prés, a French-Japanese restaurant on Albemarle Street whose existential meaning is, among other things: you can eat sushi and millefeuille in one place. It is from Cyril Lignac, a man sweating under the description ‘the Jamie Oliver of France’ because he appeared in a programme called Oui, Chef!

I cannot imagine a French Jamie Oliver any more than I can imagine a Jamie Oliver restaurant I would wish to eat in after I ate his notorious entréeon a plank, but Lignac is on TV, so let us marvel as we suck on Domino’s Pizza and long for something better.