Eat at Joe’s

It is rare for me to write a love letter to a London restaurant, but Joe Allen, which is 40 this year, deserves it; if you have any sense you will throw off misery and go there now for hamburgers. It is not really a London restaurant, which may be why I love it, but a Manhattan restaurant (established on 46th Street in 1965 by a man called Joe Allen) that was transplanted to London in 1977; the idea of Manhattan, anyway, which is more vivid in imagination than in life. I like to imagine the cast of All About Eve in Joe Allen, talking nonsense about ‘the theatre’ as they did in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s words, because they were possessed. (‘You’re too short for that gesture.’ ‘What a dull cliché.’ ‘I hate men.’) It is certainly the best ‘American-style’ restaurant in London — although the Colony Grill Room is wonderful — and it is owed a kind review.

The entrance is pleasing: a fierce red awning on Exeter Street in Covent Garden, just around the corner from the Lyceum Theatre and its eternal tale of absolute monarchy with singing lions. This part of Covent Garden feels like backstage, which is thrilling by itself; the action — the lion — is singing somewhere else. There is a heavy door and a staircase to the cloakroom; you do not visit Joe Allen, you tumble into happiness. Very few restaurants can sustain this sense of excitement over many visits: the Delaunay is one, the Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon at Fortnum & Mason another; the Foyer and Reading Room at Claridge’s is a third, although I am not sure there is much reading done, unless you think the FT counts.

The room is a cellar, but charming: wooden floors and high ceilings; brick walls with mirrors; fragile paper tablecloths; playbills; photographs; the famous upright piano, played for many years by Jimmy Hardwick, who always smiled as you walked past.