Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Eating the brand

I thought I would hate Bulgari. (At least they have stopped calling it Bvlgari). Ah, you might say, surely Bulgari, a tentacle of LVMH, the ‘luxury goods giant’ that makes rubbish for women too hot to work, but too bored to stay awake, does not belong in a restaurant column? Has Gold, who avoided being doused in Pol Roger by Charles Moore at the Spectator summer party and found the cognitive dissonance of that assault very frightening, gone mad and decided to review accessories? Will somebody else be swallowing the cartoon chicken (see above)?

Bulgari, you see, has gone into hotels, and therefore restaurants, so the women who wear Bulgari can now live, eat and digest in Bulgari; this, although they do not know it, is the natural trajectory of brand marketing, which will one day have us all living inside Toilet Duck. The Bulgari is a sheer white wall on Knightsbridge. I laid into Knightsbridge’s Assad Chic last time, so I will only suck my pencil and giggle now, because the Bulgari website thinks Knightsbridge is ‘the city’s most prestigious neighbourhood’. London doesn’t have ‘neighbourhoods’, marketing troll, it has districts or, if you are a taxi driver, manors.

The vibe is international advertising, a world gone gold. The doorman wears a cap and beige mackintosh in a desperate scream for the Lynx Effect; yes, Bulgari is another plutocrat hole in the ground, with six storeys below and nine above. This is the wages of tax haven-iasis and I am glad I am with my mother; she grins like a tyrant with $10 billion in a Swiss bank account, and is therefore at home. When I arrive she has already mugged Harvey Nichols.

We enter a dark wood and leather lobby, designed, to my eyes, to resemble an enormous first-class cabin.

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