Fairy food for fairy wives: Julie’s Restaurant reviewed

Julie’s is a 50-year-old restaurant in Holland Park, London, newly emerged from three years of closure as plushly renovated as its customers. The website calls it ‘a Holland Park favourite, neighbourhood classic and hangout for the Hollywood set, high society and rock stars since 1969’. Whenever I hear the words ‘high society’ I reach for my water pistol, as Hermann Goring didn’t say, but I do remember a birthday party at Julie’s 20 years ago when it seemed pleasingly decadent. It was designed by the owner, Julie Hodgess, the designer of the Biba boutique. I remember a series of deeply coloured rooms and dusty curtains and a faint and thrilling sense of mystery.

Now it is reborn, and it suffers from the disease of the reborn as detailed, say, in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary which is not technically restaurant criticism but I include it anyway: they have broken it.

The brown and gold awning is still there — west London, like Beverly Hills, likes awnings probably because they claim to protect hair from the broken sexual currency of ageing — but, inside, Julie’s has collapsed to obsessive compulsive cleaners and the design philosophy (I joke) of Soho House, whose name, considering that very philosophy, is an affront to still-living bohemians.

Can there be too many bold fabrics for the stomach to bear? There is still bright stained glass and neo-Gothic carved interiors and multiple dining rooms, but it feels stripped out and generic. Julie’s has ceased to look like the home of an affluent, mildly adulterous friend and looks, instead, like Harrods. That is the sweet rot of success in restaurant design and the River Café, if famous restaurants had support groups, would surely identify with Julie’s; if you have too many imitators, you are pastiche.