Fine food in a sinister Weimar wine cellar: Bardo St James’s Restaurant reviewed

Bardo St James’s Restaurant – a name which reads like a map – is a vast new Italian restaurant in one of the pale imperial palaces off Trafalgar Square, near Pall Mall and The Phantom of the Opera, which goes on because snobbery and sado-masochism are among the many things that never die. You might think Bardo (I am not typing all that again) would fold down and fold up in a night, like Cinderella’s coach – it feels flimsy – but these restaurant palaces by Pall Mall are surprisingly robust. The last time I ate in this district it was at the Imperial Treasure, a gloomy and magnificent Chinese restaurant where a performative duck was £100. I thought it wouldn’t last – it was just us, the waiting staff and the duck – but it did.

The entrance to Bardo is a lift to the basement, and beyond the lift is a closed red velvet curtain, which you have to fight with to gain entry. I like this. Beyond that are charming women – I haven’t met a rude waiter in London for many years – and the long, low salon of all Sally Bowles’s dreams. I am sorry to bang on about Weimar, but that is where restaurant design is. I didn’t know it cared so much about the fragility of liberal democracy, but cushions can say a lot if you listen to them. So can chairs, and righteously. The chairs in the anteroom to the loo are by House of Hackney, and I covet them, and if I thought I could have got away with it, I would have stolen one.