Food ruined by an existential crisis: Fallow reviewed

I was going to be jolly this week, for variety and denial, but I changed my mind. Instead, I wonder if, when Vladimir Putin – insert your own nickname, mine is unprintable – talks about the weakness of western civilisation (I paraphrase) and, therefore, our unwillingness to resist tyranny in the shape of a balding paranoiac unwisely given Botox by a beautician who lied to him because everyone lies to him, he means Fallow, which is a new restaurant in St James’s.

I wonder if Putin has been to Fallow wearing a prosthetic head and, if so, did he do the soft launch or the hard one? Did he steal more hair? He has stolen so much money from Russia he could afford a room full of prosthetic heads each with their own hair. (You can buy hair on racks at wedding shows.)

Kim Jong-un likes to visit Disneyland in Tokyo – there is even a ‘Westernland’ – so why shouldn’t Vladimir Putin visit terrible London restaurants to sample our decadent cuisine and measure our weakness, like taking a pulse?

It was so promising: well, almost. Perhaps I should have paid attention to the name. Names are important, and fallow means dormant. Fallow (Dormant) is part of St James’s Market, a gleaming shopping centre with many restaurants for the spuriously credulous and rich. It promises ‘creative cooking and sustainable thinking’ and ‘conscious creativity’ from alumni of Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner, which is possibly another clue. I don’t mind deranged PR babble – ex-journalists have to eat – and I have eaten ‘salvaged’ (that is ‘zero waste’) food before, at Ugly Butterfly on the King’s Road, before it landed in Carbis Bay – and liked it, or rather I managed to finish it, even if I would prefer rich people to practise less performative dining and consume less carbon instead.