Henrietta without a hairband

Henrietta is a restaurant in a boutique hotel on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, around the corner from the actors’ church St Paul’s, which is very plain. It is as if, when actors die, their feathers are put away and they die as they really are: plain. As Uncle Monty might say: I choose the Doric. Henrietta Street is full of tall, sad houses — the kind London does so well in fiction and in life.

They are grand and desolate; you can imagine misery behind them. This one is red brick and, because it is a boutique hotel, they have tried to build a fairyland behind the façade: wealth and whimsy are unwilling collaborators but I can see the attraction, and it is all denial. London is so Edwardian in looks, but now it has the Candy Brothers to shower it in glass. It is a robot Edward VII of a town. On Henrietta’s website, there is a photograph of a man in a red velvet jacket reading the London Evening Standard. Or possibly Metro. It may be Giles Coren but he only has half a face, so who knows? Where is the other half of his face? But this is the ideal guest at Henrietta. The real guests have good hair, and moustaches, and some have hats.

I cannot divine the hotel, because I am unwilling to pay £324 to stay in a small room in Covent Garden, especially if it has bobbly grey carpets. Some ‘luxury’ is false, and should be simply called ‘a small room in Covent Garden with a bobbly grey carpet for £324’. But the ground-floor restaurant has a menu designed by Ollie Dabbous. He was the first man to sprinkle flowers on plates of food, and the only one of them you did not want to punch in the face.