How Soho became so-so

Sometimes I fret that Soho House & Co is doing to this column what it does to London. It places its smooth tentacles in my prose and suddenly the column has a pointy beard and is playing table tennis, while doing something monstrous in advertising. But I have no choice. I cannot hide in ghostly seafood bars for ever. (Next time, Bentley’s.) Because now Soho House & Co has invaded Kettner’s, which has duly gone the way of the Odeon West End in Leicester Square, a lovely art deco cinema that these days is only a void. It will become something else — a hotel and maybe a cinema again — but it will remain a void. The transformation of Soho into the kind of advertorial you find in an airport lounge in Dubai goes on. It is flat; a once fascinating pop-up book, closed for ever.

If you were a cocaine addict in the 1990s and liked to circle Soho chewing your own lips like a malfunctioning shark, you would pass Kettner’s at least three times before dawn. It is in Romilly Street, a quiet road full of tall Georgian houses haunted by men asking schoolgirls for sex in exchange for money. Well, that was my experience but I was only 14 so maybe I dreamt it. The great brick lump of the Palace Theatre is nearby, like Edward VII’s big bottom, but singing.

Kettner’s was established in 1867 by August Kettner, who’s supposed to have been Napoleon III’s chef. (I wonder if he hated Napoleon III and ran away to London.) It hosted Oscar Wilde and later became a Pizza Express with cold white walls and black railings, magical and faintly unknowable, like a KFC at the palace of Versailles, or a Burger King in a Dickens novel.