The Lavery in South Kensington is named for Sir John Lavery, official artist of the Great War and designer of the currency of the Irish Free State, who lived here, though he died in Ireland and is buried in Putney. Lavery, of course, would no longer recognise South Kensington as his home, and his white, monumental mid-Victorian house – it’s too cold to be compared to a wedding cake, it’s a power cake – is now a fashionable restaurant and ‘event space’, which I put in quotation marks so you know I didn’t write the words ‘event space’, I just typed them out.
In houses like The Lavery, I wonder how tall the Victorians were in their heads. I like high ceilings – I am not Paul Doll, fictional commandant of Auschwitz in Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest, who wondered how he would gas people in a theatre – but this is absurd. It reminds me of the giant’s house in Mr Greedy (the foundation text for restaurant critics) if the minimalist faction at House & Garden got their hands on it. The scale is inhuman: but we are in Kensington, and inhuman is to be expected.
The dining room is white – I know the paint will not call itself that, it will have an elaborate Almanach de Gotha or Crufts’s name, but I call it white because it’s white to me. White signifies purity and status. White must be scrubbed clean by others with less money, which is why rich women love it. It’s a scream for notice – who will love you but the maid?
There is an original fireplace in grey marble, which looks out of place – I am not just saying that – and spindly chairs for slender bodies; sharp purple flowers, the kind that draw blood when you touch them; and modernist lighting: triangles hung upside-down, for instance, as if being tortured for their secrets. They light the art-curious rich of west London. This is the Frieze crowd. I know them by their sharp haircuts and over-large spectacles. They look like Italians forced to live underground, far from sunlight, or anyone in a Tilda Swinton film. Aesthetics matter: this is not style as identity, but substitute for lack of identity. This aside, the food is superb. It is delicate, pretty Italian food: the portions are for people who prefer to watch food than eat it, but you can always order all of it, and we did. Pretension, like running for buses, is exhausting.
And so we eat Tuscan salami with house pickles; mozzarella di bufala with roasted peach, bresaola and nasturtium; ravioli with ricotta, zucchini, parmesan, cultured butter and flowers (there are flowers, but I doubt a better dish of this kind is to be found in London); a veal chop with yellow pepper, anchovy and parsley; overcooked, over-buttered new potatoes, the only bad dish; an almond tart with strawberries and cream; two dense globes of ice-cream (chocolate and coffee); Lincolnshire poacher cheese.
It’s the old song – love the food, loathe the people, but South Kensington is the land of the psychopath restaurant. I haven’t forgotten Dorsia, long-closed but named after the restaurant in American Psycho where Patrick Bateman could never get a table. Dorsia was Bateman’s ever-receding dream: F. Scott’s Fitz-gerald’s boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. The Lavery is a better restaurant than Dorsia, not being fictional, but Dorsia, being fictional, is more self-aware.
The Lavery, 4 Cromwell Place, London SW7; tel: 020 8057 1801.
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