Italian cuts

Sartoria is a pale grey restaurant on Savile Row. As evidence that this is London’s destination street — if menswear is your compulsion — Bill Nighy walked past me as I searched for Sartoria; I had walked, obliquely, into his film and I was not dressed for it. But when am I ever? I wore Gap to the Valentino couture show in Paris, out of sheer spite.

Sartoria — a preening name which I dislike — wafts on reams of praise. Male critics love it; and it is a masculine restaurant. It is long and wide, with dark woods, expensive lamps and what here are called ‘neutral colours’. There is a polished bar and a ‘heated terrace’ overlooking New Burlington Street, and specifically Hauser & Wirth, the art gallery for morons who think that irony is a superhero. (At their Somerset branch they had an installation of cows mooing in what was once a cowshed. It was a Holocaust memorial for cows.) I am amazed that there are enough men near Savile Row at any one time in search of Italian cuisine to fill Sartoria, but it is so; this then, is a restaurant for men who lunch, and I have never found one before. (Rules does not count. You do not ‘lunch’ at Rules. You devour to stave off death or the memories of childhood, face down in golden-syrup sponge pudding). Here you ‘lunch’ (verb): that is, eat small food near something, anything, related to fashion. You sit on low armchairs or small sofas with cushions; you are soothed with soft voices from handsome faces, which all look like they walked out of a Patek Philippe advert for watches; you are fed delicate plates of food from the kitchen of Francesco Mazzei, who is here called a ‘chef patron’.