Piccadilly Circus, delivered: the Wolseley’s home dining reviewed

The Corbin & King dining and home entertaining box includes dishes from the Delaunay, the Wolseley and Brasserie Zédel ‘delivered to your home and finished by you’.

My husband doubts it, because it comes from London, of which some Brexiters are more suspicious than the whole of France, and because it is not ‘cooked from scratch’. He claims he never heard this phrase before he married me, but he had the sort of rural Wiltshire childhood where he would roam the fields chasing hot air balloons while his mother stood in the kitchen in an apron with a spoon waiting for him.

‘It’s like being a latchkey kid,’ he moans, as I stroke the box with tiny whimpers of joy. Then he says: ‘What’s a latchkey kid?’ ‘It’s a child denied a mother in a kitchen in an apron with a spoon,’ I tell him. You know, a woman with a job. ‘She had a job,’ he says. ‘It was looking after me.’ He scowls: ‘I’m an outsider in my own kitchen.’

Then he leaves to sulk in his study by the Wall of Andrew, which is mostly pictures of Jack Russells. One of them is embroidered. From a distance I think it could be a Velázquez, but it is lockdown part three and I will take anything.

The child, who is a fanatical capitalist, helps me unpack fish pie, steak haché, Wiener schnitzel, goujons, chips, mixed vegetables and chocolate mousse. Even staring at it uncooked — I mean unheated — soothes me, because it reminds of Piccadilly Circus, under which Brasserie Zédel sits like an enchanted cave. Do you remember live jazz? Even the fortunate eat fumes of dreams now.

I put the fish pie in the oven. Then my editor telephones, and I shout for Andrew to stop hiding by the Wall of Andrew and put the rest of the food in the oven.