Pub food, Disney-style: the George reviewed

The George, Fitzrovia, was Saki’s local, and a pub for men talking about cars when Great Portland Street was called Motor Row. I imagine them sucking down gin and weeping for early Jaguars; a ghostly Max de Winter rising to leave for Manderley; Mr Rolls and Mr Royce squabbling over ale. Felix Mendelssohn and Dylan Thomas came here too. Nowadays they would be called local creatives by marketing literature, so I suspect they are pleased to be dead.

Many pubs have failed, which is an incremental tragedy, though it’s pleasing for women seeking men who are not always drunk. It’s true that if you want to see a fantastical neo-Tudor ceiling on the Kilburn High Road, you will only find it in a pub, specifically the Black Lion. The Lost Pub Project, which is fanatically dedicated to ‘archiving the decline of the English pub’ before they are ‘forgotten forever’, lists more than 40,000 lost by postcode and county, alongside captions which function as sobs. I thought pubs were places to forget, but apparently you must remember the places you seek to forget before you finally forget them.

But the George thrives. Its doors are thrown open and a happy babble from local creatives reaches the street to mingle with fumes: live by motorcars, die by them. It’s amazing how quickly you can leave the miasma of Oxford Street if you have the will. The frontage is Victorian Italianate on a Georgian shell, so it looks like a repointed brick wall with eyes.

It is owned by JKS Restaurants, which has renovated the Cadogan Arms in Chelsea and have opened a restaurant here called, for simplicity and navigation, Upstairs at the George. It’s a series of small and lovely rooms: a pinkish and mirrored Art Deco bar; a sage-coloured drawing room; a dining room with a blackened brick chimneypiece, tapestries and eerie, curling chandeliers.