Restaurants | 10 November 2007

Do you remember when, the other week, I went to St Alban, got lost and ended up in the wrong restaurant entirely, where I said, ‘Am I in St Alban?’ and was told, ‘No, we’re Divo, a Ukrainian restaurant. St Alban is over the road’? Well, what I didn’t say was that while in Divo I looked about me and thought: ‘Hello, hello, hello, what is going on here?’, which I bet you thought only comedy policemen ever said to themselves, but haven’t I just proved you wrong? I do believe I have. Anyway, I call my old pal Robbo (you remember him — he’s the one from ‘Leeds’, which I still can’t place — have you heard of it?) and ask if he’d like to come along. ‘What sort of restaurant is it?’ he asks, reasonably enough. ‘Posh Ukrainian, I think,’ I say. ‘With, from my brief glimpse of it, swagged curtains like you would not believe. It’s like Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen has gone doolally on crack in there.’ ‘It sounds appalling,’ Robbo says. ‘But I’m up for it.’ He doesn’t get out much, obviously.

So Divo it is then, which is in one of those wonderfully grand, cream St James’s buildings although you would not know it from inside. Inside it is velvet-blue curtains that aren’t so much swagged, as super-douper-swagged. (Trust me, my dears, you have never, ever seen such swagging.) And thence forward it is vast chandeliers, gilded candelabras, swirly carpets, ceramic knick-knack-noos, the occasional starey-eyed doll, a smattering of blue and white pottery and various dining-rooms: one ragrolled (trust me, my dears, you have never seen anything so Eighties), one with birds and flowers painted on the ceiling and one which, as it happens, appears to be hosting a group of rather glamorous young women. There is also a very big flat-screened telly showing picture postcards of the Ukraine, as the local office of a tourist board might do, and which would be a nice touch if only it were.