NoMad is a new hotel in what used to be Bow Street Magistrates’ Court: a preening piece of mid-Victorian classicism opposite the Royal Opera House that is clearly too fine for the half-hearted criminal classes these days. I was judged in this court once for the very boring crime of cannabis possession (I think I did it), as was Giles Coren for something else (he says: ‘I never done nuffink’), General Pinochet, Dr Crippen (VeryMad) and Oscar Wilde. It heard its last case in 2006: the breaching of an Asbo by a man called Jason. Now it sells cocktails.
NoMad has a restaurant named, as if in homage to a public relations panic attack, the NoMad Restaurant. (I thought NoMad was named after a refugee but I checked and I was wrong.) It offers ‘the interplay between grand and intimate, classical and colloquial, festive moments of revelry and quiet meals that nourish the spirit’. I’m not sure about the adjective pile-up — was anyone injured? — or if the spirit can be nourished in central London anymore, but it is beautiful, certainly: a plant-filled three-storey atrium. All interesting London buildings become restaurants in the end: a kind of food-themed destiny. Each house Karl Marx lived in is now a restaurant, a bar or a private members club. I did the tour.
NoMad has not followed the Yard at the Great Scotland Yard Hotel, formerly the Central Detective Unit of the Met, which is morbid and velvet, filled with relics of Death and chairs that look like Mr Men without faces. That would be too pleasing and too easy: but I love themed restaurants. At least they know what they are. NoMad is for the rich and fashionable — by which I mean the socially anxious who absolutely do not know what they are, they treat Tatler headlines as religious edicts — and so, being childlike, they seek no reminder of it.
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