I am, like a strain of Withnail, in the John Lewis café by mistake. I meant to review the new Jamie Oliver café and cooking school on the third floor of John Lewis Oxford Street, but they have run out of food beyond pink cake. We have no choice but to go upwards to the fifth floor and the electricals. I have always felt safe in John Lewis, a despicable thing to think, let alone type, but that is done now.
It is called The Place to Eat, which echoes, though unconsciously, Ecclesiastes 3. It is preeningly ugly. I wonder if this is another strain of common British humble-brag, like our teeth, our town centres and our clothes. Because this is ugliness by design: it’s too ugly to be anything else. If Spectator readers are shattered by the withering of their country – by the loss of their political party, their public libraries, their youth – I suggest they move into the John Lewis Oxford Street café. It is a far more authentic expression of the current British subconscious than the fantasists at Fortnum & Mason can conjure with velvet and fake snow. It eeks catastrophe, mutely and with almost-food.
I examine the queue which seems to comprise very angry old people holding small teapots
I remember it as grey, like those 1950s British seaside holidays with less sex. In fact, it isn’t just grey: it has roused itself to the howl of brown and grey. Some restaurants have too much identity. The Place to Eat has chosen no identity for an identity in its grave near electricals: or, rather, despair as an identity. It is all windows (the view is of Uniqlo, the successor to Gap, and roofs), brown floors and glass tables. The view is wonderful, but it is not exploited because it is beautiful and, sometimes, to be beautiful is to be terrible. Have you ever tried to watch It’s a Wonderful Life with clinical depression?
If I were rigorous, I would hunt down those responsible for The Place to Eat, which I have renamed The Time to Die and ask: why? I never thought I would yearn for another teal banquette or piece of silver plate but I feel like I am in southern Russia without melons. Instead, I examine the queue – there is no table service here, in reality or metaphor – which seems to comprise very angry old people holding small teapots. If you don’t think people can hold small teapots with this insane level of aggrievement, you haven’t been to The Time to Die.
This, of course, makes me angry: why are you angry? You are baby boomers: you have postwar prosperity, golden housing and the triple-lock and all you do is whine. Then I examine the food and I understand the aggrievement, which cannot only be existential, a little better.
It is laid out, lovelessly, in rows for people to squabble over when there is nothing to squabble about. We sink to the familiar: we have a smoked salmon bagel with limp dill and cucumber, and Flora margarine in a packet on the side; an immense and miserable goat’s cheese quiche; then a brick of over-dry, over-cold coffee and walnut cake, which may have been baked yesterday and refrigerated overnight. If not inedible, it is close to it. This is the sort of place where the only thing to do is to eat crisps spread with Flora margarine, and I do. Some cafés are so boring they are mesmerising by default, and this is one such. The only thing it lacks is a defibrillator.
The Place to Eat, John Lewis, 300 Oxford Street, London W1C 1DX.
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