Stringfellows for the sex robot age: Bob Bob Cité reviewed

Bob Bob Cité is a restaurant dangling like testicles from the underside of the Leadenhall Building in the City of London. It is shaped like a series of yellow train carriages, for a voyage no one will ever make; the building above it manages, in the way of the age, to be both absurd and frightening. People call the Leadenhall Building the cheese–grater, but it does not make me think of kitchens. Kitchens are human and intimate; from the atrium, which is guarded by security men, this building looks like the innards of something vast and inhuman.

This is the sequel to Bob Bob Ricard, a Soho restaurant for rich men with anxiety disorders, hollow legs, and nervous thumbs. The schtick is this — you press a button at your booth, and champagne appears — House champagne, two glasses. Perhaps there is another button for pliant women — House women, two whole female bodies for Patrick Bateman to consume?

Bob Bob Cité, though, is larger, more expensive — it cost £25 million to fit, and you can see the money dripping down the walls — and more ambitious. You rise to a dark hallway, which does not look like a place for happy souls and does not seek to. This, rather, is where the money lives.

It is a series of sequential public and private dining rooms — some blue, some red, some gold as in The Masque of the Red Death meets Star Wars Episode 183.6 — doused in light from a golden ticker tape running around the yellow train carriage which makes you feel, initially, as if you are inside a computer. I thought the ticker tape held news of the stock market, or paralysis in government, or war, but it is actually the menu, which is defiantly French.