A creation myth: Earl -Cadogan wandered into Oriel, the ancient Sloane Square brasserie on his land, like a lardy dachshund, if slightly more cadaverous. For 25 years Oriel served as a second home for the Chelsea hags and, worse, the brats, who still wear strange coloured cords, work in estate agency or PR, and are called, even now, Caroline; and it was pretty bad, stuffed with idiocy and yapping. (I would say that Chelsea deserves no better, and should be nuked with pies, but that is not my job.) Cadogan, who has taste, hated it, and so, with the neat malice of a guardsman, he decapitated it. He gave it to Chris Corbyn and Jeremy King, who own three of London’s prettiest restaurants — the Wolseley, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel. They promised to take care of the baby (I mean the restaurant) and Cadogan stomped off satisfied, to obliterate other warts upon his land. (He also decapitated WH Smith.) They named it Colbert.
Which makes me wonder if whatever ruined Oriel, a café that seemed exhausted, like the ghost of P. Diana, or a sloaney pile of loafer dust, has cursed the spot; there is, despite the talents of Corbyn and King, something not quite right with Colbert, and I cannot put it down to Chelsea, a parish that has long lost its soul to Maleficent, or, as they call it round here, Marks & Spencer. As an outsider from north London, I can say we are actually in Victoria but who would listen? I do not mean to state that Colbert’s rooms are not bright like mirrors, that its woodwork does not gleam with satisfaction, that its table dressings are not silvery and fine. It is simply that Colbert is more ordinary than the others, as if Corbyn and King have run out of innocence and love; it is, after the fairy pinkness of Zédel, a restaurant designed for Frances Hodgson Burnett heroines to dirty their mittens, and weep on their daddies, a prosaic slide to duh, perhaps to money. It would be a shame if -Corbyn and King sold out to venues that do not deserve them, but that, I suppose, is up to them.
Colbert is a faux French brasserie, the tiredest brand in restaurant-dom; the great boulevard cafés in Paris are tourist traps now, so the French equivalent, I think, would be opening a pub. It looks, I am afraid, like a posh Café Rouge, all the way to its ’Allo ’Allo! bones. It has white and black floors, red leather banquettes, and the sort of photographs that brasseries in Paris are meant to have but almost never do these days; all Colbert needs to complete its branding is Rick and Elsa and Germans marching into Peter Jones.
At lunch it is packed, because it is, for now, horribly fashionable. This means blonde women in the back and fat men in the front, because, like the orthodox Israeli buses, Colbert practises gender segregation; this looks awful, like the discos at school, and should be abolished or at least inverted. The temporary fashionableness, which is very bad for restaurants, has a terrible effect on the staff, who stand in a complacent wall at the entrance, telling visitors to advance to the bar with astonishing smugness; only Claridge’s, which actually employs people to give customers dirty looks, is this rude to passing cash.
The service, at this early stage, is slightly ropey, but the food is fine — a dense chicken salad, a superb prawn cocktail, a fragrant moules marinière, a faintly sizzling veal schnitzel; the chocolate mousse is almost as fine as at the Delaunay. But it all melts away on nervy fashionableness and hackneyed design. Colbert is, for now, in love with herself and oblivious, because she is a Chelsea Girl; perhaps she will be more charming when she slides.
Comments