The best food Italy can offer: Giannino Mayfair reviewed

Pity the gilded restaurants of Mayfair, if you can: they are dying. Some have reopened; they ache on like men with no legs but a glut of polenta. Occasionally, a brave one will open for customers who simply do not exist and so hangs about like a character in a Vladimir Nabokov novel: interesting but superfluous.

Where are the rich? In Tuscany? On MS The World, the floating block of luxe flats? In the vault? Because they are nowhere to be seen: they are like plushly appointed Borrowers. A journalist wrote his report of the reopening of the Savoy Hotel in the Strand last month. They had six guests in a hotel reconfigured — for social distancing — for 100. Even so, Richard Caring opened his (unconsciously) Weimar Republic-themed bistro 34 with a mad political flourish: there were two Boris Johnson mannequins dangling on zipwires. What can it mean? Does Caring wish to lynch Johnson, or just to remind us of when he lynched himself?

If you believe in food as artistry — and you must, or you are a savage — this is a shame, though I think they will recover; meantime I marvel at the quality of the silence at the brand new Giannino Mayfair, named to distinguish it from Giannino Dal 1899, its famous mother restaurant, founded by Giannino Bindi, a Tuscan exile who served beans to coachmen in the suburbs of Milan. One day, a legend says — the best restaurants have creation myths — an aristocrat dined with his coachman, as if in a film, and loved it: so, the restaurant moved to the centre of the city, and Ava Gardner dined there.

In usual times Giannino Mayfair would be busy with those who can afford it: the service is gracious, and the food is without fault.