Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The food is almost too superb: Wild Honey reviewed

Wild Honey is a ludicrous name for this restaurant: there is nothing wild about it, and I do not think that is even its intention. Rather, it is a cloistered, almost sombre restaurant in the grandest part of the West End, almost opposite the Athenaeum Club, whose goddess, I fancy, is weeping metal tears. I depend on old maps of London. They offer perspective and consolation, and I know this part was once marshland from the River Tyburn on its way from Hampstead to Westminster. Now it is Pall Mall and Wild Honey lives in one of its palest, grandest buildings: it glows like a slightly restrained Versailles, signifying power and brickwork. It was once home to the royal printers, a bank, and what became, in its pomp, Aviva insurance. Now it is Sofitel London St James, a name that is simply gobble-degook.

Deepest tourist-land, then, of the kind that calls St James’s ‘a neighbourhood’ on Trip-Advisor. I marvel at the idiocies of Trip-Advisor. I seek them out. For instance, TripAdvisor sometimes gives Auschwitz-Birkenau bad reviews. (‘You have to leave your bag in a kind of shed…’) A shed? What next?

‘This is not a case for Batman…’

The setting at least is fit for the chef: Anthony Demetre, a famous chef who for 12 years ran Wild Honey in a smaller spot in Mayfair. I never went there but critics were prostrate before it, writing elegies to onions and grace and grace with onions. Now Wild Honey has stepped out of the chorus line, if you will, to a larger stage, which I hope deserves it.

It is in the brasserie-style, of course, which is normal: wealthy people like a generic world, for then they can imagine that all of it — rather than most of it — belongs to them, and this is comforting.

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