People say that Carbone is Jay Gatsby’s restaurant – Gatsby being the metaphor for moneyed doomed youth – but it is something more awful and, because people are asleep, no London restaurant has been this fashionable since the Chiltern Firehouse a decade ago. It lives in the basement of the former American embassy in Grosvenor Square, which is now the Chancery Rosewood Hotel. I thought this building would smell of fear, of why-can’t-I-have-a-visa-please? The truth is that it does, but that fear is now a commodity: you can be the person saying no-visa-for-you. (‘Uniquely yours,’ says the advertising copy. It means it.) And now, if you are rich enough, you can inhabit the instruments of the American Republic for pleasure, and that is why they kept the immense golden eagle on the roof.
Carbone is the definitive oligarch’s restaurant, and everything up to this point – Novikov, Sexyfish, Bacchanalia, nine new storeys on Claridge’s, four above ground, five below – was the overture: mere steps on the path to golden Carbone. It is an Italian American restaurant, an offshoot of the original in New York City, spreading across Earth like the tentacles of myth. The theme is gangsters, then – representing a truer America than it likes to pretend, and that is good. If restaurants want to succeed, they must be self-aware.
Carbone is the definitive oligarch’s restaurant
And because you cannot dine within ebbing democratic safeguards, diminishing press freedoms or corruption that falls like ash, there must be an aesthetic, and it is maximalism. That works, because maximalism is everything by definition and everything is what oligarchs want.
Everything, in material terms, looks like this: flocked red walls, mirrored ceilings and black and white marble floors. Or brown walls and brown floors and red ceilings, with anguished wonky male faces staring from the art. (I see you.) The first is Carbone’s – the world’s – id, and it looks like knickers; the second is its conscience and it looks like hell. There are florals, gilts, globes, doughnuts and trees; ferns, white napery; velvets; sconces; rich people, which means beautiful women pretending to listen to unbeautiful men and dreaming of yoga and luggage. It is all, like Hermann Goering, stunningly camp.
The staff, surely imported from America – the British are surlier and uglier – are charming, dressed as characters in light opera, or people who live in Shoreditch. They are bearded and move like dancers or small fish: when a birthday cake is brought, they mass, sing and swiftly disperse. They sing while pushing trollies filled with cream cakes. You can pay people to act happy – it is an expanding profession, like psychotherapy and warfare – and these are the best I have met.
The food is mixed in quality, but food is not the point here. Hard alcohol is the point here. The caesar salad (£31) is a monument with huge croutons, flying leaves and parmesan grated at the table by a smiling man summoning a cheese blizzard like a wizard; lobster ravioli (£54) is over-seasoned; angel hair pasta with garlic and chilli (£24) is overcooked and somehow wet. But the veal parmigiano (£69) is superb and the cheesecake from the trolley (£18) – well, I would go to New York City for it.
My companion says: is that Princess Beatrice? It is, and she looks as gaunt, because bad fathers and oligarchy are inseparable. In the end we feel nauseous, but this is the restaurant of everything, and, if you eat it, this is how everything feels.
Carbone, 30 Grosvenor Sq, London W1; carbonelondon.com
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