The most preposterous restaurant to have opened in London this year

Somerset House, a handsome Georgian palace on the Thames, was once the office of the Inland Revenue, and the courtyard was a car park, but that particular hell is over. Instead there is Skate at Somerset House with Fortnum & Mason, which is a purple-lit skating rink next to a ‘pop-up’ shop or ‘Christmas arcade’. This, because all PR copywriters think they write for Jennifer’s Diary in 1952, is apparently ‘the most chic and complete Christmas experience in London this season’.

I doubt it. There is, for instance, no sign of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, Father Christmas, or rogue elves, although there is a ‘twinkling 40ft Christmas tree hand-picked from the Kielder Forest’. Of course I can only think — how big a hand do you need to pick a Christmas tree? There has been a lot in the newspapers recently about tattooed elves smoking and saying ‘Have a shit Christmas’ in various Christmas ‘blunderlands’ and not exercising what A calls elf-control; why exactly elves have to conform to the same societal mores as, say, the women of Saudi Arabia I know not, but there it is.

There is, however, a selection of fashionable nightclubs and ‘après-skate’ bars selling truffles and champagne and, for all I know, magic dust. Why is there no Santa at Somerset House, which is so complete a ‘Christmas experience’? This will become clear, children, as we wander deeper into the palace, past the skaters, who are photogenically falling over as if on a mass Richard Curtis-themed date, to the north-west.

And here, at the end of an expensively lit corridor, is the most preposterous restaurant to have opened in London this year, and so probably in the British Isles. It is more preposterous than Fera (‘wild’) at Claridge’s, to which it pays homage before vaulting over it towards madness; more preposterous even than the psychological torment posing as a restaurant that is called Beast.