The way we dine now

The 1930s aesthetic is not quite as fun as it used to be. You can enjoy the detritus of fascism quite happily when you’re living in a secure liberal democracy, but when that liberal democracy begins to look unsafe, it feels more like threats in the form of tableware.

Still, the art deco style is everywhere, an oblivious pathway from decadence to something worse. It dictates restaurant design. It is as if the food knows something we don’t yet, and that makes us very stupid indeed — if, for now, not hungry.

The Holborn Dining Room is a gloomy barn brasserie in London WC1, a filthy postcode at the best of times. I think I would like this restaurant if Tony Blair — or even John Major — were still prime minister. It would feel like what it should be: a theme park in which you could observe the possibility of terror from a fat red seat. Perhaps it is the lighting, which is so low as to feel pre–medieval (is a peasant on fire?), but I find the Holborn Dining Room, which sits on the ground floor of the Rosewood Hotel, genuinely ominous. ‘Timeless luxury’, says the website instead, but it is nothing of the sort. It is vast and dark and red, and filled with people gibbering Brexit-related fears, which are no longer specific, but instead have coalesced into a kind of mood state.

It is the sort of place you would slip into and slip out of again to announce that the National Socialists have just won 37.27 per cent of the vote with a 19 per cent swing, on the BBC — the crumbs of a good, if expensive, hamburger still on your shirt.