Top brass

Bellamy’s is a Franco-Belgian brasserie in Bruton Place, a dim alley in the charismatic part of Mayfair; the part that has not been ruined. There isn’t much you can do with an alley except blow it up. It feels like a survivor from a more ancient time: 2004. Its rivals from that time are broken or gone. Annabel’s is now enormous. The Ivy is a franchise like KFC.

The new generation of fashionable restaurants have glittering statuary by cretinous artists, professional PRs and spin. They are ideas. What use is an idea when you want three courses of French–Belgian cuisine for £29.50 a head in central London?

Bellamy’s is named for the club in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. That was probably its first mistake if it wants a large clientele now: the pool of Waugh-lovers fascinated by the decline of the aristocracy — a trend that has stalled, if it ever existed, which should give them comfort — has shrunk through heart attack, death and, likely, exile. The survivors call Bellamy’s ‘a club without a sub[scription]’. That is probably its second mistake. The name is also a pun on Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami, a novel about journalism. It is not my kind of journalism, or novel. Novels about journalism are usually as awful as novels by journalists. It is obviously designed for an older generation of British aristocrats during their mythical decline.

The entrance, which is also a bar and coffee room, looks like a miniaturised interior of Balmoral Castle. I haven’t been inside Balmoral Castle. Visitors are only admitted to the ballroom, which was built, reluctantly, so that visitors that couldn’t be avoided — servants — wouldn’t sully the actual castle. It isn’t really a castle.