The Ambassadors Clubhouse is on Heddon Street, close to Savile Row and the fictional HQ of Kingsman, which was a kind of privatised MI6. I wonder if the Kingsmen eat here, being clubmen. Heddon Street needs fiction because its reality is one-dimensional. It is an alleyway behind Regent Street, and it used to be interesting. There was an avant-garde café under the Heddon Street Kitchen called The Cave of the Golden Calf. Ziggy Stardust was photographed for his album cover outside No. 23; from Heddon Street you could hear the Beatles play their final concert on the roof of 3 Savile Row in 1969.
This is dense, fierce, very sophisticated food and it is all superb
But that is over. Heddon Street now has the awful sheen of the gormless tourist London which Richard Curtis invented, entirely unconsciously. It is still Victorian, but the brickwork is over-pointed, and the windows over-washed. It could be Diagon Alley at the Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden, or the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. It could be anywhere.
Its function is to be the café for the mall that is Regent Street, but that is central London now. Whole districts are hotel complexes with amenities, and they feel like it: they have the lifelessness of parts of Venice. Heddon Street has occasional plants, not trees, and a zigzag of grey paving, not granite. It feels constructed, as if in a rush for TV. It also has Gordon Ramsay’s Heddon Street Kitchen; Ziggy Green, named after Ziggy Stardust (do aliens eat?); the Starman public house (do they drink?); Piccolino for Italian cuisine; Fonda (Mexican); and the Ambassadors Clubhouse, which has gained a home but lost its apostrophe on the way.
You might think it is modelled on the Hans Holbein painting in the National Gallery – skull, Madam, or Ferrero Rocher? I would dine in this restaurant in a heartbeat, but this is Punjabi food from JKS Restaurants, three siblings and the owners of Gymkhana. I’m not keen on Gymkhana, even if it has two Michelin stars: the colonial nostalgia is overcooked, and the chicken undercooked. The Ambassadors Clubhouse is far better, but the owners’ grandfather was an ambassador, and this is a tribute to his ‘party mansion’ – the copywriter’s phrasing – in northern India. At weekends there is a nightclub – Ambassy – in the cellar for people who are not like me.
A party mansion means chaos: bright swirled carpets, faux Egyptian pillars, chequered glass panels, golden orbs for lamps, extremist woodwork. It is eye-melting kitsch, and I like it. Come for the set lunch, I think as I enter: £35 a head for three courses, or, by my spiteful new calculation, Pret A Manger times three. Bring sandwiches from home the other two days: these are basic life skills, reader.
It is close to being a themed restaurant, which means the food matters more, not less: what use is a nymph in a toga if they screw up garlic bread? This is ‘the food of the undivided Punjab – India and Pakistan’, which means there is nothing Anglicised here. You will not find a bright yellow or red curry wearing what is essentially gravy. This is dense, fierce, very sophisticated food and it is all superb. We eat masaledar lamb biryani, which feels like a king’s dish (£28); til masala aloo, a potato curry (£11); bhindi dali kadi (£20), a chickpea curry; dhaba dal (£11).
The clubhouse offers a lot of alcohol – you could spend thousands here just on gin. Instead, sinking to decadence, we spend £28 on four glasses of lemon shikanji. Despite its grandeur, this is more friendly than Gymkhana, which had all the hubris of the over-fashionable restaurant. Come here before it meets the same fate.
Ambassadors Clubhouse, 25 Heddon Street, W1B 4BH; tel: 020 3319 8100.
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