‘Italian that just works': Broadwick Soho reviewed

Spectator

3 days ago

This column sometimes shrieks the death of central London, and this is unfair. (I think this because others are now doing it.) It is not the city we mourn but our younger selves. Even so, the current aesthetic in restaurants is awful and needs to be suppressed: beiges and leathers, fish tanks and stupid lighting, all are nauseating. But I hated Dubai. You say Atlantis, The Palm, I say enslaved maid crying for her dreams.
But there is refuge, at least from the aesthetic, and it is as ever the child of imagination and nostalgia. Broadwick Soho, the newish hotel in the street where typhus was chased down to a water pump, is a rebuke to desperate minimalism. It is a bronze and brick palace decorated, I think, in homage to Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, or perhaps Citizen Kane's Xanadu, because all the treasures are here.
In response, because most people do not want to feel dead when they are not dead, it has been named the best new hotel in London for decades, and it is, if you can still feel joy. It has welcomed Taylor Swift and Zoë Kravitz and many people more attractive than you and me. I forgive it that, because I have a quest of a very particular kind: one that perhaps only I care about. Do you want to know where all the flounces are, children – the flounces the Connaught threw out? They are at Broadwick Soho, courtesy of its founder Noel Hayden, the son of a Bournemouth magician, who has, in his parents' honour, made a hotel that Norma Desmond would love, because it is one long opening night.
There are maximalist hotels in London, of course, principally the Savoy, but the Savoy has gone mad (if it was ever sane) and thinks it is a florist or a jeweller now. Broadwick Soho has balance. It must, because it has taken all the flounces, and its broader theme is elephants, then leopards. It has two restaurants, Dear Jackie in the basement and its diminutive Bar Jackie on the ground floor, both named after Hayden's mother, who apparently loves them (as Princess Diana loved Café Diana in Notting Hill) – and a rooftop bar called Flute, named after a local flute shop, now gone. Drinking here is like drinking inside a lushly planted garden, or a paint chart. The views are of Mary Poppins's own London, the attics of Soho, and it is fantastical in rain.
I eat in Bar Jackie on a summer evening. It is slightly more restrained than the rest of Broadwick Soho, which is high-kicking into the dawn: red ceilings and red awnings; floral wallpaper for the comfort of theoretical elephants; immense, soft lamps; floral tiling on the bar. It must be hell to clean, but that is not my problem, not here. As if for contrast – I couldn't eat mezze here either – the food is plain American-style Italian, as at the lost 21 Club in New York City, and it works. We eat a very fine focaccia; soft, dense Cobble Lane salami; an extraordinary salad of trevisano and gorgonzola, walnuts and balsamic vinegar, which I will not forget; a delicate, not overlarge veal and pork ragu (there is too much stimulation to eat your feelings here – nausea will follow you); a tidy tiramisu.
It is pleasing to be somewhere that cares so much about aesthetics, when there is so much carelessness around. If you are very thrifty, you can eat for £50 for two and, considering all the agony in the world, I think you must.