Fishing for finery at No 57

This review was first published in October 2000

Jermyn Street is without equal. As a masculine shopping thoroughfare it is the nonpareil.

If I have to enumerate my leisure activities, top of a very short list would be hanging around this chunk of London. Give me a large cigar, a small espresso, a reasonably sunny afternoon, the company of the great Edward Sahakian, proprietor of Davidoff, a pavement table at Mokaris caf? and life suddenly seems worth living.

In my younger days, after a hard day's coffee-drinking, cigar-smoking, and shirt-shopping (Budd and Turnbull & Asser are my favourites), I would retire to relax and unwind in the basement of 40 Jermyn Street, perhaps better known as Tramp. I used to spend so much time at Tramp, that I once seriously considered buying a small villa overlooking the dancefloor and retiring there for good. I even mentioned this plan to the proprietor Johnny Gold. But as I'd just consumed two bottles of Krug and seven miniature bottles of vodka, I'm not sure that he took me entirely seriously.

These days I do not go out as much in the evenings as I used to. Age, fatherhood and crippling poverty have confined me to the comforts of my fabulous West London home. However, for old time's sake, and as this is the ES men's issue, I decided to go for a boy's night out on Jermyn Street.

Sadly the boys were not in town - excuses ranged from having a large estate in Scotland to run, to pleading a previous engagement with the media elite of Queen's Park.

So much for a boy's night out.

Thus, at six o'clock I called my Canadian friend. She was at her desk at Vogue having just composed a thrilling article about how hemlines in Notting Hill are a full three centimetres lower than those in Shepherd's Bush, or was it a treatise on post-bourgeois, neo-Eighties, retro-glamour chic? Whatever. I suggested that she needed to get out more and she agreed to meet me at 9pm at 57 Jermyn Street.

She finally turned up at about 10pm. I didn't mind too much. I had been spending a lovely time chatting to Nick Gold, son of Johnny. Nick is the manager of 57 Jermyn Street. It used to be a club that his father owned in the early Sixties and now it is a restaurant and nightclub owned by Matthew DuCann. DuCann is a charming, shaven-headed man who is so soft-spoken as to be inaudible. Even at his most exercised he gives the strong impression of a sloth recovering from an overdose of Valium.

His club is rather charming too - booths, wicker lampshades and vague bits of quilted leather here and there.

The food - I ate salad of marinated squid and poached smoked haddock - is good. I particularly enjoyed the vine tomatoes that accompanied the squid. Indeed the food has improved considerably since my last visit - apparently the old chef has retired. My Canadian date demonstrated her customary gastronomic delicacy and wolfed a burger of minced lamb. 'Top burger,' she pronounced. I take her word for it. Having delivered her rapier-like gastronomic verdict, a masterpiece of gnomic wit and epigrammic economy worthy of Martial, she then recounted her cv to a suave film producer who had joined our booth.

When we started dinner, 57 Jermyn Street was empty. And when I looked up from my final scrap of tasty haddock - that might have been improved further with the addition of a poached egg - it was full.

The punters here are a fairly high-tone bunch. But as ever in the hospitality industry, I should have been there the night before or the night before that. Apparently that prince of playboys, the Duke of York, had been in the night before. And Hugh Grant had recently popped down to show off his new toned body.