Good things in Da Bush

This review was first published in December 2000

Shepherd's Bush is of course the centre of the fashionable world. It is a truth I have known for many years; it is just that hitherto I have been cunningly disguising my fashion-forward status as poverty. Liberty Ross lives round the corner. Natascha McElhone, star of that masterpiece of arthouse cinema Ronin, is practically a neighbour, while the third most beautiful woman in the kingdom, TV's Nigella Lawson, lives at the bottom of my street. Even Vogue has written about the area. It is brave, it is new, it is Da Bush.

The catalyst for all this excitement, and the reason that all these closet Bush-dwellers have come out, is of course Charlie 'the beard' McVeigh's Bush Bar & Grill.

However, when I popped round for dinner the other night, the vibe was more mid-Eighties Oxford than 21st-century West London.

The first sight that greeted me was that of the perennially youthful Bruce Willis lookalike, man about town Toby Young, who has already used the Bush Bar & Grill as the venue for his 37th birthday and was dining with his charming fianc?e.

Then I saw a man who used to be called Daryl Weldon and edited a student paper called The Jericho Bugle. He is now an immensely powerful man in publishing.

Next my eye alighted on the charming, willowy and pretty ex-lover of one of the country's leading former-public-school drug addicts, someone who was a close associate of mine during my tertiary education.

Had Boris Johnson sashayed in at that very moment flanked by Darius Guppy and Patrick Marber, it could hardly have been more Brideshead meets Thatcherite Britain.

To have the past leap up and confront one in such an unexpected manner is most alarming. In its PR material, penned with effortless ease by the neglected common-law spouse of a noted property developer, the Bush Bar & Grill is described as occupying a former dairy - it says nothing about it being a hangout for Oxford graduates. It also omits to mention this site's previous glorious incarnation as the Blob Shop - it is almost as if the current proprietors were ashamed of the location's gastronomic heritage.

Access is gained via a large doorman, down a brightly lit alley and through a small, pretty courtyard. The space is big, airy, and quasi industrial in style. This look is cunning because it is impossible to tell how much of the unfinished look is intentional and how much, such as the lavatories, is just unfinished.

Having tried and failed to get our coats taken by the frizzy-haired, tight-jeaned and T-shirted greeter, who looked as though she were auditioning for a part in Boogie Nights, my wife and I arranged ourselves along one of the banquettes and I began to drink in the rich scene.

The customer base can roughly be divided into three categories: people who happen to live locally and are trying out the place; thumping Sloanes who dress out of the Boden catalogue (Johnny Boden also lives nearby); and those people trying their best to make it seem like Notting Hill by wearing expensive clothes in a scruffy manner and smoking cigarettes in a way that suggests Jean-Paul Sartre and moody Matt Dillon.