For reasons involving sentimentality and schadenfreude, the editor dispatched me this week to Hungarian stalwart the Gay Hussar on Greek Street, to document its final days. The Gay Hussar’s last hurrah, as it were. Sixty years of serving goulash to politicians, artists and passing trade. ‘Oh, it’s ever so sad it’s closing. What an institution!’ foodies have whined, people who haven’t darkened its doorway for years, instead filling their faces at 10 Greek Street, Burger & Lobster, Barrafina, Koya, Arbutus and well, absolutely anywhere else but there. My shrift is short for Londoners who moan about change, lamenting a time when Spam fritters and smallpox were de rigueur.

And obviously, at one point, the Gay Hussar was de rigueur, but now it is the opposite and, sadly, a restaurant can’t pay its bills with the love of folk who think it’s really charming that it hasn’t been turned into a Starbucks yet, but never want to eat cumbersome plates of veal goulash beside a dusty library of political biographies. Or want to dine in a restaurant where the table snacks are whole red chillies and the walls are groaning with cartoon sketches of male politicians like one big looming tribute to centuries of chuntering British patriarchy. Or want to visit a restaurant where the carpet has seen better days and the clientele consists of tourists with no idea of London restaurants and diners humouring an elderly relative who still demands to eat there.

If the Gay Hussar wishes to survive, which I believe it does, it needs to work out how to keep elements of its glorious, scurrilous past, then sharpen them up and make them affable for 2014. Just a few doors down on Greek Street is The House of St Barnabas, an ancient Grade I-listed building titivated and rejigged to make a glorious club and restaurant. It is terribly old but prettily new. London loves these places. The Gay Hussar could be a gorgeous, battily mad, imperfect yet raffish feeding and watering hole, steeped in history and juicy anecdotes, evoking the sense whenever one pops in — for a bowl of fish dumplings in dill sauce and a large apricot brandy — that London survives and we’re just ridiculous cameo characters passing through. Here now, dust tomorrow, ‘Let’s have another bottle of Bull’s Blood, I’ll wriggle out of my first meeting tomorrow.’

But presently, let’s not kid anyone, the Gay Hussar needs investment, a big yellow skip placed outside and a high-octane declutter and its entire menu scrapped, refocused and made appetising. The food is atrocious. Oh, let me count the ways. Marinated fillet of herring with soured cream arrived ice cold, curled half-heartedly into a rollmop that had collapsed en route from the kitchen, lying in a pool of room-temperature cream and miscellaneous chopped veg. Chilled wild cherry soup was reminiscent of a bowl of wine-drenched Nesquik.

If this is what Hungarian people are actually eating, the matter should be noted in Parliament during any future debates on the ethics of immigration and the entire country granted asylum. At the Gay Hussar £18 will buy you a plate of smoked goose with red cabbage and solet (Hungarian bean stew). It is a vast, breathtaking plate featuring, centrestage, a deep-fried potato lattice fortress — again collapsing on the way from the kitchen — filled with a thick sludge of brown material that was once beans. The fortress is topped with thin slices of goose and sits in a perilous watery moat of stewed red, but now brown, cabbage.

I sat staring at the plate sadly, acutely aware that the staff were all watching me from behind a low partition wall like the cast of Meerkat Manor. Dinner should not be an endurance test. I shall be sad when the Gay Hussar closes, but not remotely surprised. It will live on in our memories. The food is unforgettable.