Hard to pick at Nic's

This review was first published in May 2000

I tend to like in-store restaurants. For that portion of the world that totters up Bond Street, down Sloane Street and along Walton Street, spending their spouse's money on shirts, skirts, shoes, scarves and all the other things that make life worth living, the in-store restaurant is like the works canteen. It serves as a place to stop, derive nourishment, take a few minutes' rest and collect one's thoughts before returning to the daily grind of retail therapy.

Nicole's, the basement eaterie beneath Ms Farhi's eponymous flagship store, is a great example of the genre. The mood is low-effort Caprice: monochrome pictures of famous people on the walls, people you know at some of the other tables, a bar to lean against while waiting for your fashionably late lunching partner, and a menu filled with food that is sufficiently fashionable without being too challenging.

Sadly, I do not know many ladies who merely shop to lunch, or for that matter who lunch to shop. However, I have recently followed where the fearless AA Gill leads and found myself a blonde friend. She looks presentable enough, in a tall, willowy sort of way, and knows how to wear an appliqu?d cardigan and smoke a low-tar cigarette with poise and allure. We did, however, get chucked out of the Ritz once because she was wearing jeans (I really ought to tell Giles Shepard that jeans are the height of chic at the moment).

But there is more to my blonde friend than her hair colour and cigarette etiquette. She is related to almost every man I admire. She was once married to Cosmo Fry, one of the most charming, good-looking men you are ever likely to meet. She is still, just, the daughter-in-law of David Beaufort, the James Bond of Dukes and the best-looking, best-dressed aristocrat that this country can offer. She is the niece of club owner Mark Birley, the most tasteful man in Christendom. And she is fortunate enough to be the de facto sister-in-law of the brilliant and dazzling Jean Pierre Martel, fabled Iberian decorator.

She also runs something called Concierge London, which organises the lives of people who are simply too busy to do things like, well, go shopping. She is on the verge of employing a young woman called Flossie, who has at least two or three degrees, one doctorate and is desperate to break into personal shopping. However, my blonde friend is not afraid of doing a bit of dirty work herself and consented to come along and join me for a shopper's lunch.

There will be a time, in the not-too-distant future, when one will be able to purchase a shopper's lunch over the counter of one's local pub, much in the way that one used to be able to buy something called a ploughman's lunch. The classic shopper's lunch is as follows: four low-tar cigarettes (Silk Cut or Marlboro Light), one rocket and parmesan salad, one main course of pasta/risotto (of which you eat at most half), one latte coffee (which you will treat as a pudding devouring the froth with a spoon).

My blonde friend demonstrated her unerring instincts to do the right thing by ordering a rocket salad, which came garnished with great planks of parmesan that had obviously been hewn from a cliff face of this hard cheese and then hauled into position over a pile of leaves.

I began with a very attractive dish of grilled squid with chilli and lime marinated black beans. However, it was a close-run thing; I adore morels and I toyed with the idea of a warm morel, leek, potato and gruyere tartlet.

This was then followed by an exemplary risotto, the sort of comforting thing I like to eat on a gloomy day: thick with mascarpone cheese, although a little too heavy perhaps for a person hoping to keep their wits about them for a gruelling afternoon's bargain hunting. I noticed that my blonde friend left half of hers.

As I devoured and my blonde friend toyed with her risotto, Nicole Farhi's spin-doctor appeared as if by magic at our table and told me that Nicole Farhi was on holiday in Spain with her companion, the playwright Sir David Hare. I found this intelligence a little worrying. Whenever I have met her, I have found Ms Farhi most delightful company. I also have the highest regard for her husband's dramas. Nevertheless I would be worried if Marbella were suddenly to become overrun with New Labour clones of the type that shop at Nicole Farhi and see plays by David Hare. It would raise the tone rather too much for my liking. New Labour should stick to Tuscany and leave Marbella alone.

Happily, Nicole's is not the sort of place where one can dwell for too long on such potentially depressing matters as the threat that New Labour poses to Mediterranean culture - there is simply too much else to look at. At one distant corner table I saw an older woman, weighed down with numerous gold chains, swathed in garments that must have been at least 130 per cent cashmere, coiled like an athlete on the starting block, ready to pounce on a passing bargain. While on the table right next to me, a group of determinedly young people, who transpired to be fashion staff from Arena and The Face, were in conversation with two women in grey knitwear from the Gap, one of whom had taken the daring step of wearing culottes and boots to lunch.