Hungry ranger in Queens Park

This review was first published in November 2000

Queens Park is one of those things that happened during the Nineties. There was a time when an NW6 address seemed like an employment requirement for anyone who worked at a high level on (or should that be 'in') Vogue.

It was at about this time that my bearded designer friend, his charming common-law spouse - she's a producer for BBC2 - and their two fashionable young children moved into an apartment here.

Within a few months they had turned a perfectly normal late 19th-/early 20th-century mansion flat into a cross between a piece of early mid-period John Pawson and an example of the school of Starck-hotel-lobby design. Even the kids' toys - vintage models of Lotus racing cars from the early Sixties etc - are the sort of thing you might reasonably expect to find scattered around the lobby of the Sanderson.

I have made trips out to Queens Park and I can only describe it as Stepford for politically correct people who read The Guardian, practise homeopathy and name their children after colours or design movements. The park, complete with a small zoo of sheep, goats and rabbits, reverberates to cries of 'Stop doing that, Scarlet, Carmine and Blue' or 'Come here at once, Bauhaus, and bring your brother Weimar with you'.

I find the area riveting - it's a bit like Notting Hill, but for all the family, even families with incomes that could never afford full-on W11. Having been a few times I would rather like to become an initiate: like religious faith or a drug habit, I imagine the Queens Park life is a self-sustaining thing - it is all you will ever need. And, rather like religion or drugs, it makes complete sense to its adherents but rather baffles everyone else. Yes, it has some quite nice houses, yes, it has a nice park, but then so do many other quartiers of our fair city... that is, after all, the point of London.

Rather like the Men's Club in Stepford, it seemed to me that the focus of life in Queens Park was The Park restaurant.

The Park is a large glass-fronted, quasi-industrial space that is just perfect for a large neighbourhood restaurant. It is not cutting edge; it just gives a gentle nod towards canteen-like modernity. Seating in the open-plan lounge area is sort of vaguely redolent-ish of a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair. The palette is off-white with just enough terracotta to keep middle-class homemakers happy. It is actually rather nice and comfortable as well.

We sat at a corner table and surveyed the scene. It included a table of heavily made-up young girls in flared trousers and Nike digital watches, chain smoking low-tar cigarettes.

We asked for a round of drinks - apparently the Martini was spot-on - and some bread and olives, which did not turn up. And then we had the kind of conversation that only people in Queens Park have. It centred around a smart new bakery and delicatessen that had just arrived in the area and charged phenomenal prices. Even though we live in Shepherd's Bush, my wife had already taken the precaution of visiting it and had bought two cheese straws for £6.70; while the common-law spouse of my designer friend said that she had paid £10.99 for a piece of pumpkin. Shock registered on all our faces as she described, with some emotion, the fine packaging, the ritual weighing and the cool aplomb with which she was relieved of her money.

It made me want to visit this bakery, this temple of the ten-quid pumpkin sliver. Rather like Cathy and Heathcliff sticking their noses up against the glass of Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights, I wanted to gaze in awe at the millionaires who frequented this place calling with reckless abandon for a dozen cheese straws, and a gross of sliced pumpkins.

In the absence of bread and olives, this image kept me entertained until the arrival of my dolcelatte and pear salad with mixed leaves and lemon dressing - it tasted anonymous. Far better and far better value, at £4.95, was the antipasto misto of air-cured meats, marinated vegetables with white anchovies and olives that my wife ordered.