Prescription for a pricey night

This review was first published in April 2000

'I took four "Fat Trappers" before coming out tonight,' announced my date for the evening as he settled himself into a seat in the first-floor window of Pharmacy with its splendid view of Campden Hill and Notting Hill Gate. It was an odd greeting but then my friend Howard is an odd man; richer than most people I know, he still works like a dog, while his partner spends at least six months of the year at his estate on Nevis.

The Caribbean, however, holds no allure for Howard. Rather, he has recently become consumed by a trio of products: Fat Trapper, Dessert Avert and the wonderfully named Exercise in a Bottle. He imports these wonder drugs from the US, and for him they have taken the place occupied in other people's lives by religion or children. He is plain nuts about them: much as others bring out Bibles or pictures of their kids, he whips out a promotional pamphlet.

I dare say he hoped to prey on my greed, and that if I downed a fistful of Fat Trappers and took a belt or two of Exercise in a Bottle, I would be able to eat twice my own weight in food. It sounded like a cross between bulimia and the Moonies so I tried to get him to study the menu.

'What is Joselito "gran reserva" pata negra with pear?' he asked. I informed him that it was probably some 2,000-year-old piece of Iberian pig, and suggested that he should have some. He almost agreed, but then I remembered he is Jewish and felt it would be indelicate to push it. As it was, I need not have worried - he went for the shellfish soup instead!

Howard seems to feel at home at Pharmacy, something I am only beginning to learn to do. I think it's the overtly youthful downstairs bar, which attracts young people with the sort of silly haircuts I had in my teens, that I find unsettling. Otherwise, it is a charming, Damien Hirst-decorated chunk of nostalgia for the Cool Britannia years. The art alone must be worth a fortune, and I dare say that in a millennium or two Pharmacy will become W11's answer to, say, the Scuola San Rocco in Venice or the Sistine Chapel.

Ever since I bumped into Hirst at Quo Vadis and found him fine company, I have developed a taste for his work, and the butterfly pictures and pharmaceutical wallpaper at Pharmacy hold a definite charm for me. Nor am I the only one: that great connoisseur of the arts, Jeremy Clarkson, was holding court at a table on the occasion I went with Howard.

Indeed, the whole restaurant was packed with a mixture of Hoorays ('Yah, like, it's really cool; they should open one in Fulham') dining their Alice-banded molls and, as the evening wore on, progressively foxier chicks, the foxiest of whom turned up wearing a long, black sheepskin coat and very little else. She was, inevitably, the consort of the glammest man in the room, Drew Barwick.

Drew is one of the honchos of the Hartford Group that owns Pharmacy, as well as other restaurants including Canyon, where I had a less than wonderful dinner in the summer.

Drew asked what I thought of my food. 'Expensive,' I said, calculating that each scallop in an extremely tasty dish of seared scallops with tomato and cardamom sauce had cost £4.50. To head off further enquiries, I announced to the tables around me that Drew was one of the owners and, should they have any complaints, he'd be happy to address them.

Happy to have caused a little consternation, I returned to my main course of poached organic salmon, with bottarga. I am about as zealous when it comes to bottarga as Howard is about Exercise in a Bottle and though the dish was good, it would have been more to my taste had it benefited from many more shavings of this powerfully flavoured rice.

Howard, however, pronounced the seared tuna, red peppers coulis and potato gnocchi delicious. And looking at it, I was sorely tempted to wolf a fistful of Fat Trappers at that moment and order myself some. It was livid Schiaparelli pink inside and surrounded by beautiful corkscrew-like gnocchi, each of which looked as though it had been painstakingly crafted on a lathe by a master gnocchi maker.