Shapely surroundings at Prism

This review was first published in August 2000

The City freaks me out. I just don't get it, as I found to my cost when I visited Sir Terence Conran's Terminus to watch the financial district's traditional Friday night bacchanal. I made a few mildly disparaging remarks about the somewhat coarse nature of the clientele. Moreover, I rather implied that many appeared to have come from Essex. Cue terse e-mails, angry letters and drunken phone calls aplenty from 'offended of Essex', reassuring my commissioning editor how much money they earned and why my opinions were a disgrace, etc etc.

All I can say is that if I earned half a million quid a year, as one caller claimed he did, then I would be busy spending it rather than getting exercised about what some nancy-boy restaurant writer had said about my neighbourhood.

And being the nancy boy that I am, I was not about to lay myself, or my editor, open to further abuse from demi-millionaires; Friday night in the City is just too risky a place for me to be. I decided to go undercover and sneak into the Square Mile on a Monday night in the middle of the summer, in the hope of avoiding detection by the Essex Pride vigilantes.

And so it was that I strode purposefully into Prism, a restaurant located in a large old banking hall that once housed a branch of the Bank of New York. My sidekick was a designer friend whom I took along primarily because he undertakes extremely lucrative work on behalf of City institutions. He knows how to handle City boys and has a unique insight into their cultural make-up. He has visited trading rooms and becomes quite lyrical on the subject of the integral coat hangers built into the backs of dealers' chairs.

He also has a critical eye when it comes to such things as drinks trolley design, lighting and so on. He approved of Prism, apart from the Spirograph-style logo, which is the sort of thing that my elder child could cook up. I asked my friend if he felt that the design for the menu cover had taken five minutes to create. He looked at it critically and said: 'Less.'

Just then, a burst of traditional Square Mile rowdiness erupted from a nearby table and intruded into the serenity of our evening. For a minute I feared that this crowd might burst into a raucous rendition of 'Happy Birthday'. Mercifully they subsided when a waiter brought over the humidor and tossed them a few cigars - much as I remember shutting up the sea lions by throwing them fish when I worked at Brighton Aquarium.

We ordered. I was tempted by the tempura of Whitby cod with pea pur?e for two reasons. First, it was a pretentious way of saying fried cod and mushy peas; second, I understand that cod has entered the endangered species list and this could be the last time I'm able to taste the delicacy. The designer obviously thought along the same lines, and ordered it first, leaving me to console myself with a warm potato cake topped with wild smoked salmon, dill cr?me fra?che and Beluga caviar. Both were good.

Once again our ideas about what to eat for a main course collided, and this time neither of us was prepared to give way. So we both ate rare seared tuna on tapenade with a warm deep-fried egg, and rocket and walnut dressing. The rocket and walnut dressing tasted to my warped palate like a rather good, coarse pesto; the deep-fried egg was a bit like a poached crossed with a Scotch egg, with a crunchy crust. The only slightly disappointing aspect was my side order of cauliflower mornay: by another name, a poorly executed cauliflower cheese.

Prism is a Harvey Nichols restaurant, and I normally dislike the fashion store's forays into the gastromarket. This, however, was different. It was good. Besides, since meeting Joseph Wan, top dog at Harvey Nichols, I have come to view Harvey Nicks with a different eye.

I bumped into Wan at the opening of the new Harvey Nicks in Riyadh, where I discovered that he also runs Dupont. For me, the Dupont lighter factory is one of the holiest sites in Europe. I collect Duponts, in fact I am nuts about them. With a Dupont in one's hand the world seems a better place. Forget Prozac or Ecstasy; happiness is a warm Dupont.

As my designer friend and I made use of one my vintage Duponts, dated circa 1978 and gold-plated to a thickness of 20 microns, we revelled in the fine design of one of the world's greatest luxury products. And looking around the restaurant, I felt only love for my fellow customers. The two ultra-smooth men with receding hairlines and dubious-looking tans suddenly became pillars of the financial edifice that is the City, while the American man who received a sheaf of documentation with his bill was not involved in some arcane accounting procedure, but just a man who loves his paperwork.