Grace and flavour: Café Royal

So, I was dispatched to The Grill Room at Café Royal to investigate a romantic evening for all you Valentine’s types.

Perhaps you’re one of those couples who sit on the Central Line from Holborn to Leyton wrapped around each other like koalas on ecstasy, excavating each other’s ears with your lips. Maybe you wear matching outfits from The Kooples and do all your relationship admin on your Facebook timelines.

But en route to Café Royal I was thinking I know little of St Valentine other than that he is the patron saint of 40 per cent cocoa truffles, helium balloons and watching in bewilderment as the office numpty, who says ‘pacifically’ instead of ‘specifically’, is presented with 24 red roses and a highly flammable bear. One Valentine’s Day I was dumped unceremoniously and had to call the restaurant — through a snotty fug of supermarket-brand vodka and The Best of Celine Dion — to cancel our reservation. That said, my ex went on to edit a caravan-enthusiast magazine and now spends his days fruitfully at Cirencester-based chemical toilet exhibitions, so my voodoo doll paid dividends there.

I didn’t take a loved one to Café Royal to drink champagne and eat caviar, I went in a far more pleasing manner, dripping in diamonds, with a handsome, eligible homosexual, namely my dear, funny friend PR guru Matthew Park. I’m aware one is supposed to make a terrific fuss about caviar — which I like, but am wholly aware is essentially Shippam’s salmon paste with delusions of grandeur — but on a rainy Thursday evening I was far more in the mood for the chicken hash and skirt steak at John Salt in Islington (do go, it’s wonderful). Or a lobster roll with fries at the new Bread Street Burger & Lobster (don’t wear the plastic bib, you look like you’re chowing down in an open prison). Or a large plate of crespelle with pumpkin and sweet onion at Trullo. Proper comfort food for a rainy night.

However, the Café Royal Grill Room experience transpired to be rather wonderful. The hotel itself is a 160-bedroom, five-star, yet still slightly anonymous, mecca of luxury, next door to the Nespresso shop at the top of Regent Street. I say this, as I’ve walked past it at least 250 times in the past decade and never acknowledged it.

The recently restored Grill Room is ridiculous and slightly mesmerising, festooned in Louis XVI-style gold, and seductively lit. It is possibly one of the most hysterical, beautiful, flamboyant rooms in London. I’m struggling to think of a proper rival. You half expect Louis himself to be sitting on a pile of gold in a far corner, spooning Beluga into his decadent mouth. The room slightly throbs with its history of people being gloriously up to no good, having played host to London at its most dandy and ostentatious since 1865. Artists such as Augustus John and Aubrey Beardsley caroused here; Oscar Wilde fell in love with Lord Alfred Douglas here; David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor all got very squiffy here. It’s the type of place where one ends up proposing marriage, when one strictly is actually married to somebody else.

Another important fact to honour is that The Grill Room is excruciatingly bank account-rupturing, ‘wake up the next morning crying and pondering declaring yourself bankrupt’ expensive. We drank Taittinger — the cheapest plonk on the list — and nibbled our way through a ‘caviar flight’: 10g Italian Sevruga, 10g Russian Oscietra, 10g Iranian Beluga XX, served with sour cream, crostini and potato, and were £240 down within 90 minutes. I drew the line there and left. I’m sure party girl Tamara Ecclestone would order 125g of Iranian Beluga for £900 and half a dozen or more bottles of Krug Grand Cuvée (£380 a go) and may well even be carried to her car in a cacophony of paparazzi flashbulbs wearing a leather miniskirt over bare legs, displaying her fetching wonky ankle tattoos, but I’m a great believer that less is more. I went home and ate a tin of Heinz soup. I was very tipsy and totally starving.