Grace and Flavour: Il Ristorante

After seven days’ holidaying in Greece, tackling its financial crisis one cold Mythos beer at a time, my first jaunt back in London was to the Bulgari hotel in Knightsbridge. Planet Wonga. The land that monetary gloom forgot. I rarely go out in SW1, aside from brief trips to Harrods pre-TV filming to stock up on plunge bras and DVF frocks with which to terrify Ian Hislop and Griff Rhys Jones, or to attend birthday parties in hideous bars where men order champagne so expensive it’s accompanied by a firework-lit procession, bongos and the subtext ‘the smaller the penis, the bigger the bar tab’.

When friends ask about dinner at the Bulgari — the hotel nicknamed ‘The Vulgari’ by those who think blowing £800 on a room to be the mark of the ostentatious imbecile — I struggle to recall what went past my lips. I quack on about the glossy mahogany walls, which made finding the loos a two-man event. And the black granite floors, oh so perfect for a wedding-disco knee-skid. Or the bar full of little Bernie Ecclestone-alikes and the sort of men Naomi Campbell falls in love with. And the enormous table full of size-zero Dasha Zhukova types, all eating salad, all staring towards one man at the head of the table, who was barking into a mobile phone, flipping between Sandhurst-toned English and fluent Russian, before ordering ten shots of vodka, squaring a bill for several thousand and leaving in a flurry of squeaking limbs.

Il Ristorante, according to its website, ‘is the new place to be in London’. True, if the place you want to be is in the slightly soulless basement of the most expensive hotel in town, surrounded by the mothers of Saudi diplomats, food critics, and the sad but super-wealthy.

So, yes, the food... um? There were far better things to boggle at. I was with my friend and fellow appreciator of dandyish daftness Ed Simons — Ed and I met at a house party many moons ago, in the days when I could wear a leopardskin catsuit in a blasé manner, without anyone double-checking whether it was Halloween, and bonded over a love of EastEnders and Coronation Street and other deep, cerebral matters — and I know we consumed £208-worth of dinner, but aside from a few strands of Zucca-standard fresh pasta with pesto and a piece of very fine cod that would make environmentalists weep down their hemp jerkins, it was the least amazing thing of the whole experience.

On arriving, you’re given a slip of paper and a pencil and asked to choose appetisers to go with your champagne — a bit like being in a yummy version of Argos or Coral (a joke that would possibly fall flat with the Bulgari demographic). We chose fresh sardines with fig, mozzarella that had, according to legend, arrived from Italy that morning, and some teeny-weeny pieces of squid. These appeared in little ashtrays accompanied by an arduous inventory of every ingredient featured within the dozen mouthfuls.

I am experimenting with various methods to pass the time in restaurants when waiters over-egg their part, giving the inside-leg measurement of the cow, the make of tractor that collected my spuds and so on. At Bulgari I tried: ‘clutching my hands to my face in rapt enchantment like a Victorian cherub’ and ‘examining my nails in Joan Collins circa 1986 mega-bitch pose’. I also toyed with: ‘asking more questions’ (warning: never ask more questions; you will never exhaust a theatrical waiter on how mature the ‘matured parmesan’ is), and ‘shooing away with a big, flappy hand while shovelling pasta with the other’.

My strongest memory of the main courses is that the menu had several dishes ‘recommended by Bodyism, our resident personal trainers’, which we immediately rejected. As if I want my dinner chosen by a wazzock in a headband with zero per cent body fat. Defying the fun police, we ordered chips to accompany our mains; the chef sent six taste-free ‘chickpea chips’, standing upright in an eggcup. The highlight of dinner was an excellent boozy tiramisu. We needed that extra kick of liquor to face the bill.