Dear Jackie is where the beautiful people will be going next — that’s the word on the fancier streets of London. For now this new high-end Italian, part of the Broadwick Soho hotel, will have to make do with me. I presume the beautiful people were still getting their slap on because it was nearly empty on my Thursday-night visit, apart from a much older man with a much younger woman at the table next to us. If you had that on your beautiful-people bingo card, tick it off now.
For some reason, the places now patronised by the definitely rich and debatably glamorous resemble the boudoir of a minor colonial governor’s daughter, if she had also raided your granny’s curtain collection. Annabel’s, 5 Hertford Street — anywhere frequented by sad hedge-funders strung out on cocaine, and sadder girlfriends stringing out their credit cards.
Over at Dear Jackie, there’s velvet everywhere — on the chairs, the curtains, the walls. Gold-rimmed mirrors. Chandeliers of many colours. Flower-patterned ceramic tables and an array of elaborately painted dinner plates on the red walls. The waitresses are dressed in silken red or blue spotted pyjamas. One of them tells me she recently got into trouble for using the wrong-coloured nail polish. Every element precisely designed and controlled, all in the service of looking like an explosion in an embroidery factory.
But despite the eccentric predictability, it does feel luxurious. Shaking off the sensory overload, we order the seasonal crudités. Why? Because they cost £12, and I’m fascinated to learn what you could possibly do with crudités to justify asking for £12 and keeping a straight face.
Dear Jackie: “There’s velvet everywhere”
The answer is to serve them with a little dish of bagna cauda, a garlic and anchovy dip, and arrange them in semi-interesting shapes. A triangular bit of cucumber, thin discs of sweet radish, perfect slithers of baby carrot with the stems left on. This is how the other half live — contain your envy if you can.
The unfortunate whom I’ve dragged along suggests that some of these delicately proportioned veg ornaments don’t hold the dip well and we would be better served with gauchely middle-class chunks of veg, the type you’d chop up for the buffet at a regional wake. This is because he naively believes he has been brought here to enjoy good food.
It’s a weird quirk of British society that the ability to obtain nice grub improves as you move up the income spectrum until you hit a certain point of confused wealth, whereby the whole thing collapses and you lose any sense of taste. But we are not here to eat; we are here to be seen to be here. And you can’t put a middle-class carrot stick into your Instagram stories.
Some of the pasta is decent, I suspect almost accidentally so. Papardelle with braised rabbit, olives and guanciale. The flavours work, the pasta doesn’t quite: it’s squeaky and slops morosely in the rabbity juices. We are saved by the orecchiette puttanesca. Sweeter than you’d expect and a little warmer too; a decent whack of pangrattato — breadcrumbs, but fancier.
Then a slab of monkfish on top of an ’nduja mush, and seared yellowfin tuna with agrodolce — sweet and sour sauce Italian-style, with honey and vinegar. It’s very salty. The monkfish is a little rubbery, an occupational hazard for monkfish, but for £36 you’d want it to be perfect.
Roast monkfish with ’nduja
This is the problem. These are perfectly edible dishes, but you’re paying £68 for the two of them. For that I’d expect something more than edible, but there are no surprises here. No innovation either. Simple food done to perfection can be worth a foray into the overdraft, but that isn’t what this is either.
This is food for people with so much money that they don’t need a 36-quid main to be really good; for whom a 36-quid main equates to a Pret sandwich at their desk. I’m not one of those people. I doubt you are either.
It’s a little heartbreaking. It feels like a medieval fable about the futility of avarice. This is what your Sunday schoolteacher meant when they told you that money won’t make you happy.
Dark chocolate mousse
People who aren’t uber-rich often think the point of riches is that you can buy nicer things, but for a certain type of wealthy person, making money is not about that. Watching numbers on the screen go up is the goal in and of itself. This is food for them. They have every right to enjoy it. It’s fine; it’s expensive, which is the main point.
For dessert, a chocolate mousse log arrives. It looks regrettably faecal, with precisely three tiny pencil shavings of gold leaf balanced on top. As metaphors go, it’s on the nose.
★★☆☆☆
broadwicksoho.com/dear-jackie
