This was my life in all its shallow richness - hundreds of well dressed people crammed into a room where chandeliers drip onto corporate carpeting and waiters with minimal English squeeze through the crowd bearing silver trays of canapés and bottles of champagne in white linen collars.
Okay, well it wasn’t my life every day; but once or thrice a year – the Glendas, Time Out or, as in this case, The Tatler Restaurant Awards. I haven't worked for the FT since 2003 but still my name pops up on out-of-date mailing lists for launches and events, one of which belongs to Conde Nast, god bless the inefficiency of their PR company. This year the Awards Ceremony is being held in the Mandarin Oriental, upstairs in a vast function room with a floor that sways under our feet like an ocean liner sailing through calm waters. I tell myself it has been sprung for dancing. I repeat it every time it eddies and dips with attendant stomach lurch because the alternative, that it’s struggling to bear the weight the assembled restaurateurs, is too terrifying. I see us all tumble to our deaths in a muddle of masonry and shattered glass, and hold my hand out for another (exceptionally good) canape and a Roederer refill to cushion the shock.
I hardly recognize a soul, but then I never did. Even when these events were the jam on the bread and butter of writing a restaurant column, I could only pick out the household names - the Marcos, the Giorgios, and the Gordons. I can’t see any of them here but it’s so crowded, it’s impossible to be sure. People stand in mostly male clusters with a token woman who can be the chef’s wife but is more usually the Front of House. Most of the restaurants I wrote about back then are gone and best forgotten though there are some familiar names in the roll call of those shortlisted for various categories. The winner of Best New Restaurant Quo Vadis, in my day was run by Marco Pierre White and the place where a man first told me that ‘it was a pleasure to meet a woman with a brain for a change’. You know it’s all over when men start admiring you for your mind. Especially when they are pissed at the time.
Mark Hix, who got something for the Oyster and Chop House, and the tiny Helene Darroze, who I recently interviewed for a magazine article, won Best New Chef.
As well as a nice fee for the piece I still have a night at the Connaught in one of their plush rooms to cash in as a thank you from the Hotel.
Me and my mind are very much looking forward to it.
