These “smart” deli/cafés are often “full of yummy mummies and their adorable children”; fans plug breakfasts as being of “top-quality simplicity”, and say the other fare is “delicious” too – critics are more inclined to note “truly absurd” prices, and “the worst ever” service.
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“This week’s review isn’t so much a criticism as a parable”, says the critic. “It is about a [Notting Hill food shop-cum-diner] that has so comprehensively failed to notice the change in the [economic] weather, that is so utterly out of step, desperately, sadly passé, and embarrassingly over… It is a small, self-satisfied chain that’s been unloaded from the mother shop, which is a sort of Cotswold Westfield, selling everything you’ve never wanted for that cashmere lifestyle. At its heart, it is a food shop of such towering pretension and expense that only those who are bored and weepingly depressed enough to live in Oxfordshire can appreciate.”
Jasper Gerard (2nd March 2009)
6/10
Spurred by the sight of the “cashmere mummies” who crown out Lady Bamford’s latest smart food shop/diner, the critic reminisces about the days when Notting Hill, if “hardly Afghanistan”, was the “front line”. Notting Hill, as he sagely observes, “has become very Lady Bamford”. “Everything here is white. Except a few of the waiters, who are black. And everything is superior, particularly the till operator. … Everyone is Twiglet thin.” The critic finds himself “[choking] on the slogans dotted around the shop-restaurant-retail experience, proclaiming the moral imperative of slow food and quality ingredients”. (“Every lady muck and banker's wife knows that or they wouldn't be forking out £90 for a teetotal lunch. Invert these slogans to see their banality: what we need is more fast food! No to quality ingredients! Eat badly!”)
AA Gill (16th March 2009)
Jasper Gerard (2nd March 2009)
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