banquette

there was something rather disturbingly hilarious about the fact that we were sat at a table on the first floor of the savoy, peering intently out of the window over the foyer in anticipation the arrival of a black cab. the vehicle in question had no passengers, simply an envelope bearing a document which ls was going to have to review over dinner. as usual, I filled our time boring ls with random trivia about how the savoy court was the only street in london where vehicles are required to drive on the right.

welcome to london. or rather the anomaly that is the City – where documents take taxi rides by themselves, and according to the play we had just watched, where blackberrys rule the day and bankers diarise sex with the wives via their secretaries. Alex the play is hilarious – based on the comic strip satirizing the comedy that is the City and its clown bankers. hilarious. and perhaps it was so funny because for all the fun it poked at life in the city, it was painfully very close to the truth.

lucky for my tummy, reservations at banquette were in order and we toddled over for a well deserved supper. banquette, one of the g ramsay family, whose design was apparently inspired by the interior of a 1950s corvette stingray, looks like the inside of an American diner, albeit a rather sleek one at that. fortunately there wasn’t any meatloaf or grits on the menu, there was however a delicious sounding burger and spaghetti carbonara – comfort food for a friday evening – the end of a long and painful week battling the clowns and their other circus friends in the City. well, at least it was the end of the week for me. ls was still reading his document.
document drama dealt with, we decided to forgo a rather too energetic sounding party in the interests of sheer fatigue and for more comfort sought in bellinis and the strains of jazz piano in the American Bar – home of harry cradock’s legacy cocktails. it was a lovely mellow bar, evoking images of women in glamorous cocktail dresses and men in fedoras in the days of speakeasy and the prohibition – the long lost days before blackberrys and taxi-riding documents.