Another British institution bites the dust........

An unpleasant piece in the Torygraph by a teenage scribbler gloating over the demise of Simpsons-in-the –Strand, that gastronomic icon of Britishness.

 

Here is how he describes it.

 

 

‘Simpson’s was an unventilated backwater, stale and dispiriting, whose only tics of animation were the energetic repetition of lazy clichés.

One of its reputation-making customers was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but this was in the period when he had submerged himself into an especially loopy version of Spiritualism. Conan Doyle thought the dead were speaking to him. Any visitor to Simpson’s knows this to be true. And today the dead are tipping us the wink, saying: “I’d go somewhere else, if I were you”. Will we be losing a great institution when the patinated silver-plated cloches and creaking butlers’ trolleys are consigned to the antiques trade and the pompous chandeliers to architectural salvage dealers? Maybe, but most traditions are, like Simpson’s itself, inventions of the 19th century. And there are some traditions we can do very well without.

 

Apart from Conan Doyle, Dickens and PG Wodehouse were regulars.

 

And me, in those halcyon days when Maggie was putting a bit of stick about, the City was awash with loadsamoney, and three-course lunches accompanied by a bottle or two of Chateau Collapso were the way of doing business until replaced by the modern generation’s preference for rabbit-food and cocaine.

 

It had its own culture. Dress code was jacket, collar and tie in the days before Dave made scruff-order fashionable. It was noted for its roast beef Yorkshire pud and ‘bubble’. The huge baron of beef came round on  a trolley, and you could have it any way you liked, from rare to well-done. The trick was to tip the carver, when there would be so much beef on the plate that there was scarcely room for the veg. Otherwise you got a couple of slices!

 

The writer goes on

 

‘An exhausted Simpson’s could never compete in a new London food culture where foraging, sourcing, cooking and tending bar have a youth appeal which working in television or music once had. Simpson’s is dying not because it became very old, but because it became irrelevant’.

 

What that particular piece of verbal ordure means is almost beyond me by I think he is saying ‘Yoof don’t dig it, know what I mean!’ Personally,  I would rather go on a starvation diet than be seen in his kind of right-on nosherie.

 

The paper is a bit kinder in a separate short piece. It says

 

Simpson’s-in-the-Strand has been delighting patrons since 1828, when it opened as a coffee house and chess club. With its richly reassuring fare illuminated by chandeliers, and wood panelling interrupted only by the odd monarch in oils, it is perhaps a quintessence of Britishness. Not that it has failed to move with the times. Women have been allowed in since 1984. It is sad, then, that the Savoy hotel, which owns Simpson’s, feels further update is required. It is seeking a chef or, worse, brand, to run the restaurant, which may even lose its name. An update of the Bateman cartoon on Simpson’s menus may be required, with the red-faced chap hurling his knife in outrage at “the gentleman who suggested Simpson’s needed 'revitalising’”.

 

Not entirely accurate. Women have always been allowed in but before 1984 only in the upstairs restaurant.

 

This is sure to be a case of Hutber’s Law: ‘all improvement is deterioration’.

 

At least it answers the question ‘Is nothing sacred?’ It is ‘No!’