‘Finchley Road Entrepreneurs’ In The Spectator And At The Savoy
OLD Mr Anorak caught Alistair Horne’s review in the Spectator of the new Savoy Grill run by Gordon Ramsay. OMA is compiling a dictionary of London Streets and appreciates Horne’s phrase: “the nasal tones of Finchley Road entrepreneurs, boasting their latest high-powered deals.”
OMA had thought that area of North London to be the locale of entrepreneurial Yids. But it turns out they have been overthrown by a new breed.
The review goes thus:
Another common fault of even smart London restaurants — the tables in the Grill are too close together. (The Ritz is an exception.) Our conversation was beaten down by the nasal tones of Finchley Road entrepreneurs, boasting their latest high-powered deals.”
On a clear night you can smell the fuzzy wuzzies’ camp fires:
The voices carried me back to the last time I was treated to ‘Henry’s table’ in the Grill. It was June 1940, a party to cheer up my cousin, Cecil, who had just been given the DSO (on top of a WWI Military Cross) for bringing his battalion out of Dunkirk.
He was a man brave as a lion, who rather alarmed me as a child, and that day was gaunt and hollow-eyed as if he had escaped from hell. He had. He talked of German ‘secret weapons’. Then, as we rose, he looked around the room and asked scathingly: ‘Are these really the people we fought for?’ He might possibly have posed the same question today, except that he was killed two years later at the head of his brigade in the desert.
Whatever can he mean..?
Spotter: Sam Green
Posted: 4th, April 2011 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
