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So here it is, the same as it has always been — a gaudy red chocolate box, a little battered, as if a deranged grandmother has hurled it across the room and stamped on it. It clings to the end of Greek Street, ready to fall into Soho Square. I walk in, armed with a reservation I do not need. The Gay Hussar is emptier than a TUC conference in Dubai — not so much Gay as Desiccated and About to Sell its Body Parts at a Discount. The waiter looks surprised to see me. It is like the time I went to the Varna Town Museum. They were so amazed to have a punter, they threw a party and served champagne.
Inside, the walls are covered with Martin Rowson cartoons. I like Rowson: he paints souls and his squashed and stretched faces bespeak rotting. There are books too — real books, not painted ones — and Peter Mandelson’s biography My Days as a Christopher Lee Impersonator is actually facing outwards. Since I am on Peter Mandelson, I would like to say that, contrary to the report in Private Eye, Peter Mandelson did not make me cry during the election campaign. You do not have to be a Peter Mandelson-ologist to realise he cries himself to sleep quite often and I almost never do.
The menu is proper Eastern European food; that is, it could, if it wished, rise and shoot you in the face. It is stews, soups and 1,001 things to do to a pig. In Romania, they think pigs are a vegetable. On the table is a bowl of fat red chillis. Maybe Neil Kinnock should have had a Labour chilli, not a rose. It might make people think Labour is hot. I have invited a right-wing friend for comic effect but even he is wilting. He arrives and sinks into a polemic about the evils of inheritance tax. Say something interesting, I tell him. OK, he says. This restaurant — and he looks around — is Conservative. His evidence, I believe, is the presence of a tablecloth and the absence of single mothers (‘sperm bandits’) wearing Burberry and beating their children with sticks. You don’t have to be a Tory to use a tablecloth, I say. He pouts, sucks down some red.
We have goulash soup and duck foie gras; then a schnitzel and a venison stew. I had fresher food in Bulgaria but I didn’t get to pass a photograph of Gordon Brown looking wracked on the way to the loo in Bulgaria. I ask the waiter — does Ed Miliband come here? ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘And his brother too. But never at the same time.’ Tories come here too, he adds; and they are very friendly with Labour. ‘I have been here 16 years,’ he says. ‘Meetings. Always meetings.’ I stare at the promotional material. The Gay Hussar has included a very detailed floor plan. I don’t know why. The pudding is almost inedible and the waiter takes it off the bill unasked, because he is probably a socialist. I like this restaurant with its soggy potatoes and its memories, clinging, like a ghastly metaphor, to the past.
The Gay Hussar, 2 Greek Street, London W1D 4NB, tel: 020 7437 0973.
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