GRACE AND FLAVOUR

Grace Dent visits Ham Yard to see if it cuts the mustard

Regular sufferers of this column will be aware that I’m obsessed with the naming of eating venues and will thus not be surprised that the new multimillion-pound Central London hotel and restaurant Ham Yard has been giving me a retinal migraine since January, when I first became aware of it. Ham Yard? Well, I ask you. Yard, as in a backyard, or a yard full of tat as in Steptoe and Son, but full of ham, as in dead pig. It’s a name reminiscent of one of those commonplace taverns in Game of Thrones into which a secondary character might creep for a tankard of mead and end up being rather unsportingly disembowelled by a wildling. I haven’t been so incensed since Prawn on the Lawn in N1.

Still, I opted to forgive Firmdale Hotels for this shaming name, as in fairness this is the name the postcode W1D 7DT — a newly reopened thoroughfare connecting Great Windmill Street and Denman Street — has always been allotted on the map. I was also keen to see inside as Ham Yard Hotel has a cinema, a bowling alley and a roof garden, and I was in the market for a new London late-night champagne, titbits and general badness option now that Chiltern Firehouse has transmogrified into a sort of famous person safari park. In fact, my cohorts now call to book a table at Chiltern and are witheringly informed reservations are ‘from September, and that book isn’t open yet’, which is a long time to wait to watch investment bankers rubbernecking Bono eating a slider. I booked for four people to dine at Ham Yard on a Saturday night with remarkable ease. I can’t see this situation changing. One enters the ‘urban village’ — their words — through a courtyard of tables. It’s deeply non-London, breathtakingly regional. An oh-so-quirky cacophony of fractal patterns and mismatched bespoke furniture, Inca tribute artefacts, lamps on tables that resemble Glade plug-ins, scatter cushions, loud Muzak. It is a Malmaison having a nervous breakdown. It is the swankiest place in Cardiff or Birmingham where hairdressers and parochial Trendy Wendys go for bubbles and nibbles. Like Dolly Parton, it’s taken a lot of cash to make it seem so cheap.