The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The return of decadence
Opulent, mega-camp and outrageous, this new arrival reminds Mark C O’Flaherty of a more colourful age
The novelty of the Elizabeth Line hasn’t worn off for me. Google Maps still frequently denies it exists, suggesting I shell out on the Heathrow Express instead, but I’m Team Liz all the way to T5. The line has also reinvigorated Soho and connected it physically, as well as spiritually, to east London where I live. I can get from Mr Fogg’s Gin Club on Chapel Street to dinner at St John in seven minutes.
Soho has, of course, changed. I am a fan of Mr Fogg’s, but I detest what has become of Berwick Street and the once so cinematic and seedy, now sanitised, Walker’s Court. Still, there is always something new to compensate and the latest thing is the Broadwick Soho, a Martin Brudnizki-designed, mega-camp, beautiful boutique hotel at which I had such fun on a Monday night that I had to take all of Tuesday off. This, surely, is the point of Soho.
From the outside, there are few clues as to just how opulent the Broadwick Soho is. There is a fabulously overdressed doorman, and two giant elephants on the façade were decked out with baubles for Christmas – but looking in through the window at the unremarkable all-day dining counters of Bar Jackie, all looks fairly vanilla. Dear Jackie – an Italian restaurant downstairs, with good rabbit ragu, fish dishes, and a classic veal chop – is a different story. It is vivid red, with giddy floral upholstery plus red and white striped sconce lamps that look like boiled sweets. There are dimmed chandeliers, with red and blue bulbs.
When I had dinner there, Stephen Fry was at a nearby table while I eavesdropped on a first date crashing in slow motion on the other side of me. “I found fame really hard to deal with,” said the nondescript man whom I didn’t recognise. “I just need you to know about that, if this goes beyond a first date.” I doubt it did. If he was lucky enough to be staying over for breakfast, though, he would have been given a menu featuring the standard eggs Benedict and avocado on toast but with a cute Italianate arrangement of cream-filled bomboloni (doughnuts) on the counter.
I wonder how much the upkeep of Broadwick Soho is going to cost. Not for the gorgeous, woody Dame of Soho fragrance that Azzi Glasser has concocted exclusively for the rooms, more because of all the Murano glass mirrors in the lifts and bedrooms – and all the drunk people who might stumble into them. There is a plush, calm residents’ lounge bar – the Nook – hidden away behind the ground-floor bar, but the focus of the action is Flute, on the roof, which should be open until 4am but, because this is Westminster, closes at half-past midnight on weekends.
Stretching the length of the building, this is where Brudnizki’s star talent shines, with wild patterns, a mirrored hexagonal-tile ceiling, Art Deco silhouettes and coral textiles. There are classic cocktails with gentle twists (miso butter in the Manhattan) but spiritually this is pure Porn Star Martini territory. There are nibbles too, but kitchen please note: a samosa is not a gyoza.
The only reason I am deducting a point at the Broadwick is the cod Baroque frames around the TV sets in the bedrooms. They make it look as though Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen broke in and added a few changes after Martin Brudnizki had signed the rooms off; they are horribly 1990s wine bar. Everything else about the bedrooms is impressive. They aren’t for minimalists, but they are sexy. There is a lot of velvet, the beds are big and squishy, with crisp white cotton covers, and the bathrooms are marble, bright and stuffed with fancy Ortigia products (I had a tough conversation with myself along the lines of “No, if the handwash is in glass, you can’t take it”).
While midnight might be last orders upstairs, these are the sorts of rooms in which you can imagine recklessly emptying the ornate elephant-shaped minibars while staring Rear Window-style into the tiny living rooms of the few people still lucky enough to live in W1.
I have always had a fantasy of joining them, here in the middle of the city. Maybe more in the Eighties and Nineties, or even the Fifties and Sixties. But then it is easy to be in love with nostalgia for something you didn’t even experience. Yes, Soho feels too clean today but it is still a place in which to cause havoc in between multi-coloured LED tuk-tuk rides soundtracked by Kylie’s latest banger. And it is still somewhere to wake up knowing you have written off a weekday – and in style.
Double rooms cost from £595, including breakfast. There are six accessible bedrooms.