Restaurants James Pembroke

Before Harvey Weinstein, NSIT (Not Safe in Taxis) was the epithet awarded by mothers to swathes of young (and old) blades raised on Carry on Cabby.

My patient wife, Josephine, has officially dubbed me NSAL (Not Safe at Lunch), owing to my overflowing diary over the last four weeks. Literally tens of POST-COVID escapers have shone a Fatman searchlight into the night sky. And, lo, I have arrived at 1pm, napkin a-go-go.

David from Chester even brought his friend, Piers the surgeon, for two lunches in a row; the first in my garden, which morphed into a takeaway Greek mezze; the second at that temple of joy Boisdale, with its packed post-prandial cigar terrace.

Apart from that, all my dates were concentrated on sunnier-than-ever Soho, whose table-strewn streets will remain car-free until the end of October. The Editor and I cycled down to Polpo, in Beak Street, owned by Oldie shareholder Richard Beatty and his chef wife, Florence Knight, whose new menu offers the closest-to-the-real-thing Italian food in Soho.

Then Jim, whose Northern vowels break glass, took me to Vasco and Piero’s, the long-established and underrated Umbrian restaurant in Poland Street. Joyous Joey from Notting Hell swigged Bloody Marys at Prix Fixe in Dean Street – a bargain set menu in the ultimate bargain-menu street.

Then, for my birthday, I took the Oldie sales team and art editor to Yalla Yalla, part of the excellent Lebanese chain, in Winsley Street, which offers a massive mezze for just £19.95 for two. We were all thrilled with the Lebanese Ksara wines at just £24.95 a bottle.

Best of all, the manager let me open the bottle of 2014 Château Moulinet Lasserre that my lunch guests had generously given me that morning, without knowing that three bottles of the

2015 vintage of the same wine were waiting for me at my Safe Six birthday dinner. Even the Editor, who bypassed childhood because of ‘all that nonsense about fairies’, conceded that the odds of two near-identical wines in the same day must be several thousand to one.

Josephine chose our Lunch of the Month at the Gay Hussar’s recent reincarnation, Noble Rot, in Greek Street. I was nervous, of course. Why hadn’t they incorporated the old name into the new? Would they have kept Martin Rowson’s cartoons of Labour Party regulars such as Michael Foot and Roy Hattersley?

Richard Ingrams used to have lunch either there or at the Star Café in Great Chapel Street. So countless Oldie staff lunches of Hungarian wild-cherry soup and roast duck were devoured under the wicked eye of John Wrobel, the devoted manager.

Twenty-five years ago, I booked one of the private rooms to interview the three Goodies for my doomed magazine Cult TV. My best childhood moment was when I was plucked from prep at my prep school to appear in an episode with the trio. So overjoyed was I by our reunion that I ordered for them. ‘You’ll love the duck – it’s magnificent.’ I yelped.

‘I bet it was,’ gasped a sullen Bill Oddie, Britain’s most famous birdwatcher.

Well, Mr Goodie Two-sandals, you must return. Rowson’s cartoons are in the National Portrait Gallery but the £18 set menu (smoked trout and sausages) is the best deal in the West End. I ordered a bottle of a Hungarian Áldás Bikavér, in memory of the restaurant’s glorious founder, Victor Sassie. If he was Hungarian, I was the fourth Goodie.