TOM JACKSON52 The Times Magazine
as an elegant Georgian space in the grubby
hinterland of Oxford Street is a perfectly
suitable thing to celebrate at the top of a
restaurant review in The Times.
As is the conversion of one of its most
elegant houses to a dazzling, modern,
multilevel eating, drinking, dancing and
boob-watching space. Maine is owned by a
sexy Canadian millionaire with a glamorous
track record in Dubai who wanted to recreate
the glamour of his childhood holidays in
New England (or something), and so as
I headed across town to meet my wife for
dinner, I was primed to be intimidated by
its opulence, offended by its flashiness and
enraged by its condescension.
In fact, I was so sure the doorman
would look me up and down and sneer that
I stopped at Liberty on the way and bought a
new pair of shoes, and dropped my old ones
in a bin. And still I fumed as I walked along
about how the doorman would say, rudely,
“Have you got a reservation?” and completely
ruin my evening.
But he didn’t. He saw me from a distance,
pacing around outside the house, wondering
why the front door wasn’t the entrance, and
he stepped out of the shadows and smiled
and said, “Are you looking for Maine? Come
on, I’ll show you the way...” and he led me
round the side of the building, down a newly
built arcade, and in through a side entrance
to a locus of pure joy, like the speakeasy
masquerading as a funeral parlour at the
beginning of Some Like It Hot, where the cop
gets shown through into the party theatre, fullEating out Giles Coren
ook, there was a stripper. There is no
getting away from that. I can’t leave
her until the end and build up slowly
to the fact of her nakedness in the
way that, say, a stripper does, because
to do so would be to suggest that this
restaurant is all about the stripper.
Which, of course, it isn’t.
And I can’t very well drop her in the
middle of the review, between the fish tacos
and the sprouts, because that would be to treat
her, quite literally, like a piece of meat. Which,
of course, she isn’t.
So I decided it was best to put this lovely
lady, with her glistening amber skin, big bare
boobs and smooth round bottom, right at the
top of this piece, and get her out of the way
now. Because otherwise she would be very
much the elephant in the room. Although
an elephant, in a smart restaurant in central
London in 2022, would be considerably easier
to ignore than a stripper.
I had been planning, before I went to the
Maine, to write my introductory third about
the end of the building work in Hanover
Square. I know – yawn. But that lovely square
(whose classical layout and mature trees were
the view from my desk when I worked at
Vogue House in the 1990s) has been hidden
behind screens and scaffolding and dust for
more than ten years now, and its reawakeningL
‘It was all just as
2022 as food and jazz
can be. Apart from
the breasts. The breasts
aren’t very 2022 ’
The Maine