Favourite Places, The French House

Dean St, SoHo

Leica M3, Summicron 35mm F2 FP4 (400)

At The French House (Soho, September ‘26)

A peculiar kind of London establishment seems to have been designed by someone who had heard about hospitality but never actually witnessed it, and I say this with enormous affection, because the French House on Dean Street is the finest example I know. It serves beer only in half pints, a rule of such magnificent pointlessness that I stood at the bar for some minutes on my first visit trying to work out whether I was the victim of an elaborate prank. I was not. The half-pint rule has been in place for decades, and nobody can quite tell you why, except that it has always been so, which in Britain is considered not merely an explanation but a complete moral argument. I ordered a half of something, received it in a glass roughly the size of an egg cup, and felt, for the first time in my life, genuinely French, or at least short-changed in a way the French would recognise.

The dining room is upstairs, up a staircase apparently built for a smaller and more agile species of human, and it is tiny, and wonderful, and slightly wonky in the way that all the best rooms are. The walls are crowded with photographs of people who drank here and were famous for it, and the tables are pushed so close together that you are, in effect, dining with strangers, which I found charming until the man beside me began to describe his gall bladder. The food, though, is the real thing: robust, unfussy French cooking of the sort that makes you want to loosen your belt and write a letter of thanks to the chef's mother. I had something involving a pig and a great deal of butter, and I have been thinking about it, on and off, ever since, usually at night.

What makes the place so delightful, I think, is that it has no interest whatever in the twenty-first century. There is no music, no television, and mobile phones are forbidden, so that everyone is obliged to do the one thing modern people fear above all else, which is talk to each other. Legend has it that de Gaulle drafted a wartime rallying cry to the Free French in these rooms, and whether or not that's strictly true, you can easily believe it; it is exactly the sort of place where a person, fortified by a small beer and a large lunch, might decide to save a nation. I left three hours later, blinking into the Soho afternoon, having saved nothing at all, but feeling, as one always does on leaving the French House, that civilisation was in reasonably good hands after all……….