“The slums money makes are far more depressing and disgusting than the ones the absence of money creates.”

“I’ve made it a rule of life never to dislike people simply for what they have — dismissing them for being rich is as unpleasantly irrational as dismissing them for being poor. Neither wealth nor poverty have innate characters; they are both prone to their own turpitudes. But over years of travelling, I’ve discovered the contrary truth that the slums money makes are far more depressing and disgusting than the ones the absence of money creates. And Berkeley Street is a self-made money slum.
I also believe restaurants are a force for good. Nothing polices a street like a neighbourhood bistro, or evokes community and civic pride as a theatre of free assembly. They are society’s social workers, its romance, guidance and business advisers. But it is an incontrovertible truth that the tasteless stew of Berkeley Street has been created by restaurants.
There’s Novikov, with its oriental and Italian kitchens and meat-rack bar; and Nobu, which has gone from being one of the earliest fusion restaurants into an embarrassing playground of entitled youth and socially hapless sportsmen. Then there’s the newly opened Sexy Fish — packed and, as anecdotal gossip has it, with an average table spend north of £1,000. Most recently, Alan Yau has opened his long-anticipated, turgidly gestated restaurant.
As we walked down the road towards it, there was the honk of imperviously parked Mercedes, blacked-out Range Rovers and furious cabbies. The pavement is thronged with manically smiling young women who, while not actually prostitutes, have the look down pat, with smartly streamlined faces and angry mouths, sucking the life out of cigarettes, black eyes sliding over the ranks of young, stateless men dressed in awkward collections of branded expense, guarded and manoeuvred by platoons of doormen, bouncers, bodyguards and muscled maître d’s.”
– from AA Gill reviews Park Chinois, Mayfair W1, Sunday Times UK, 10 Jan 2016