Vingt-Quatre

I am cross with Vingt-Quatre. It has always got away with serving pretty mediocre, overpriced food because having a restaurant open 24 hours a day on the Fulham Road is just so handy and fun and convivial. It does a roaring trade in midnight suppers and 4am breakfasts, but I imagine someone who happened to wander in for lunch would be underwhelmed on every level, and not least because the decoration owes a lot to provincial 90s disco. Maybe it’s not so neon in the daytime. Side point: mirrors. Don’t put mirrors everywhere in a place which caters almost exclusively to the nocturnal, i.e. drunk, element of life. I spent a good 10 minutes pouting at myself over my friend’s shoulder. I apparently even took a photo when she went to the bathroom – see below - smooth.

Actually, the croque monsieur I had on that occasion was really quite good, but the atmosphere was ruined by the bouncer. An actual bouncer. Not someone with an ipad and an earpiece standing behind a lectern in a self-important manner, which is bad enough, but a fully kitted out, heavyweight bouncer. Now, with its close proximity to the dens of iniquity that line the Fulham Road, catering for everyone from teenagers on their exeat weekends via people who want to be on Made in Chelsea, to old men who work in Finance and really should know better, I’m sure they get awfully pissed up groups of people milling around outside wanting nothing more than to scarf a club sandwich at 2am. And I’m sure, given the fact that all of the groups mentioned above are loud and self-important, they get some aggro. I’m also almost certain that it must be pretty lame aggro. It’s not exactly Brixton – although I admit the smashing of the Hugo Boss windows in Sloane Square during the London riots did give the area a touch of street cred I feel it previously lacked.

Anyway, I can’t imagine why there was a bouncer blocking the door. He rudely enquired whether we intended to eat a ‘main meal’, each. Well, I don’t know. I might intend to sit there and eat three courses, but maybe I’ll look at the menu and decide I want a bowl of chips and a bottle of champagne. Or maybe someone will call me with dramatic, late night news and I’ll have to rush out, flustered but purposeful, in a flurry of scrunched up napkins and scraped back chairs, before anything has passed my lips- let alone had a chance to get to my hips. I’m being facetious, as ever, but seriously, come on dudes, two girls looking for a midnight snack are really not a problem for you, or your business. Don’t set a bouncer on us. If it’s the safety of your patrons that concerns you, two forty year old venture capitalists scuffling outside the restaurant (I’m imagining Colin Firth and Hugh Grant here) after one too many jagerbombs kindly offered by the pretty ladies with the sparklers in Dukebox are hardly going to require a bouncer to separate. Equally, I understand eight teenagers taking up a big table, ordering one burger and eking it out for three hours so they have somewhere to sit is annoying. But I would have thought those are quite easy to spot and, being thin emo/goth/vegan/peace frog/beliebers, are probably not going to require a giant bouncer to tell them to move on. After we had solemnly sworn that we both intended to eat, said bouncer made a gesture through the glass window, which I understood to be the international symbol for ‘2 people’, but equally could have been an homage to Churchill or indeed an appreciation of Star Trek. Relief; we were allowed in. We promptly went back outside again for a cigarette.

2 croque monsieurs (messieurs?), a bowl of chips, a 500cl carafe of indifferent wine, and a £60 bill? Somebody saw us coming.