that Quattro Passi’s prices were a little high for Mayfair. That is something worth thinking about, given that Mellino and his sons import over 90% of the produce. The fish is sometimes ordered during the night and delivered the following day. I am happy to pay for a fish delivered to my plate from the Amalfi coast, and so should you. We opted for the beef carpaccio with rocket salad served with nuts and Mediterranean sauce, langoustines flavoured with ginger and served with a blueberry coulis, and a glass of champagne. Try to arrive in a restaurant and order an aperitif, people. Some pinnacles of polite society need to be readopted. How was it? Simply put: perfect.
We moved to an Italian Chianti for nostri secondi. The glassware felt so great in the hand, I spent a week finding it online and ordering some. We ordered the wild sea bass fillet served with fennel, black olives and mint sauce, and the rack of lamb on hazelnut, cocoa and dehydrated raspberries crumble. Now, if this is all reminding you of American Psycho, that’s you and me both. This is what one can usually expect in a two-Michelin star restaurant: pomp and ceremony at its finest. I decided that the whole meal would be well capped off with the warm orange tart with bitter chocolate ice cream, and a double espresso. I forget what Laith ordered. Probably
dates and coffee. Quattro Passi has whet my appetite to visit their founding restaurant in Italy. Let’s see if we can’t get it on the books for 2016. With the editorial calendar planned for the rest of the year, we headed out into the London night and into the Phantom. And if we’d ended up in a nightclub, we could have easily been in scene two of American Psycho. ‘There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, hut there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping you and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.’ TR