From a certain angle, Mayfair’s restaurants are best understood as one babying tableside preparation after another. Lemon soles are surgically filleted on your behalf; crepes Suzette are finished with leaping flame; and, at Bacchanalia, the toga-clad waitstaff spend so much time cutting food for you that, after a while, you start to assume they are going to ferry a forkful towards your mouth while doing aeroplane noises.
But at 20 Berkeley, a shimmering new dining labyrinth just along from Berkeley Square, the first piece of theatrical razzle-dazzle does not actually involve anything edible. A little black dish is set before you. Lemon-infused boiled water is poured from a ceremonial tea pot. And then you look on as the warmth turns one or two nubby white lozenges into magically expanded miniature flannels. “This is to wipe your hands if they get sticky after the dinner rolls,” says the server. And as a demonstration of this venture’s core appeal, of its enthralling dichotomy, it could hardly be more perfect.
