This cheap and cheerful joint couldn’t be further from New Labour’s glamorous Granita – and it is perfectly suited to today’s leftwing leader
Like the company they keep, you can tell a lot about a person by the restaurants they choose to go to. Famously, of course, the Blair/Brown “pact” was sealed at a table in Islington’s Granita– at the time, the hardest-edged, most glittering of the new wave of London’s restaurants, thrilling the borough’s Georgian house-owning chattering classes with lentils and chickpeas and chargrilled meat. The sort of place that spawned a million internet commenters squawking “champagne socialism” – Granita welcomed every customer with a glass of fizz – it couldn’t have shrieked New Labour louder if it tried.
Old, old Labour hung out in Soho, within the liverish, tobacco-stained walls of the Gay Hussar, a gentlemen’s club masquerading as a restaurant, where intense chaps of the Hattersley and Foot ilk slurped fuchsia-coloured cherry soup, and Blair’s image nudged up to that of Karl Marx.
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