Dover Street Counter, London: ‘You walk into a room beating with joy’

There’s a scene in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard where a vast and absurd car pulls up outside Schwab’s drugstore, where ageing, mad Norma Desmond gives the young writer Joe Gillis money and sends him in to buy her a pack of Turkish cigarettes. He walks in, sees the jeunesse dorée of Hollywood at play, catches the eye of Betty Schaefer, the woman he loves, and briefly forgets the looming horror that he’s left outside, parked on the Boulevard.

It’s one of the best scenes in one of my favourite movies. I hope you’ve seen it. I know for certain that Martin Kuczmarski has. There’s no way he hasn’t. Because walking into his excellent Dover Street Counter feels like reliving it, in conception, in spirit and somewhere alarmingly deep in my soul.

For me at least, Mayfair today has touches of the Hollywood where Wilder wrote. Fading stars, dead-eyed 15 percenters, and beautiful but vapid hopefuls posturing among the ruins of a crumbling empire. And in the middle of it, unannounced and as jewel-perfect as a Paramount set, there’s now appeared a lunch counter for our own lost generation. It’s impossible not to make an entrance. I wanted to look up through tears and see if I could recognise anyone in the lighting rig.

I’m going to tell you first what I ate, just so we can agree afterwards that it’s not the point. I started out with buttermilk fried chicken, because that’s about the best thing to put next to a superbly built martini. The space behind the bar is packed with people (the only inauthentic thing here, a real diner is defined by how few staff it can employ between the line and the Formica), but that means you can build your order as you go, and you can see it being made by the same hand that will place it before you – my definition of perfect hospitality.

I had “disco” fries, because of the moxy it took to name them. They came in a chrome bowl, hot and crisp – shot in the back with pickled chilli and floating face-down in a pool of “disco jus”. (As God is my witness, I’ll never type those two words together again.) Tuna tartare served in the kind of stainless-steel coupe you’d expect for an ice-cream sundae is slickly tossed before your eyes by a white-jacketed counterman and stacked with furiously furikake’d rice crackers for shovelling.

I do deplore the restaurant’s ignorance of Euclidean geometry. The “wedge” salad, though authentically assembled of chilled iceberg, a proper ranch dressing and walnut crust as rich and crumbling as Norma, was an inch-thick, diametric tranche. Patently a cylinder.

We Brits have issues with the tuna melt. Maybe because most of the tuna we ate growing up was cat-food. Or if you grew up middle-class, you would have been beaten for transgressing the imagined French culinary convention that fish and cheese have no place on the same fork. The brilliant alibi inherent in a properly made melt is that tinned tuna doesn’t taste much of fish and US Government-inspected cheese-like food-product isn’t cheese. Their combination, plus the brilliant seasoning, plus melting it into a sandwich, creates something on a different ontological plane to its constituents (to be fair, the Counter uses unimpeachable red Leicester, but it remains appropriately reclusive in the welter of flavour).

Finally, of course, appears the absolute unit that is the DSC french dip. Sliced roast beef, ragù, taleggio, pickles, in a long soft roll with a pot of jus as flavouring/throat lube. I realise the year is young, but 2026 will surprise me immensely if, at any point, I slip anything better over my tongue. So, yeah. A solid, if mathematically unsound, 14/10 for the food.

A stellar cast of favourites, executed with flair by a slick young cast. But with respect, that’s not the point.

At this time of the year, critics traditionally talk about trends. You’ll have been told that New York-style restaurants are hot, that traditional French is newly à la mode, that old-school Italian is roaring back and that consumer conservatism haunts the industry. For me, this is all one meta-trend. Since the turn of the century, the British restaurant scene has pursued an ever more frenetic churn of launches led by hype and celebrity, and I honestly think the public are bored rigid.

There’s a reason places such as the Devonshire, Maison François, One Club Row, Martino’s, Arlington, Brutto, Bouchon Racine and now the Dover Street Counter are achieving such impact. It’s because they are sets for the movie we want our evening to be. What unites them, for all their varied styles, is that they are designed as the backdrop against which we can cosplay a night out. It’s not that we’ve suddenly rediscovered an interest in French, New York or Italian menus, it’s that these older restaurant tropes, from places with hospitality traditions infinitely older than our own, still instantly signify in the diner’s mind, competence, experience and, well… quietly giving people a tried, tested and guaranteed brilliant, evenng out over generations.

Because it’s my job, I know the names of the chefs at all these places, I’m betting you don’t. That’s because suddenly customers don’t need to know. And the restaurant names? Neutral. Egoless. Like they were named after the street or whoever opened the joint when they first arrived on these shores in 1937.

Schwab’s didn’t need a “name” chef or pre-launch PR carpet-bombing to manufacture a short-lived scrum of influencers at the door. “Dover Street Counter” is about as publicity-neutral, even obscure, a name as you can get without it being Schwab’s Pharmacy. The “trend” if we insist there must be one in all this, is punters wanting to feel they are in experienced and safe hands. Not near hysterical with hyped “super”-excitement.

For all that it’s in Mayfair and the bill is way above what a struggling, morally compromised hack can afford, DSC reminds me, like Joe Gillis, what it’s really all about. You pay to forget, for a few moments, the pop-eyed insanity out on the kerb. You walk into a room beating with joy and welcome, and you’re instantly comfortable that this is the place to have an evening you’ll remember your whole life.