Among the best puddings I’ve ever eaten: Richoux reviewed

Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in a haunted mirror in which the only thing that matters is your survival. This duplicity is important to understand, because the road from Cicero to Caesar is so short it may lack potholes. Cake is less urgent, but at least cake won’t lie to you. And here is Richoux, still filled with cake, if you can afford it. It is, for many people, marvellous and theoretical cake.

Richoux was a cake shop on Piccadilly – a street I can never eat in without thinking of Alexander Litvinenko sitting, doomed, in Itsu, when it still pleased Vladimir Putin to kill people individually – for so long it was forgotten. It is 113 years old, or one seventh of Yoda. People walked past it as if it were a tramp, or a piece of lazy monumental statuary, or a ghost. I remember Richoux from my ever-receding youth. It was for tourists and the ancient, and people who walked in by mistake. It belonged to the same class as Bella Pasta and Angus Steakhouse: the bad London restaurant.

Then it closed – a victim of pandemic crisis closure, not energy crisis closure – and reopened six months ago under new ownership. They brought it back to life on Piccadilly and this is fitting, because this is not only Litvinenko’s street, it is also Count Dracula’s street. He lived near the Hard Rock Café, if you believe in the existence of vampires. I would have said probably not before 2016, but now I’m not sure about anything.

So Richoux is remade, and it is pleasing in that generic modern style that looks like Weimar Germany for people who know nothing about Weimar Germany and would hate you if you told them about Otto Wels and the Enabling Act and the coming of fire. That is, it is as oblivious, in its way, as the nearby Rainforest Café, now rebranded Jungle Cave, with its happy fabric animals. I don’t know exactly what restaurant designers are watching for pleasure, but I suspect it is Cabaret again.

This Richoux is another child of the Wolseley – it shares its aesthetic – but Weimar tribute chic was less offensive when Tony Blair was around: we were playing. It has dark woods and marble floors and chandeliers and tiny tabletop lamps and soft green seating shaped like plush shells. It looks like a jazz bar for people too monied and controlling to appreciate jazz. There is a glittering bar for the drunks, but that is more a prayer than something functional. There is a large menu of brasserie food – French onion soup, sea bream, ribeye steak frites, well done at good prices, and pleasing to my colleagues in restaurant criticism – but this is really a patisserie, and cake is the drug of choice.

It lights up the window with solace: no street is closer to the fantasy of the Edwardian childhood than this. It features a series of monumental sugared cruffins, which are a hybrid of a muffin and a croissant, with raspberry and vanilla, or sea salt and caramel. Late capitalism always has something up its sleeve: presenting the cruffin.

The puddings exude less Dr Frankenstein as itinerant pastry-chef and, probably for that reason, are among the best I have eaten: an apple tarte tatin with crème anglaise; a meringue gateau with mascarpone Chantilly; a milk chocolate mousse that, unlike us, knows exactly what it is doing.

So central London has another excellent patisserie that serves steak frites too. I could say that this will hold us up, but it won’t.