What Soho House has got right: Electric Diner reviewed

Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior design and even its own restaurants. The Ned, its City hotel with ten restaurants, is genuinely insane, like Thorpe Park for people who are scared of roller-coasters; and no restaurant for adults should sell fishfinger sandwiches, even at Babington House, a Soho House hotel which is Clown Town for grown-ups but near trees.

But Electric Diner is much finer: the sort of restaurant that attacks its parent with a spade, like Oedipus. It is attached to a beautiful old cinema called the Electric – electricity was once exciting enough to name things, and may be again – and it sits on the Portobello Road in a very curious part of London: as much crossroads as hill. The Portobello Road used to be a farm track between Kensal Rise and the Kensington gravel pits, surrounded by orchards and named for a distant victory in a long-forgotten and very minor war.

It’s easy to forget how fascinating London is and could be again if we only had the imagination to preserve it: villages upon villages, cities upon cities. Notting Hill, which wanders through the class system north to south, like an illustrated guide for children, is in denial about this now, as if aching for some deadly conformity. Why it seeks to conceal its undeniable magic is my first question. I suppose money is the answer; it wants to hide near other money and cast out those who have little: security in numbers, like cows. Why no one ate the food in the restaurant scene in the film Notting Hill – they had gooey plates of pasta and just ignored them, as if they were spectral plates and somehow dangerous – is my next question. But that was 20 years ago, and I will never get an answer now.

Restaurants are dying in these parts: a lovely Nordic bakery passed over during the pandemic, though the famous Ledbury is back for £185 a head, and I will get there in time. Electric Diner will endure though, beloved by locals and well-funded. Soho House has gone global, a design pandemic of its own. Not all well-funded restaurants deserve to survive – I gnash my teeth at the gilded pits of Mayfair – but this one does. It has, probably by accident, a mad kind of integrity. It meets the hidden oddness of Notting Hill with an oddness of its own: I think it is the closeness of real cinema. And it’s a diner, a genre of restaurant I love.

The diner is a well-priced and doughty fantasy: hack Americana, brought to you by gasoline, cinema and insatiable greed. If you blacked out the windows – and there aren’t many – you could be anywhere. You could be in Deliverance, The Sopranos, a snowstorm or Hove. There’s a nothingness here which is very pleasing. All great cities should have pockets of nothingness.

The dining room is long and slender, bustling with morning. Like all great restaurants, it seems as if it’s always been here: the orchards are as forgotten as the minor war. If it looks familiar that’s because it has been copied so faithfully – pale tiling, red banquettes, a kitchen open to the room. The menu is a journey through American desires and, sequentially, the nearness of obesity, though you can scan a code for calories (and I wonder who does that): mac’n’cheese; eggs any style; waffles; Philly chilli cheese dog. It’s early so we take the full English and it’s perfectly done. Nothingness with a good fat sausage too.