Twenty years ago, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, that masterpiece of popular sociology, listed the Admiral Codrington in Mossop Street (SW7) as the most Sloaney pub in London. A cruelly apposite photo showed a group of Sloanes eating "lunch outside the Admiral Cod", having a jolly time in the beer garden. One, a thin-lipped Oxfordy boy, sat drinking bitter and wearing a barbour. Opposite him was a gorgeous Sloanette, with Diana-ish layers in her long, dark-blonde hair. She was sipping white wine ("vino"), looking very bored and rather stupid. Competing for her attention - unsuccessfully, by the looks of things - was a stockier, fluffy-haired Hooray Henry finishing his pint of bitter.
How times change. Published in 1982, the Sloane Ranger Handbook told why it was essential to giggle at funerals, to cry at weddings, to wear navy blue, to read Dick Francis and to love the Princess of Wales. But many of the rules of Sloanedom have altered now. You no longer have to turn your collar up and wear pearls with everything. Barbours have become too common (in both senses). Navy blue is not indispensable any more; Sloanes wear black like everyone else and read Louis de Bernieres instead of Jilly Cooper. Diana is dead. And the Admiral Codrington has become a gastropub.
The words "gastropub" and "Sloane" do not go together. The handbook insists that Sloanes are not foodies (though they like going on cordon bleu cookery courses, especially the women). In 1982, Sloanes liked pub food, shepherd's pie, curry, nursery food and boarding school food such as cinnamon toast and Gentleman's Relish. They lunched on lasagne. They gave dinner parties of pea soup and duck, with chocolatey puddings. They liked pasta, disliked salads and spinach, and feared fish on the bone, crustaceans in their shells and strong cheeses. ("Their choice is limited by the smell. 'God what a pong. Has someone dropped a beast?' Ripe Stilton is often as far as they'll go - drinking lots of port to counteract.") Mainly, they like getting drunk so that they can't really taste what they're eating anyway. "The talk all through dinner is about lavatories and adventures which involved being sick."
Ostensibly, the sophisticated Admiral Codrington restaurant, with its plush red banquettes and elegant pictures, is far from this ideal. But do not be deceived by appearances. Happily, for the Sloanes of this world, eating at the Cod is still much Sloanier than you might at first think. The wine list, except for the champagne, is pretty terrible, with acid South African Sauvignons and hoorayish New World Chardonnay (Sloanes hate wine bores, despite their love of getting drunk). But the food is even worse, a mixture of baby-soft textures and inept cordon bleu experimentation. It tastes as if it were cooked by the bottom of the class at Leith's School of Food and Wine.
Someone in the kitchen is very fond of spring rolls, which crop up all over the place. A starter of two tiny crab and ginger spring rolls (£6.95) contains next to no crab (good for those squeamish about shellfish) and comes on top of a taste-bud battering castle of red onion chunks and woolly tomatoes. There were more raw onions with the salmon fish cakes (nursery food again) - this time, those little silver-skinned ones so beloved of cordon bleu cookery. The chef must have missed the class in which they learnt how to cook them, because they were as hard as pearls. The Admiral's Cod (£10.95) came with a breadcrumb topping ("Sloanes like food to wear a hat") and a vile, gritty, creamy sauce, salamandered like a creme brulee. The only dish worth eating was gnocchi (Sloanes feel most comfortable with stodge). It seems astonishing, given the vast choice of eating out in London, that any place could get away with serving such horrible food at such high prices. Yet the "Cod" was heaving with willing punters. But then, the crucial thing about Sloanes, as Diana herself admitted, is that they are as thick as two short planks.
As for the front part of the pub, it could have been 1982 (except for the prices: £4 for a gin and tonic). There are still black and white photos of Ian Botham on the walls, and Eighties music on the stereo. Big-boned girls in Jermyn Street shirts or twinsets and expensive loafers hoot at each other over the ice bucket of Laurent-Perrier and say "he is sooo sweet" of everyone they know. Outside on the pavement, there was a familiar tableau: two boys and a gorgeous Sloaney girl. She had long, dark-blonde hair and a glass of white wine. The boys were, respectively, a thin-lipped Oxfordy-looking one and a stockier, curly-haired one in a suit, both with pints of bitter. They snorted with laughter at everything she said. She looked bored. They were all smoking Malboro Lights instead of Silk Cut - but otherwise, this Jules et Jim trio were indistinguishable from their Sloane parents back in 1982. Plus ca change . . .
