After "What's the best restaurant in the world?" and "What on earth does the Blonde see in you?", the question I'm most often asked is: "What's Michael Winner really like?" I'm asked it so often that I am considering having the answer printed on cards: "Well, you know Jabba the Hut and mad King Ludwig of Bavaria? Imagine them mixed with Erich von Stroheim, Mr Creosote, Abenazar and Fagin. Got the picture? Well he's not anything like that."
In fact, if you could imagine the polar opposite, that's Michael Winner. I can think of no other public persona that is so utterly divorced from its private originator. Sorry: I know this is going to ruin a lot of people's breakfasts, not least Michael's, who has worked so diligently to make a monster of himself.
Before I go on, I must pass on a message. I have just had a call from Matthew "Public Relations to the Stars" Freud's dad. Ah, Sir Clement, what can I do for you?
"You know Club Gascon?" (he pronounces it like a native - a native of Somalia, but still impressive). "Well, I booked a table there months ago and they just called me to ask if I had booked a table, then said they hadn't decided whether they were going to open for lunch that day. 'What do you mean,' I said. 'I booked a table months ago.' 'Yes,' they said, 'but we haven't got many reservations, so we might not bother.' Isn't that extraordinary?"
Well, yes and no. I gave Club Gascon a rave review, as did Fay Maschler and Jonathan Meades and Uncle Tom Cobley. We all said it was an archetypally French restaurant, and here they are behaving in an utterly frog way.
"There's another thing."
Yes, Sir Clement Freud.
"I have just seen a Christmas cake that says 'Best before December 24'."
You have made that up, Sir Clement.
Long pause (Freudian pauses are dark brown and lustrous). "Yes."
Do you want me to use this in my column? Another dark teak pause. "Absolutely."
This, I think, is a fine example of reverse genetics: a father who takes after his son.
Anyway, back to Winner. Although I have known Michael across crowded rooms for years, and admired him ever since I first saw The Jokers (a brilliant gem of a film), we have never actually broken bread together, though once, just after he had started writing reviews, I sent a bottle of champagne to him in the Ivy. When I asked for the bill, the champagne was the only thing on it. Mr Winner had picked up the rest. I remonstrated with him for this flagrant piece of one-upmanship. He just laughed and said: "Oh, won't you allow an old Jew to be vulgar?"
Finally, we arranged to have lunch at the new Isola restaurant in Knightsbridge. In honour of my guest, I booked under a new nom de tasse: Mr De'Ath. Winner was there first, sitting in solitary splendour. "They tried to give me that table," he huffed, pointing at a perfectly blameless piece of furniture. "Can you imagine? That table!"
Ha, ha, the very idea. I sniggered conspiratorially, as you do when you're pretending you've read Goethe. I have never understood this business about tables: it's an area of restaurant criticism on which I am embarrassingly derelict. Michael is the master. He's the Who's Who, the Burke's Peerage of placement. I suspect that he has "Four legs good, one leg bad" inscribed on his bedroom wall.
Isola is a pristine development on a site that used to be a shopping arcade; two big restaurants on two floors. It has cost Oliver Peyton a lot of wear and tear to the grinding teeth, not to mention his wallet. Peyton is one of the best restaurateurs in London. His portfolio, from the post-modern brewery Mash to the clubbish Atlantic, by way of the cutting-edge Coast, has been disproportionately instrumental in giving the capital its cool, sybaritic reputation. Peyton himself is, unusually for a restaurateur, his own perfect customer. He makes dining rooms for people like himself, putting his mouth where his money is.
At Isola, he has brought Bruno Loubet back to the kitchen, and not before time. Bruno is, again, a disproportionately important chef. Personally, he is one of my top-five favourites, an extemporising modern French cook with impeccable technique and a magician's palate. It seems odd, if not downright contrary, to put him in charge of an Italian kitchen.
Perhaps it's because I had such high hopes for Isola that it was bound to be a disappointment. For a start, I am not convinced that splitting it into two restaurants actually doubles the value of the space. I ate downstairs in the cheaper Osteria the night before my lunch with Winner. The menu here is confusing and unnecessarily split into columns representing different areas of Italy. The food is delivered on communal plates by staff whose knowledge of English and ingredients is charming, but the dark side of illuminating. The banquette seats mean they have to lean over your shoulder a lot; they managed to drop cutlery on me three times. This may have been nerves, but what wasn't was the £1.50 charged for a slick of dipping olive oil that wouldn't have lubricated a pair of shy newts, and the £5 for a small plate of parmesan cheese put out as nibbles - neither of which we had specifically ordered. This sly overcharging simply won't do. Nor will doubling the price of first courses if they are ordered as a main dish. The room is tall and noisy, designed with utilitarian forgetability and without Peyton's usual panache.
Upstairs, it's comfortable enough, but again oddly featureless. The floor-to-ceiling window along one long wall looks out over a busy pavement. The passers-by get a better view than the diners; it's like being in a Harvey Nichols display. The menu up here is a set £25 lunch with an a la carte section: starters are about £9 and main courses about £20.
Michael and I shared a melted-cheese dip with white onions and black truffles, which we both thought good, and then I had a broth with home-made pasta, which was also fine. For pudding, I had a saffron ice cream that tasted precisely like cheap Taiwanese plastic toys smell. Michael had a saffron sorbet that didn't - which was bizarre.
Michael pointed out that, although the food was perfectly nice, he probably wouldn't come back because this wasn't a room that was made for him. Now some of you may think that that's a distinct selling point, but the thing is that, at these prices, I don't know who this room is made for. It's not sumptuous enough for occasion dining and it's too expensive for a shopping lunch. The menu is too stuffy for the young and the room too relaxed for their parents. Overall, both restaurants are weighted down with too many conflicting concepts and ideas that must have looked smart on paper.
By amazing coincidence, Michael and I went to the same school. Actually, we are the only two old boys either of us has ever heard of. Being a Quaker, vegetarian, self-governing, co-educational boarding institution, the school had more students who dropped out of life as we know it than a pals' brigade on the first day of the Somme. We had both been taught by a man who made my life a small, sniffling purgatory.
"I employed him after he retired," said Michael, "but I had to fire him."
You fired Gammy Mercer? I said incredulously. Oh joy, oh sheer bliss.
Also by coincidence, I was once Winner's gardener, working under a strangely difficult chap who laid me off.
"Oh, I sacked him, too."
You didn't? How good of you. Everyone should have a Winner, a sort of vigilante crusader to settle old scores. You see, if you want your revenge served as a cold dish, you have to go to a restaurant critic.
All through lunch, there had been a photographer hovering around the table. This chap had set up lights, umbrellas, tripods and any number of flashing things until our table looked like the set for The Greatest Story Ever Told. I went to the loo and passed Paul Levy, a serious and venerable food writer. He pursed his lips and regarded Winner with the sort of look you reserve for a dodgy monkfish. "A bit of a performance isn't it, I mean for lunch?" I think he imagined that Michael habitually ate with floodlights and his own paparazzi. I didn't disabuse him. Another brick in the great Winner myth.
Isola, 145 Knightsbridge, London SW1 (0171-838 1044). Lunch, Mon-Sun, noon 3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-10pm, Sun, 6pm-8.30pm. Bar menu all day in Osteria
