Then a 21-year-old looks at you strangely when you try to use the word “chopped” in conversation, and you remember that no, you are a lame, middle-aged millennial whose brain has been permanently damaged by playing FarmVille on Facebook.
But one thing crosses the generational divide. We are all yearning for Cool Britannia. To relive that golden moment when everything was boomtown, a night out cost 20 quid and things could only get better.
You’d imagine the marketing department at Soho House would be jumping for joy. The early 2000s! Remember us? The exclusive parties, the A-list membership, the tabloid tales of Jude and Sadie’s toddler swallowing an ecstasy pill off the floor. And yet. Despite Noughties nostalgia overload, Soho House is nowadays the least cool place in London.
On a shortlist of London’s least cool places to be seen, 2020s Soho House claims top spot
On a shortlist of London’s least cool places to be seen — The Prince in West Brompton; any branch of Vagabond Wines; Polo in the Park; anywhere Steven Bartlett has visited — 2020s Soho House claims top spot.
At the turn of the century, Soho House probably wouldn’t have let me darken its door because I don’t work in a creative field. These days, following its mass expansion, they’d welcome me with open arms.
When your glittering membership list is comprised of recruitment consultants, lawyers and bankers, having a Substack probably makes me the most interesting person in the room. To today’s Soho House members I might as well be Byron. Although they’d probably think that’s a burger joint.
Bright lights, dull clientele
Yes, everyone is better looking than average, and probably richer too, but somehow this only makes the whole thing more pointless. Once you’ve worked out where you’re allowed to sit, you realise you may as well be in any bar or restaurant, except here you’ve paid an annual fee of thousands for the privilege of being disappointed.
And look, I get it. If I’d been born in the suburban sprawl outside London, where the cultural zenith consists of date night at Nando’s, kitchen extensions and the occasional neighbour being firebombed after the nonce hunters catch him talking to minors online, I’d probably think Soho House was terribly exciting too. When your baseline is Beaconsfield, a room full of attractive people whispering about Ibiza and fashion week must feel like being in the court of Louis XIV.
The lighting is subfusc, the furnishings fusty, the ornaments faintly proctological
The trouble is that, after half an hour, you realise Louis XIV isn’t coming. But a very loud marketing girl from WPP is, and she would love to tell you all about her long weekend in Marseille — incidentally a city yet to be graced by a House. Indeed the sites they choose always seem weirdly random. I can imagine a target list for their next House might include a Prague brothel, an Egyptian department store, the Lubyanka and Mar-a-Lago. But beyond these storied façades and the Gestapo-lite check-in girls, it’s all rather anodyne. The lighting is subfusc, the furnishings fusty, the ornaments faintly proctological.
Fish in formaldehyde butter
So why do people still go? I do hope it isn’t for the food. I have eaten at Soho House enough times to know I never want to eat there again. The menu changes but the disappointment is consistent. Once I ordered fish and was presented with a desiccated, under-seasoned, poorly filleted hunk of gills, flopped onto a plate and varnished in a briny formaldehyde butter that I suspect was stolen from Damien Hirst. Another time, Japanese food, which tasted like supermarket sushi bought from a branch somewhere deep in the Uzbek desert. Making fish taste landlocked in an island nation is quite something.
So you’re not there for the food. If the allure then is being judged by two-dimensional Sloanes, women so flat they cast no shadow, you can get the same effect by walking into the Joe & the Juice on the King’s Road wearing a Socialist Worker’s Party T-shirt for the price of a coffee. So it’s not that either.
My theory is that Soho House is an expensive and exclusionary dating experience
My theory is that Soho House is an expensive and exclusionary dating experience for those who want to be expensive and exclusionary. Meet someone in any House the world over and you can dispense with tedious preliminaries about money, safe in the knowledge the person you’re flirting with has also paid a few hundred quid that month to be there. We should be grateful Soho House has walled off these people from the wider dating pool, leaving them to sip spicy margs and blow smoke up one another’s arses in the age-defying dimmed lamplight.
But by now, I’m sure you, my discerning reader, have rumbled me. To be able to tell you what it’s like in such granular detail I must have frequented the place. Often. I put my hands up, I’m a hypocrite. I have been a loud, obnoxious, narcissist in my time, the sort of person you’d all have hated and wouldn’t want to be seen dead with.
Hell, maybe I still am. There’s a reason I write anonymously.