High Road Brasserie

On special occasions in my junior school, boys were allowed, encouraged even, to dress up in their cub uniforms. We already had a uniform: maroon wool blazer, stripy tie, cap with badge, grey shorts, prickly socks, lace-up black shoes. I see photographs of myself now and think: how on earth could we have faced Monday mornings in that fancy dress? I stare at my hacked hair and Just William mien and hear the echo of myself saying: "Sir, sir, there's a common tramp in our shed. Says he's Jesus Christ Almighty, sir. Swap you tuppence ha'penny worth of Heinkel shrapnel for your sixer conker, Corky."

Anyway, the boys that were cubs wore their green uniforms with toggles and scarves. All the toughest, coolest kids were cub scouts. They sat proudly at their sloping desks with inkwells (inkwells, for Chrissakes, for dip pens!) and I looked at them and knew, even at the age of eight, that they were suspect. If ever the country went tits up, they'd be in the ethnic-cleansing squad, booted and belted, throwing a rope over the lamppost. Even then, I knew that I would always be the one on the other end of the rope. I was not born to be a joiner.

The most despicable and dangerous Englishman is a club man. Membership and exclusion, seconders and rules and traditions, they are all loathsome and ridiculous. Clubs are the very antithesis of an open, pluralistic, inquisitive, modern, hospitable society. And yet, just when we thought they were finally dying of their own cancerous tedium, the club was remade by the people you hoped would know better. Here was the Groucho in Soho, thinking the thin irony of its name might mitigate the smug snobbery of its business.

Now clubs are sprouting all over. Every other press release for a West End restaurant boasts a members-only bar or attic for smoking cigars and licking the ears of Moldovan hookers.

Soho House is a club that's slowly taking over the world. Or rather, that bit of the world inhabited by telly, film, PR, ad and journo folk, the movers and shakers (moving to Notting Hill and shaking everyone's hand), the switch-on and tune-in-tomorrow people, who I like to think of as the Blackberry and Apple crumblies.

Soho House started as a clonish antidote to the Groucho, then morphed into a country club in Babington, Somerset, then on to New York and Hollywood, the Electric and the Cowshed in Notting Hill and Cecconi's in Mayfair. And this, unfortunately, is where my rant grows a little shrill because, although I'm not a member, they are all good at what they do. I often stay at Soho House in New York. I like to watch films from the big leather seats at the Electric. The attention to detail and the inventiveness in the Soho House empire is admirable. They are all overseen by Nick Jones, who is one of the nicest men in the hospitality business, and one of the most talented. But you probably already know that, because Nick will be a close personal friend. If he isn't, you are, by default, a member of a very exclusive club. Everyone knows Nick and Nick knows everyone. He's a super-clubbable kind of guy. And now he has opened a brasserie in Chiswick. New York, Los Angeles ... Chiswick? Well, I expect he knows his business. Chiswick is where Notting Hillbillies go to die.

I took the members of my own small club - my mother and two children - for an end of summer hols lunch. The brasserie lounges confidently up at the media end of Chiswick High Road. There are tables on the pavement, separated from the polloi by a barrier - a stout barrier - and an awning. Inside, it's a cross between a 1920s French bistro and a northern pub. There are some particularly good tiles on the floor. It was buzzy with people in various bits of cool, left-over Balearic kit, with a postman's wrist of rubber bands in their hair, discussing projects and property prices in Mozambique. Actually, I have no idea what these people discuss, except that they all look like extras from a Richard Curtis script, directed by Bruegel.

The brasserie starts with breakfast and shimmies into lunch, then dinner and supper, so you could waste an entire day here. I started with imam bayildi, because I'm trying to overcome my blackballing of aubergines. It was pretty good for an eggplant, though I wouldn't want my chicken to marry one. The kids had crispy squid, which they tricely scarfed. Mother had tuna tartare, a big plate of cold, dead, maroon fish, the point of which escaped me, but which she liked.

The best thing was an order of freshly made scotch quail's eggs, that were almost worth a visit on their own.

For main course, I went for the recommended chicken casserole, which was only all right: small thighs of chicken poached in a stock that had been reduced by the Spanish inquisition to the consistency and texture of melted wine gums. Ally had a lobster, which kept him happy for hours, like edible Meccano. Flora ate eggs benedict as if it were her last meal (and it probably will be - as far as I can tell, it's all she eats). Mother had a suckling-pig sandwich that we oinked would be an Italian porchetta, but turned out to be heartily paved with granary bread and was a bit like trying to eat a small Cotswold cottage.

For pudding, there was Eton mess in a glass, and a crème caramel that mother said didn't have sufficiently burnt caramel, adding, "But then, they never do these days," as if burning sugar were a lost nicety, like children's caps and tramps who think they're Jesus. Prices are reasonable for the suburbs: £6 or £7 for starters, £12 or so for main courses. It's a jolly nice local restaurant and I'm sure it will do well.

What the menu doesn't have on it is any acknowledgment that it owes almost everything to Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, who made the Ivy, Le Caprice and, latterly, the Wolseley. If you've eaten in the Wolseley recently - and almost everyone here probably had - it all comes as a Proustian déjà vu or a repeat on More4.

As I left, I asked the charming maître d' if this was also a club. "Oh, yes," he said, flicking his eyes heavenward. "Up there is the members' dining room with a completely separate kitchen and everything."

I felt the old toggle-less righteous ire of childhood, the oxymoron of repulsion and exclusion.

HIGH ROAD BRASSERIE