Dear Jackie is the restaurant in the new hotel the Broadwick on Broadwick Street in Soho, which is most famous, if you are an infectious diseases nerd, for being the site of the 1854 cholera outbreak and its cure. Dr John Snow isolated it to the street’s water pump, noted local brewers were immune, and proved cholera is not airborne. When children stopped dying, Soho eased into its time of moral rot.

This is as spirited an attempt to re­animate the 1970s as I have found beyond musical theatre

This is a changeable thing. Drama fled Soho in the 1970s, and the Broadwick is an attempt to put it back. This is no generic hotel. The new building – high, with blackened brick and bronze facings, and a long crimson canopy spelling out Dear Jackie– could be in New York City in its Gothic stage. The interiors are (and I am happy to write it, since the Peninsula hung a lump of Concorde from the ceiling and would get the whole Titanic up there if they could) happily insane. It is colour and fury and art, made with an obsession so ravening they could not release the build cost. It’s the sort of place – and I think of the Mariinsky Theatre and its tutu and piano graveyards – where you wander with gaping mouth, passing David Bowie’s lewd art and some early, honest Warhols. In the bar I find the hotel’s creation myth. There is a photograph of the founder Noel Hayden as a child, performing with his father, a professional magician, in the Bournemouth hotel they lost. Hayden grew up, made a fortune and built this, and it is as much memoir as hotel. He bought Francis Bacons for the penthouse, and there are images of elephants everywhere, for remembrance.

Dear Jackie is named for Hayden’s mother, and it is – as mothers tend to be – on the basement floor. (There is also Bar Jackie and Flute, named for a flute maker who lived in the street in the time of cholera.) Hayden told me Jackie cried when she saw her manifestation in restaurant form. I think she should live here as the resident anchor and sibyl.

It is already very fashionable – that is, it is filled with handsome people in dark glasses at night, even now the international signifier of proximity of fame. They do not know that they are inside a Dorset dreamscape.

The walls are red fabric, the banquettes floral fabric, the tables floral tiles. The chandeliers are glass, possibly Venetian, with bright silk hats. Plates with queens’ faces line the wall. The wall lamps look like tulips. I remember the gaudy innocence of the 1970s, even from Teddington, and this is as spirited an attempt to re-animate it as I have found beyond musical theatre. There are red curtains everywhere: even the kitchen looks like a stage.

The cuisine is Italian, which makes sense: it is noisier and more vivid than French. The food is not the point here – it almost never is – but it is very fine, and expensive. We eat seared scallop with champagne, trout roe and finger lime; burrata with tardivo and preserved figs; pumpkin tortelloni with ’nduja butter; Hereford beef fillet with black garlic and pink radicchio; pork collar with roast treviso and salsa verde; tiramisu and house gelato (chocolate).

This is such a heartfelt restaurant – the word ambitious would be too cynical for it – that I marvel at it, but I am Jewish and I cry easily. This is less a restaurant than a long-conceived homage to the painful ecstasy of nostalgia, and since it wants so much to be loved, I do.