At Julie’s at the fag end of Saturday lunchtime, Notting Hill beauties are defiantly not eating, and the table is covered with crumbs. Restaurant Ozymandias, I think to myself. This is no longer a district for the perennially wracked, or unrich. The Black Cross – Martin Amis’s ideal pub in London Fields – is now a sushi joint. Of course it is.

The omelette is bright yellow and tough, like a hi-viz croissant

Julie’s, which is named for its first owner, the interior designer Julie Hodgess, mattered in the 1980s. I don’t trust restaurant myth-making – let longevity be the judge, and this is the third Julie’s on the site – but it was for a while the sort of place that glossy magazine people wrote about when glossy magazines mattered: like Langan’s, the Grill Room at the Connaught and Le Caprice. Julie’s was an idea really: that by occupying a space Mick Jagger had occupied, you were somehow, if not Mick Jagger himself, then close enough.

This third Julie’s has been kindly reviewed. Possibly it is nostalgia – the first Julie’s was good, it sold sausages and mash – but, as you know, the nostalgic is not yearning for place but for himself when he was there. He is reviewing himself, when young. Because this is ashes: the worst meal I’ve had since Langan’s, and it is no coincidence. You can’t eat myths, and left to themselves myths get lazy.

The interior is flouncy florals – pretty enough, like Notting Hill is pretty enough: with its own distinctive culture, invented by Richard Curtis in his film Notting Hill, it is now less place than aesthetic. When Americans who watch European rom-coms think of London, they think of Notting Hill and Mary Poppins and Paddington. Unreal places don’t need real people or real food. All this, though subconsciously, Julie’s manifests. I should have taken a marmalade sandwich and hidden it in my hair. They treat me like I have.

My companion orders duck liver schnitzel with shallot marmalade, and I choose a mushroom omelette. Perhaps I shouldn’t have: chefs say that brunch is cursed. But it is Saturday afternoon in autumn, so why not? The duck liver schnitzel is small, and it sits in a reservoir of fat like a thing, and my companion cannot eat it. If schnitzels could cower, this would. The mushroom omelette is bright yellow and tough, like a hi-viz croissant. Inside, too-large girolles sit in a havoc of unmelted Gruyère. It looks and tastes vile, it is £19, and I can’t eat it.

We can’t eat this, we tell the waiter when he comes, gesturing at the plates. This is how we always cook it, he replies of the catastrophe omelette: do I want another one? I think the insinuation is: I am insane, and he will humour me to a point. I don’t, I say. We don’t discuss the schnitzel, and its testimony floats away. I think of this duck, which deserved better.

We go to the front desk for the bill. Our food was inedible, I say, we couldn’t eat it. The woman hands me the bill with angry eyes, as if I have failed Julie’s because I do not understand it, and, in doing so, am unworthy of it.

This is restaurant as cult, and cults can’t hear. When I booked, I gave my credit card details – I understand why restaurants insist on it, because people are selfish and cruel – and then I moved my booking because I had Covid. If I moved the booking again, I was told, I would be charged. There’s a carelessness here, as if Julie’s exists for a fictional Mick Jagger, and everyone else is dust. Does he know?