The exterior of the Phoenix Palace is cream with golden letters like the napkin and the Laffer curve, and it is squeezed below an Art Deco mansion block in Baker Street. The street is self-effacing, stuck between the Marylebone Road and the Sherlock Holmes museum, which exists because London is, among other things, morbid. The cuisine is Cantonese.

Understatement is a feint here, though; the Phoenix Palace is famous, and always on the best dim sum lists. It is beloved by Chinese tourists and students, and, weirdly, the Labour party, whose grandees smile uneasily from photographs, like hostages to the economy, and rice.

The food comes near instantly. That is one of the charms of the famous Chinese restaurant

The interior is give-us-everything-then-more, but Marylebone maximalism is less offensive than Mayfair maximalism, because it involves fewer aristocrats pretending interior design is a job. This feels more like error than invention, so it works. There are polished floors and lanterns; lattices and mirrors; chairs with elaborate golden dresses and ribbons; a tall fluffy red dragon covered in stickers; a small toy flamingo; a fish tank containing a fish who looks like a small nuclear submarine, just angrier (is he pre-death?); random pieces of wood. There is no daylight, but the Phoenix Palace doesn’t need it, being an entirely coherent world: daylight would only hurt. All in, it looks like Turandot parsed by daytime TV, and I like it. It is practised but not cynical, and people do not pretend to be happy here. They are happy here.

Like all dream palaces, the Phoenix Palace is an optimist, and you should have your wedding supper here if marriage is still your thing. The menu has 800 dishes. I would like to see the kitchens, but it is not that kind of place. You are here to be bullied and soothed.

Drinks come swiftly in heavier glasses than we need, always a good tell; the food comes near instantly. That is one of the charms of the famous Chinese restaurant in London. Satiation is always close, and that is what we are here for: diner as child, the ideal.

We eat crispy duck and pancakes, the best and worst thing to happen to waterfowl ever; an exquisite dish of honey-glazed pork; egg noodles with just enough taste of the earth to please me; egg rice, because carbohydrates are the only real drug left to Generation X, and there is nothing wrong with that.

As I leave I pause and, like Martha Gellhorn realising that the operating theatre she is standing in is a bar she once frequented – the Spanish Civil War was full of surprises good and bad – I understand that the Phoenix Palace is more interesting than I thought. It has a wall of fame, and it is actor- and Labour party-themed.

There is Jackie Chan and Jeremy Corbyn, an amazing combination, and Barbara Windsor and Cherie Blair, which is less amazing. There is Keir Starmer looking like he enjoyed his meal but has had better – his default expression, to be fair. I like Keir Starmer, and I will be sorry when he in his turn has been devoured like a duck. Read the history of the Weimar Republic: there is always a worse duck coming up the ramp. There is an unnamed actor from EastEnders, who could be a fantasist, and the Chinese ambassador to the UK, who I suspect is anything but. That is, it is London in all its possibilities in steady grins and sweat – still, just, a city of hope.