You don’t go to a strip club expecting to put something in your mouth unless you’re an incorrigible roué. So it came as something of a surprise to find myself doing just that in the new Spearmint Rhino club. The club recently launched in Soho’s old Windmill Theatre, famous for staying open throughout the Blitz, when girls appeared naked in static tableaux to get around the era’s indecency laws. Now the venue offers both flesh and – more shockingly – food.

A restaurant in a strip club has both bacchanalian promise and the risk of comic disaster. Degustation sounds so like a combination of delicious and disgusting, it suggests there is a fine line between food and sex. Get it wrong, and the result is as depressing as Ann Summers chocolate body spread or Will Self’s observation that orgies are awful because there’s ‘always a naked fat man eating ham alone on the stairs’.

Everything on offer is a small plate because the girls are the main course

Sadly, Spearmint Rhino lives up to none of its erotic or comedic possibilities. The interior is knock-off Ritz: fake crystal chandeliers, fake gold-framed pictures, fake leather sofa and shelves of fake books. It’s ersatz luxe, so the punters feel less seedy as they watch a girl strip under red lights to ‘Private Dancer’ (on the nose, yes, but then what else can you expect?).

The menu is carnal. Greasy finger food: burger, Milanese sandwich, chips. Everything on offer is a small plate because the girls are the main course. The menu is full of potential innuendo: ‘beef sliders’, rare-breed steak, nuts – but this isn’t a place that makes jokes.

I go for wild mushroom arancini (£11), beef brisket croquettes (£14), ‘Rhino Wings’ (£10) and ‘Inari, Sushi Rice, Tempura Prawn’ (£12).

Girls shimmy on the poles. Voluptuous olive bodies; lily-white tattoo-covered waifs; dark skin in white mini-dresses, different but all as beautiful as the models in a Dove ‘Real Woman’ ad. As I wait for the food, I speak to Mimi, a dancer sitting beside me. I ask her if the dancers eat the food on offer and she says they have their own ‘girls’ menu’ backstage of salads and chicken wraps. Tonight, though, her dinner is a packet of Skittles which she pulls from her diamanté handbag. She complains about self-appointed feminists who chastise her for doing something she loves and university boys who ask her for a student discount. All the dancers I talk to tell me they love the money.

You may celebrate or lament this fact, but strip clubs have been struggling ever since Labour’s 2009 Policing and Crime Act that made councils reclassify them as ‘sexual entertainment venues’. This allowed local councils to enforce stricter licensing laws and the number of strip clubs in England and Wales dropped from around 350 to fewer than 150. Still, there is an irony in the fact that a party once so prudish about stripping is being undone because of associations with Jeffrey Epstein.

My food arrives, a beige selection of deep-fried balls served with thick white sauce, spiced mayonnaise with the tempura, mustard aioli with croquettes. Miraculously, it’s not awful – and if the purpose is to soak up the disinhibiting booze, then it’s perfect. The beef croquettes are meaty and the wings juicy, though I could have skipped the gunky sushi (this is no place to eat fish).

Still, it’s inescapably weird eating in a room where people are naked: like having lunch in a gym. Nudity and food are an intimate pleasure, and perhaps only a feeder or an exhibitionist would pay for the combination.