Claridge’s grew nine storeys in the last decade: it’s a metaphor. The ornamental 1897 castle on Brook Street has expanded to fit the available space. Though it grew by half, it never closed, and workmen dug out the basement by hand. In one room, Claridge’s was a building site: in another, a dream world. We are trekking through metaphors now. We are up to our necks.

The children eating the Nutella, banana and whipped cream crêpes look deranged

Hotels are like buses: they have infinite possibilities. That is what they are for. To not be home. Like Alec Guinness, who lived in the Connaught with his share of the profits of Star Wars, which shamed him (the Connaught is the anti-Tatooine), I would like to live in a hotel. I would like to live in a suite in Claridge’s, but I think I would go insane. W.H. Auden warned about the dangers of euphoria. Too much of it, and you are not fit for anything.

Perhaps that is why Dwight Eisenhower fled Claridge’s for Kingston upon Thames before D-Day. He wouldn’t have taken Normandy from here. Too much spa.

Still, there is something almost-normal here, that keeps the balloon dream-world on the ground: the Claridge’s ArtSpace Café and the Claridge’s Bakery on Brook’s Mews. Many grand hotels open bakeries nowadays as semi-edible marketing, and they are usually very silly, because they are for Instagram not human beings: for the algorithm.

First, the ArtSpace Café. It is a long, pale, well-lit room: a Mayfair cave in marble, wood and leather. It is for people who cannot afford to live in Mayfair but want it for an hour. It is, in its heart, a theme park. It holds divorced men with children eating hamburgers (£16) and solitary men on MacBooks eating granola with Greek yoghurt, berries and honey (£10). Eventually the children rise in number and the MacBooks ebb away. (It is Saturday.)

The paintings for sale – flowers, a mouth, a sad face, a small war – are paintings of the café itself, because elites are incurious. They have to be. The food, though, is smart: workman’s food souped up, or Mayfair food, giganticised. You don’t want tiny, mad buns here. That would be too easy.

We ignore the omelettes, salads and sandwiches. Instead, because it feels subversive to eat so much carbohydrate in Mayfair, land of female anorexia, we have an immense golden crêpe filled with Gruyère cheese and ham (£16). It is like the cheese bread native to Stalin’s Georgia, or the portions at Katz’s Deli in New York City. But it cannot be finished, and the children eating the Nutella, banana and whipped cream variants of crêpe look deranged, as if they have hangovers for the first time. Then two immense croque-monsieurs (£14): a glut of white bread.

For pudding we go to Claridge’s Bakery, which rejects the awful algorithm and its hunger for nothingness: these are real buns. Eisenhower would like this, because it is of his time. He might even have stayed for it. The iced finger (£4); the jammy dodger tart (£5); the walnut whip (£5); the Belgian bun (£5); the iced fancy (£4); the Bakewell tart (£5). All are marvellous. They do sandwiches, sausage rolls and quiches too, and bread, real bread: a bloomer is £6, a granary loaf £6, a French stick £4. It is a very good French stick, and it is impossible to mistake it for anything but what it is.

A real bakery, then, and in Mayfair. I am stunned.