Long before French Connection sniggered itself into the acrimonious FCUK, there was Foxtrot Oscar, a restaurant that used the international alphabet of radio operators to tell its customers exactly where they could go. There wasn’t even a double entendre. It isn’t anyone’s initials; it didn’t mean “Food’s Outstanding”; it was simply the name you come up with after a drunken lunch.

“Hey, why don’t we call the place F*** Off?”

“F*** Off?”

“Yah, F*** Off!”

“You can’t call a restaurant F*** Off!”

“Yes, you can.”

“FO? That’s Foreign Office.”

“Yah, okay. Foxtrot Oscar, then.”

“What about Foxtrot Oscar See You Next Tuesday?”

“That’s bloody tasteless, and it won’t fit on the chequebook.”

Foxtrot Oscar is a talismanic example of why a certain style of English public schoolboy will never be fit for anything except dying in braying waves on barbed wire, shagging the staff, doing Sean Connery impressions, singing 13 verses of the Good Ship Venus and being auctioneers. They can, at a push, also manage to run small, louche restaurants. And there used to be quite a lot of them, tart and trollop-magnet wine bars and Frog-Eyed-Sprite-friendly country pubs, which were all started by plausible amateur chaps, who generally had already failed at the meagre handful of occupations that minor public schools equip you for – the Royal Green Jackets, the sedate end of banking, estate management and wine dealing. Wearing a butcher’s apron, they’d finally settle behind the bar of a small, shambolic restaurant with vaguely French leanings and clubbable intentions. They were the Terry-Thomas restaurateurs. The charm was rarely on the menu; it was in the childishly seedy and paunchy atmosphere. These were places that revolved slowly and elliptically round inebriated bands of unimaginatively loyal regulars, who would be chaps with matching bald patches, foul breath, broken veins and an aura of stoically borne but well-deserved failure. They would cash hopeful cheques and bring in blowsy, plain girls on first dates and ply them with chat-up lines of relentless, leering innuendo, punctuated by double entendres, while waiting for the second bottle to kick in like horse tranquilliser.

The most successful of these hospitable gents was Peter Langan, and the least successful, but more famous, was the recently poleaxed Keith Floyd. In and around Chelsea, there were any number of these little local escapes from reality – Dan’s on Sydney Street, which had a nice garden and food that demanded Olympic teeth; Monkey’s on Chelsea Green, famous for its game among people who had never eaten there and infamous among those who had; and Foxtrot Oscar, presided over by the screamingly avuncular Michael Proudlock, an exemplary example of his calling and type. By his own admission, his food was never really the point; at best, it was a nappy for the drink and a location device for identifying insensible regurgitation. It was a vicious haunt of the splattered blazers who revolved around the repellent and ridiculous Nigel Dempster, a man who, though dead, I can still think nothing but ill of. I seem to remember reading a Dempster column that said I’d been banned in absentia from Foxtrot Oscar for some snobbish felony or gossip infraction. It was a bit like being banned from having to share a sleeping bag with badgers.

I’m not making these amateur-gent restaurants sound particularly moreish and, in truth, they weren’t. The food was never better than average, and the drinking had all the attractive savoir-faire of thwarted middle-English blokes who haven’t got enough of anything except enlarged livers, misogyny and selective xenophobia. The defining dish for all of them was lamb cutlets. There was a sentimental attachment to the back ribs of sheep. But they suffered from all the faults of long-term amateurism, imbecilic service, coin-toss consistency and a general malaise that if you didn’t like it, you could just go and Foxtrot Oscar. But there was one agreeable, if not quite compelling, quality of this long-lunch-hour genre: they were restaurants constructed and run around the foibles, eccentricities, prejudices, passions and the soggy social lives of their owners. They were all attempts to create the perfect restaurant, where you could sit till you died with your mates. Of course, they were all flatulent failures, but laughably heroic.

Proudlock has done a deal with Gordon Ramsay. He says, without rue, that things have to change. And indeed they have. There is no room now for the gifted, or indeed inebriated, amateur in the hospitality business. Now, Ramsay is what we get, the Richard Branson of catering. He doesn’t want to sit at the bar all day and slurp the profits with a bunch of fat friends talking bollocks. He wants to have more kitchens than friends. Barely has the refurbished Foxtrot Oscar been opened, than Ramsay is already touting it as a template for a chain of medium-price-point, Brit-style bistros. Ramsay isn’t a working chef any more; I doubt he ever does a shift at the pass unless there is a camera pointed at him. He is now a businessman, a catering manager, like Ronald McDonald. Though, obviously, not actually like Ronald McDonald, not having the dress sense or the degree. But he has made a success of making himself a brand, and he has made a lot of money. But you can’t pretend you go out to eat his food now, in the sense of it being artisanal or handmade. You’re eating Aunt Jemima’s Restaurant Mix.

Foxtrot Oscar is a long, squashed room that is too small, with too many tables. It never seemed to matter when it was really a bar with slumping space. But it has been remade into a remarkable homage to Travelodge banqueting and conference facilities – a bland, tacky makeover in several subtle shades of cold corpse. The lighting is a whitewash that leaves no shadows. The air conditioning is airline fresh, and the menu a professionally calculated collection, comprising safe, unexciting constructions, much of it preprepared, that could be made by a small brigade not overburdened with talent or skill. There is a tuna niçoise made incorrectly with fresh tuna, and a classic Waldorf salad with the classic mistake of including raisins. But none of that would matter about any of the food if it ate well.

I started with a French onion soup – a simple standard that should be hot, unctuous, glistening, sweet and sonorous. What I got was allium gruel into which someone had dumped a couple of cheesy Wotsits. Next, there was a braised beef and redwine pie, served in its own dish with a paper napkin. I’ve no idea why it needed a Kleenex. Inside the pastry, the bowl was half full of sharply dark-brown-tasting meatiness. A less optimistic or friendly customer might point out that it wasn’t actually half full but half empty. Even at a cheapish £9.25, you would like your pie to be brimming with hospitality.

Pudding offered a classic rum baba – there is an insecurity of classicism here – and a lemon posset that was molar-meltingly sweet. Despite the chain-store prices, the food just isn’t well enough made, tasty enough or interesting enough to count as a night out in Chelsea. You could say that it is a cynical abbreviation of the movement towards stout English food, but then, cynicism itself implies some exercise of care and commitment and a dry emotion. Proudlock is still here, wandering the tables like the jocund ghost of lost lunches. He hovers, yearning perhaps to pull up a chair, open another slightly better bottle, but it’s not that sort of place any more. He is sanguine and good-natured about the death of his natural habitat, chatting amiably about mates whose napkins have become shrouds. He is an extinct breed, and he has seen the future – and it is on telly, and it can go Foxtrot Oscar.

79 Royal Hospital Road, SW3; 020 7352 4448
Mon-Fri, noon-2.30pm, 6pm-10pm; Sat-Sun, noon-4.00pm, 6pm-10pm

5 stars: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot; 4 stars: Charlie Foxtrot; 3 stars: Foxtrot Uniform; 2 stars: Foxtrot Oscar; 1 star: Bravo Foxtrot

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