Reviews #7
Kensington Roof Garden, The Devil Wears Prada 2 etc.
I’ve been lazy about reviewing things lately because I’ve been busy being alive lately, forgetting to photograph my plate, not bothering to note the plot of the book I will soon finish and forget. I went to Paris and ate myself sick, went to Cambridge and graduated, went to London and taught a million Pilates classes to avoid finishing the book, the film script, the Substack homework I had set myself. My parents came to visit me and dote on me and post me on Instagram. We went to restaurants and exhibitions and events I could review, but am choosing instead to hold most of these close to my heart. All mine, all ours.
Even though it is crippling and counter-intuitive, we writers generally imagine a reader - it is sometimes impossible not to. Somewhere and somehow along the way, it seems that the imagined reader in my mind’s eye (for these reviews), became an elderly middle-class woman in a baby pink pashmina. I realized this after having a serious toss up about whether to review the Eurostar to Paris, or Earl Grey tea. My fingers itch defiantly as I try to make them not write about either. Perhaps it is this identity conundrum - confusion around whether I am writing to an army of PU$$YRIOTy rebels with fire in their veins or my future, elderly self post chemically induced placation or lobotomy - which is the reason for my procrastination. Either way, today I cast a wide net and see which fish, big, small, conservative or ancient, I pull up.
Contents:
Kensington Roof Gardens
Court of Thorns and Roses
The Devil Wears Prada 2
Kensington Roof Gardens
Category: members club and restaurant. Rating: 8/10. Attended: Friday afternoon. Attire: not enough designer. Cost: N/A Vibe: Soho house but for people who actually have money, ladies who lunch, gorgeous garden. My mood: happy, apprehensive for graduation, sober. Where: guess.
My most rockstar friends who don’t work 9-5s, don’t have consequences and don’t live for many reasons other than to have fun, invited me to Kensington Roof Gardens a few times and I had too much to do the next day to afford the inevitable hangover, so declined. Eventually, my parents informed me that we would be going for lunch there. This being the safer, wiser, responsible option, I was intrigued and excited to attend.
Like all members clubs that one is not a member of, one gets the feeling that they must be on their most best behaviour when entering, much like going through airport security. Except in the reverse: when going through airport security, one must hide all tattoos and neaten one’s hair and hide any cracked fingernail polish. When entering a members club in London, one must remove their cardigan to expose their cleavage and tattoos, one must scruff up their hair or draw attention to their many earrings. One must bring attention to their individuality, their incredible fashion taste, their wealth. In both spaces, one must change themselves ever so slightly, to fit in. To be let in.
The person behind the desk is always having an egotistically orgasmic power trip so that you have to find something anything to compliment them about and ignore their hostile, silent response. Unlike Soho House, the people at Kensington Roof Gardens are a bit preppy, less (secretly) broke, and more interested in food than speed. So, then you have to put your cardigan back on and wish you’d worn make up. If I am at a place in the category of ‘nice’, ‘expensive’ or ‘exclusive’, then I always judge it based on its bathrooms. The bathroom at KRG (I may as well become a member), is spectacular.
