There are restaurants that decorate, and there is Sexy Fish, which commissions. The dining room on the corner of Berkeley Square carries a coral reef of shimmering bronze fish by Damien Hirst across its ceiling, crocodiles by Frank Gehry along its walls, and mermaid sculptures watching over a bar that runs late and loud. It is Mayfair's most photographed room for a reason: nothing else in London looks remotely like it.
The food has always had to fight the interior for attention, and it wins more often than the sceptics admit. The kitchen is built around a Robata grill — Japanese charcoal cooking that delivers blistered, smoky fish and seafood with theatrical directness. Around it sits a broad Asian seafood repertoire: sushi and sashimi cut with genuine precision, black cod that honours the dish's London lineage, and shellfish platters engineered for tables intent on celebration.
This is a room in which restraint would be a category error, and the crowd understands the assignment. Birthdays arrive in numbers; the bar mixes serious cocktails for the pre-theatre and post-deal crowd alike; and the service, for all the glamour, runs on well-drilled Mayfair professionalism. The private Coral Reef Room downstairs — its walls lined with live coral tanks — may be the single most extravagant private dining space in the city.
Sexy Fish is not the restaurant for a quiet conversation about the wine's minerality. It is the restaurant for the night that needs to feel like an event — and at that particular job, on Berkeley Square, it has no equal.