The “spatialisation of culture under the pressure of organised capitalism” is how the veteran critical theorist Fredric Jameson described the Westin Bonaventure hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This behemoth of a hostelry comprises a curious agglomeration of four giant squeezy bottles coated with mirrored glass grouped around a six-storey high atrium, up the sides of which shoot glass lifts. The Westin – which has a stand-still part in the epochal video-game series Grand Theft Auto – was, with its colour-coded zones and its restaurant-cluttered levels, an early spatialiser of late capitalism but, three decades on from Jameson’s appraisal of it, Zizzi, a chain of some 120-plus, vaguely Italian restaurants, is surfing the zeitgeist when it comes to such figurations.
This is what I thought as I clop-slopped in from the rain to an empty shopping mall. Up above, a thousand little dag-tails of fairy lights dangled from a bridge of white-painted girders, atop which hunkered an office block, lit up and void – a ghost ship sailing through the urban night. It was a scene that demanded zombies; instead I found Zizzi. In turn, dramatic logic dictated that Zizzi should be deserted: a pure cultural space through which the crumpled menu cards blew like tumbleweeds, but instead the glassy hull projecting into the mall’s atrium was loaded with folk eating, drinking and talking 9.857857 recurring to the dozen.
The waiter – who resembled a stevedore – dumped me at a table by the glassy bulwark. At the next table, three flushed men in their thirties were getting performative over their second bottle of wine as they ate crispy bread strips served in a furl of greased-paper pseudo-newsprint stuffed inside a miniature bucket. I could’ve sworn one of them said – loosening the knot of his puce tie – “Yeah, I’m poisoning him with Tipp-Ex!”
I cast about me at the pillars papered with a pattern of leafless silver birches, at the dangling 1960s-style lampshades that hung in bollock couplets, at the zinc-topped counter piled with wooden platters. I took it all in and sighed: I was home, where I belonged, with my Volk: the great, lumpy British bourgeoisie, who spend all day industriously servicing one another and all evening being serviced in turn.
As to food, let one menu description act as a synecdoche: “Agro dolce – one half mushrooms, thyme, mascarpone and mozzarella all drizzled with truffle oil. The other half speck ham, pumpkin and mascarpone with a sprinkling of crumbled amaretti biscuit. It really shouldn’t work but it does.” Basically, Zizzi is a high-end pizza joint with spicy pretensions. I ordered a risotto and a green salad, which were brought by the stevedore at a decent clip and were fine. I was fine, too, if that’s taken to be an acronym for Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional. The men at the next table were talking about moving offices; the Tipp-Ex poisoning victim would have to be run through the shredder before they finally departed.
The Zizzi chain proclaims the usual charitable inclinations on its menu – in this case, it’s something to do with the Prince’s Trust. It had never occurred to me before why Charlie Windsor should’ve chosen this name for his institutionalised noblesse oblige but, when you think about it, by ceaselessly bringing before his putative subjects the words “prince” and “trust”, the subliminal message “Trust the Prince” is being implanted in all of us. Zizzi’s involvement with the trust seemed to have some bearing on its work with young graduate artists, whose work is displayed in the restaurants. In the case of this particular outlet, the work was by one Amy Murray, who’d done a series of illustrations that were riveted up in the corridor that led to the toilets. This sequence “attempts to capture elements of the Orient Express’s history while also creating intimate snapshots of its passengers at the peak of its popularity during the 1920s and 1930s”. The elements in question are, of course, “exoticism, intrigue and romance”.
I was a bit confused by all this: was it Murray’s illustrations alone that were meant to evoke the Orient Express or were the toilet stalls and the corridor intentional components of this fantastical mise en scène? I’ve never travelled on the Orient Express but I wager that even among all that exoticism, intrigue and romance, there’s still the occasional, pee-soaked bit of toilet paper flotched on the floor.
Anyway, there I was, urinating inside an evocation of a historic trans-European train, inside an Italian-themed restaurant, inside a British shopping mall … Fredric Jameson would, I felt certain, heartily approve.
