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My attempts to have a meal at Titanic, Marco Pierre White's fate- flouting new mega-restaurant, met a series of small disasters. First a Sunday lunch, planned for the opening week, was called off the night before, when a panicked functionary phoned at midnight to say that the restaurant's power supply had failed, and it would be closed the next day. A later dinner was jeopardised when my companion cried off, with just hours to spare, pleading illness. So it was with a noble, all-hands-on-deck manliness that my friend Geoff Dyer stepped in to save the day.
Titanic is a cavernous place just off Piccadilly Circus, carved out of the old Regent Palace Hotel, and designed to attract the young and groovy late-night crowd who flock to the Atlantic Bar and Grill beneath it. The Atlantic has never appealed to me, because of its vast size and scary door policy. But I have fond memories of the hotel, whose Carvery was the first London restaurant I ever visited (not very groovy, but plenty of gravy, as I recall).
A phalanx of gelled and overcoated security men guards the Titanic's revolving doors, but once you've persuaded them that you're a bona fide young person with a reservation, and not a befuddled tourist in search of a good Carvery, you're allowed down a flight of shallow steps into a huge, noisy and rather dark version of an ocean liner's dining room.
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