The Travel Critic

The Ivy brand holds an interesting position in the British psyche. It’s the restaurant equivalent of saying someone’s lovely. Not brilliant, not exceptional, just… nice. It exists in the nice parts of nice towns, where nice people go for a nice meal. The décor is nice, the service is nice, and the food, well, it’s not going to frighten anyone’s palate.

The Ivy in Oxford is no different. Tucked neatly between the high street’s tweedy boutiques and its cashmere-clad undergraduates, it glows like a promise of Prosecco and polite conversation. Inside, there’s the usual Ivy formula: art deco light fittings that look like they were bought in bulk from a Gatsby-themed prop shop, velvet banquettes upholstered in that specific shade of green that screams “affluent aunt’s conservatory,” and staff trained to beam the same warm but faintly harried smile regardless of whether they’re serving a pornstar martini or a babyccino.

The clientele is a reassuringly predictable blend of Britain’s modern tribes. You’ve got your aspirational young couples: she’s in something low-cut and glittery, he’s in something tight and Hugo Bossy. Then there are the groups of glamorous women of indeterminate age, all of whom could be 32 or 52 depending on lighting and filler. And finally, the families, three generations of them, out to celebrate something that may or may not require a cake with a sparkler in it.

On this occasion I was part of the latter category, drafted in for my in-laws’ anniversary. And I can’t possibly pass up the chance for a Les Dawson-style mother-in-law joke: my mother-in-law said she’d like to be cremated, I told her, “Alright, get your coat.”

It wasn’t a grand plan, more of an exhausted stumble after an afternoon spent traipsing the cobbled streets of Oxford, where every corner promises “something quaint” and delivers another Pret.

By the time we reached The Ivy, we’d decided cream tea was the only sane course of action. Scones, jam, clotted cream, a pot of Earl Grey. The holy trinity of middle-class fortitude. And, to be fair, it was all… nice. The scones were warm enough to pass for fresh, the cream thick enough to risk a coronary, and the tea came in pots that clinked just so, as if reassuring you that this, yes, is civilisation.

Nothing to fault, nothing to write home about, and nothing to particularly remember, which one suspects is precisely the point. The Ivy doesn’t want to dazzle you or challenge you or change your life. It just wants to wrap you in a slightly perfumed blanket of competence and say, “There, there. You’ve made a nice choice.”