Fifteen years ago, if you were eating at 239 Brompton Road in Kensington, just over from the Oratory, you may have been enjoying steak tartare, or grilled rabbit with mustard sauce, or tête de veau, a poached portion of calf’s head with turned potatoes. This was the former premises of Racine, a French restaurant by Henry Harris, which Michael Winner said was ‘quadruple historic’. Harris now runs Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, rated the best restaurant in the country this year, after closing the Knightsbridge site in 2015.

At 239 Brompton Road nowadays, on the menu you’ll find a ‘cheesecake brownie served with vanilla ice cream, Oreos and warm Nutella and Lotus Biscoff sauce’ (£10.95). If you’re coming in for breakfast, you can have a ‘cube croissant’ filled with Lotus Biscoff (£6.90). Wash it all down with a strawberry cheesecake matcha latte (£8.50), which is topped with Lotus Biscoff crumbs. As Henry Ford almost said, any customer can have a coffee with any flavour so long as it is Lotus Biscoff.

This is EL&N, one of the most upmarket examples of a ‘dessert café’, an increasingly common type of establishment on high streets across the country. They come in varying degrees of garishness, but they all cater for the bizarre need of someone who, at 10 p.m, wants to head out for banana chocolate French waffle toast.

Their aesthetic is maximalist: I have learned you can get indigestion from reading a menu

Their aesthetic is maximalist: I have learned you can get indigestion from reading a menu

At 11 p.m. on a Saturday, the branches of EL&N and L’Eto opposite Harrods are only just........

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