This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Class infiltration is the new sex. Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals is on the telly, provoking a spate of rapturous Eighties nostalgia from middle-aged lady commentators. Gins and tonic in the morning! Massive earrings! Rupert Campbell-Black (I hold up my hand).

Those young people however, are less interested in the booze and bonking than in the fact that in the divine world of Dame Jilly, everyone aside from the odd doughty housekeeper or maddeningly dishy flat-vowelled groom is posh.

The brilliant Emerald Fennell was on to this a while ago with her hit movie Saltburn, which begins at “Webbe”, a fictional Oxford college. Brasenose, where the Oxford scenes were shot, has now put up a flimsy nylon sign over the lodge saying “Brasenose College”.

Its purpose is not to inform visitors that this is Brasenose College, but to provide an imitation of the clunky placing device in Saltburn’s opening scene, where a similar sign welcomes “The Class of 2006”.

Later in the story, when the arriviste Oliver Quick has wormed his way into the country house of his aristocratic friend Felix Catton, their summer idyll includes reading the hardback of Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, published in 2007.

Saltburn has been compared to Brideshead Revisited, a lazy analogy when it comes to Waugh’s novel, but apt in terms of the hit TV adaptation starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews which aired in 1981, the year French philosopher Jean Baudrillard coined the term “hyperreality”.

Defined as the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from its simulacrum, hyperreality represents a conflation of signs, the imbrication of the factual with the fictitious. Someone at Brasenose is playing a very meta game.

When I passed through Radcliffe Square on my way to review Quod, there was practically a riot going on between rival gangs of Instagrammers fighting for selfies at “Webbe” and the “real Hogwarts”, a.k.a. bits of the Bodleian library.

What Brideshead, Saltburn, Harry Potter and Rivals have in common is class. Everyone is either a toff or trying to pass as a toff. Boarding school, venerable architecture, arcane etiquette, effortless assurance, hierarchy and good cheekbones signify belonging and reassurance; no-one wants to be a working-class hero anymore.

The Eighties was an anxious, febrile decade. Thatcherism was bringing poverty and mass unemployment to the regions even as it poured loadsamoney into the City, and the very real fear of nuclear war was ubiquitous. Back then, undergraduates ponced around with teddy bears quoting Anthony Blanche; now, coming of age in the social wreck that the boomers have bequeathed them, they throw Saltburn-themed parties. Nostalgia for an invented past, whether pre-war or pre-digital, permits a form of hyperreality, less escapism than denial, that speaks not so much of hedonism as hopelessness, an if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them abrogation of agency.

Quod is sited in the former Old Bank Hotel, across the High from the semiotic vortex of Radcliffe Square. Both the look and the “European classics” menu seem to be going for classy but not intimidating: there are bits of faux-Renaissance sculpture chucked about, but nobody’s going to call out Oliver Quick for holding his knife like a pen.

The crowd was a mix of student/parent parties in various stages of taut shame and a very jolly hen night in pink cowgirl hats, nipping out for shivery fags in a spacious courtyard which would be charming in summer. The menu is broad — breakfast, tea, a choice of five pizzas and “Daily Blackboard Specials!”

Our blackboard promised oysters, but the waitress told us there was only one left, so we ordered a scallop, prawn and mushroom gratin, dressed crab with fennel and watercress and octopus with split peas and chorizo, all of which were just fine without having much else to say for themselves.

A main course of monkfish with more chorizo came as a huge, bone-in lump, correctly cooked but unwieldy and not terribly appealing. Seared duck breast with celeriac purée and braised red cabbage was a disappointment, the meat overdone and slimy and the tablespoon of sugar in the red cabbage had done nothing for its personality. It reminded me of the duck “all’oronge” speared so witheringly in Jilly Cooper’s Class. Chicken Kyiv was more successful, arch, crispy and gushing with garlic. This is not posh people’s food, which is either dark and strongly flavoured or mushy, but an imitation of what someone in the kitchen thinks is smart, which wouldn’t matter if it was nice.

Puddings made an effort towards nursery retro, but the sticky toffee was puffy and bland, and a salt caramel cheesecake tasted of neither salt nor caramel, just more sugar, so we left it. Leanness, as Mrs Gaskell said, is a great aid to gentility. Quod could be a much better restaurant, but its lack of allure misses the mark. Nothing was actively unpleasant, but everything felt ersatz, not quite itself. Perhaps if its name were less bumptious it would not feel so awkwardly arriviste.

Quod restaurant, 92-4 High Street, Oxford OX1 4BJ