108-11 0 New King’s Road, SW6; 020 7371 5147.

Lunch, Mon-Sun, 1 2.30pm-3pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 6.30pm-11pm; Sun, 6.30pm-10.30pm

5 Stars: Entertaining Mr Sloane, 4 Stars: Hooray Henry, 3 Stars: Sloaney Pony, 2 Stars: Yuppie flu, 1 Star: Dire tribe

Wouldn’t you just know that the world centre of excellence for dog cloning is South Korea. Of course it is. Where else would it be, in a world that patently works as a manga version of Grimm’s fairy tales? Naturally, the Koreans clone dogs. They have two laboratories competing to corner the market in copycat dogs. One is led by Hwang Woo-suk (the h is silent), a disgraced scientist who’s been tried for fraud, the other by his protegé, Lee Byeong-chun, who has, surprise, surprise, also been accused of fraud. It’s plainly obvious that clones breed clones and that fraud breeds fraud and, anyway, what else would cloners be guilty of except duplicity. Apparently, the Roslin Institute in Scotland is pissed off at the Koreans for cloning their patented cloning technology. “No. You do sheep. We do dog. Scot person eat disgusting haggis from sheep arse. Korean eat yummy dog. You sod off back to fat-battered Gorbals and take your sporran with you.”

The one thing you’d think the world didn’t need any more of was dog. Battersea Dogs Home can’t give away dogs. (Actually, they can’t give them away because trying to get a dog out of Battersea is like trying to get an Afghani out of Guantanamo. It’s like trying to adopt one of Angelina’s twins.) And you’d think that in a world where a quarter of all mammalian species are facing their last Christmas, that they’d start off by cloning orang-utans or rhinos. What about sturgeon? But, no, it’s dogs. The first dog they did was called Snuppy. They’ve got a pair of labradors that produced 50 clones. You know, if they’d just left them alone, the dogs would have done that themselves. Labradors can get scatter cushions pregnant. Seven of them have been used by South Korean customs as sniffer dogs — all called Toppy for “tomorrow’s puppy”. Apparently they hump cases with drugs in them. Or Barbours.

Now they’ve just done their first commercial clone job, and duplicated a dead pit bull terrier called Booger that belonged to someone called Bernann McKinney. Bernann is a woman. She said that, before Booger I departed, he looked her in the eye and said, without moving his lips: “Don’t be sad, because I’m coming to see you again.”

There are any number of things that need addressing in this mess of a story. First, given that we don’t need any more dogs, what we really, really don’t need any more of are pit bulls. Bernann ordered five for £25,000. Then, if a cancerous dog looked at you and with a mind-meld, told you he was coming back, well, you’d be very, very worried. And then there are all those names. This whole page is riddled with weird names. Who calls their kid Hwang Woo-suk? And what about Mr Byeong? And Bernann? And the dogs? Where do you get Snuppy from? “What are we going to call the world’s first cloned dog?” “Runch.” “Rovernover.” “Fidodo.” “No! Snuppy.” What’s a Snuppy? Was it a cloned Snoopy that went wrong? And Booger? For those of you whose Yanklish is rusty, a booger is a bogey. Why call a dog Bogey? And why would you want to clone a killer canine called Snot? Completely unrelated to all of this, someone else has just discovered that dogs yawn when their masters do. Well, they’ve probably got a lot to yawn about. But my point is that I would bet you George Monbiot’s cloned pension plan that more money has been spent on cloning pit bulls called Nostril Candy and hash-shagging labradors and research into whether dogs wink or blow kisses than ever was spent on protecting lion tamarins or albatrosses. There really is no point in trying to maintain the planet as it is, or was, because, frankly, who really wants it? What’s the rainforest ever done for you, except made you feel guilty. We would rather clone the Andrex puppy than a lemur with eyes like peeled bollocks and fingers like a goblin proctologist. You just know there will be thousands and thousands of people queuing to clone their disgusting incontinent yorkies and neurotic schnauzers. There will be dozens of people looking to make indefinite Crufts’ champions. The Koreans are absolutely right: what we want are more dogs. Korea, after all, is itself a sort of cloned country, separated at birth — good clone, bad clone.

Here, I must admit an interest. I have a little dog and, last Sunday, I went to let her out, and she couldn’t walk. I took her to the emergency vet, who looked very concerned and talked of x-rays, MRI scans and neurological damage, and suggested softly that I should prepare myself for the worst. And I felt that terrible curdling, the lightening of the head, the tightening of all the internal organs, that is the preparation for mourning a dog. There is no pain as intense or fathomless as doggy loss. If you’re reading this with the earth from a human funeral still fresh under your nails, I’m sorry, but you can talk to people about it. There are shoulders for you to cry on. They will understand, give you time off work, sympathy shags. But say your dog just died and they’ll yawn, or go, “My aunt had a dog that died” and “I just ran over a dog, or perhaps it was a fox”. Canine grief is the love that dare not speak its name. If the vet had said, “Look the dog’s got to go long bye-byes, but I can clone you a new one, have it in a couple of months, you won’t be able to tell the difference, only thing is we’ll have to melt what’s left of the ice cap to do it”, I’d have said the kids love the dog.

Turns out she was just pretending. She’s right as rain. (Which is cloned drizzle.) That’s a relief. The ice caps are still there. But I faced global meltdown, and realised it didn’t stand a dog’s chance.

We have, of course, been cloning humans for the best part of a generation. They did it first in Fulham, in a pub called the White Horse, and they were called Sloane Rangers, which is another silly name. They really ought to have been called Snuppies. I found a whole nest of them last week, in the Tendido Cuatro, which is an annoying name, from the man who brought you Cambio de Tercio and Tendido Cero on the Old Brompton Road. He’s called Abel and he’s Spanish and he has produced and maintained a pair of the most consistently edible Iberian restaurants in London. This one, on the New King’s Road, is sit-down tapas. Tapas is a sort of annoying name as well, and it is the national cuisine of the Sloane, embodying everything they love. You can eat it with your fingers; you can share it; it comes with lots of little bits to stop you getting bored; it encourages you to drink; it’s cheap; it tastes the same coming up as it did going down; some of it’s surprisingly hot; you can throw it. I’d forgotten that Sloanes either eat in pairs or by the dozen. They go out and do mating rituals for about a month and, after that, will only eat in gangs. You can see the couples here, straining their courtship conversation to breaking point, eyeing the guffawing and joshing tables with envy. Sloanes dread doing anything one to one. They go on holiday in gangs, they join the Army, work in offices like prep-school classes. They do have sex in private, but always with the telly on and ranks of photographs of their friends and family watching, doing thumbs-up in ski gear.

The food is far better than they deserve, or notice. It’s good value, the room smells of deep-fried Basque, and there’s weird piped music. But then, Spanish music all sounds like someone stamping on seagulls. The service was Spanish in the Fawlty Towers sense, and the waiter at the door asked for the name we booked in. The Blonde gave hers. He frowned. “You have another name?” he asked. Which is a particularly asinine question, even for a Spaniard. “How about Timbo?” I said. “Ah, yes, Mr Timbo. This way.” The old Sloane-cloned name.

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