Fancy a Zinc? Join the New Heddonists

The throbbing heart of South Soho? Eleanor Bailey checks out Heddon Street, W1, and the Zinc bar

Zinc, the new Conran eat and drinkerie which opened on Friday, is a shy little number tucked away in the soon to be fashionable Heddon Street. The coming of Conran is just another stage in the burgeoning chicness of what they are (naturally) calling the new hedonism. For Heddon Street, on the wrong, non-Soho, side of Regent Street - as featured on the cover of the Ziggy Stardust album - is on the up.

A vodka bar is coming. A company called Strawberry Moon is opening that most Nineties of leisure concepts, the "club pub". Then, there is the trendy new Lebanese restaurant Momo and the Sadie Coles HQ. I wasn't sure who Sadie Coles was, but people called Sadie are always cool. Her gallery was showing Bulging, a exhibition by David Powell, who scrawls fantasies about the sick and disabled over copies of old masters. My favourite had an adolescent anally raping an old, incontinent, half-paralysed stroke victim on a hospital trolley. Fashionable wasn't the word. Powell says his response is more honest than a "patronising ideal of media fantasy."

Media fantasy, meanwhile, was in full swing at Zinc, with the low-key opening bursting with "just a few friends and family". The interior is subdued. There are zinc ashtrays that, I am told, will age with washing, sea-green banquettes and marble-topped and claret-laminated tables.

"The idea is that it should be a casual venue, for people to come and have a drink after work, "says Conran's PR. A pub then? Well, not exactly a pub. It has a rotisserie and a seafood bar - sorry, "crustacea". Casual Conran is something akin to the high-heeled trainer. Round the walls are luggage racks - officially to give you somewhere handy to leave bags, in reality a way of showing up those with naff holdalls. An upmarket food writer sips from a champagne glass and ponders: "One wonders whether we really need another restaurant. I mean, London is full of them." Zinc used to be a Victorian tailor's workshop. The food writer sighs. "It's a shame. But all the tailors are probably out in Southall now."

Andrew, an architect, is causing a stir with his black trousers' fluorescent flies. In a corner, Lesley Ash - the blonde one from Men Behaving Badly - is sitting with her football boyfriend Lee Chapman. Lee has his arm wrapped protectively around his woman. The champagne is going to my head. I am telling the architect about my feelings for Shane Warne.

As it gets later, the crowd gets younger and the pianist gets carried away. It's time to leave. I wander out to Leicester Square leaving the fashionable friends and family behind. "Did you give him money because he was poor or because he had one leg?" a man demands of his girlfriend outside Burger King, where they are eating chips - at 90p a bargain compared with Zinc's pommes frites.