Sartoria: the home of Savile Row’s men who lunch
Sartoria is a pale grey restaurant on Savile Row. As evidence that this is London’s destination street — if menswear…
Le Caprice is trying to bring back the 1980s (unsuccessfully)
Le Caprice is a monochrome patch of the 1980s behind the Ritz Hotel, in the part of St James’s that…
Bring back the old Brass Rail, Selfridges!
The last time I reviewed a restaurant in Selfridges, a PR man rang up to ask what he could do…
Meet Feng Shang Princess, the (lousy) Chinese restaurant in a boat
The Feng Shang Princess is a floating Chinese restaurant on the Regent’s Canal in north London, which flows from Little…
Center Parcs Longleat – a stealth socialist utopia on Lord Bath’s estate
Center Parcs Longleat is a holiday village in a forest in Wiltshire, on Lord Bath’s estate, so you can never…
Darth Vader is dirty and it’s not just me that thinks so
Star Wars taught Hollywood how to make children’s films for adults, says Tanya Gold
How hard should we fight Black Friday?
Should we make peace with this imported festival of consumerism?
Sexy Fish: not so much a restaurant as a museum of London’s rich
Sexy Fish is a ludicrous restaurant with a ludicrous name in a ludicrous town. It is the latest venture from…
Redecorate the restaurant, but you can’t redecorate the clientele
Forty-five Jermyn St lives in the left-hand buttock of Fortnum & Mason (F&M), a shop whose acronym is slightly too…
I went to Pedro’s Tex Mex Cantina to claim my racist sombrero
Pedro’s Tex-Mex Cantina is a fantastical shack near a ring road in Norwich. It was recently asked to stop handing…
Smith & Wollensky doesn’t even serve the best steaks in Covent Garden
Smith & Wollensky is a restaurant from The Shining: a terrifying American steak joint by the Thames, four months old,…
Finally, a foodie restaurant that isn’t pretentious, overpriced or insulting to the intelligence
I cannot review the Gay Hussar every time the Labour party behaves like a self-harming teenager (‘I don’t want to…
Where comics find their Edinburgh comfort food
Mum’s, or to use its full title, Mum’s Great Comfort Food, is a restaurant in Edinburgh designed to soothe itinerant…
Boastful, narcissistic, overpriced: welcome to Jamie’s Italian
Jamie’s Italian is squeezed into the Devonshire Arms on Denman Street, Soho, borne on the duplicitous winds of TV shows…
A fake fishing village, and the nastiest thing I’ve eaten as a restaurant critic
Selfridges is skilled at making things that are not hideous (women) look hideous (women dressed as Bungle from Rainbow or…
Venetian restaurants know I’m English from the back
The Gatto Nero — or ‘Black Cat’ — is in Burano, a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. It is…
The joy of an empty Gordon Ramsay restaurant
The Maze Grill is on a sinister street in Chelsea, between a small Tesco — a boutique Tesco? — and…
The new Ivy doesn’t have the old magic (if there ever was any)
The Ivy is a Playmobil-style faux-medieval restaurant in a triangular building opposite The Mousetrap; of the two, The Ivy is…
A fantasy world with its own perfumed air: the Colony Grill Room
The Beaumont Hotel is a bright white cake in the silent part of Mayfair, where the only sound is Patek…
Fenchurch in the Sky Garden – like going for dinner in Total Recall
Fenchurch is a restaurant that is scared of terrorists. It cowers at the top of 20 Fenchurch Street, a skyscraper…
There’s only one place to mourn another Labour loss
Ed is a plank. He was always a plank — and now he is in Ibiza being a plank. Plankety–plankety-plank:…
The Portrait restaurant: a secret glade of stone and brick, suspended above Trafalgar Square
The Portrait Restaurant lives at the top of the National Portrait Gallery, London. It is fiercely modern, but likeable. You…
The Ivy Chelsea Garden: Richard Caring has finally built a restaurant I admire
The Ivy Chelsea Garden is a restaurant inside an Edwardian house disguised as a Tudor house on the King’s Road;…
A cemetery with cocktails: La Coupole and the spirit of the brasserie
La Coupole, Montparnasse, is the grandest and most famous of the old pre-war Parisian brasseries; that is, if you have…