Food
‘The food is as good as you will find in London’: Saison at Raffles London, reviewed
The Old War Office (bad acronym OWO) on Whitehall is now a Raffles hotel: you can stay in Winston Churchill’s…
‘They do better spaghetti bolognese in Hampstead for a tenner’: The Lobby at The Peninsula, reviewed
The Peninsula is a new hotel at Hyde Park Corner. It is part of the trend for absurd expense: rooms…
Revised Criterion
There are cursed restaurants and cursed women, and this makes them no less interesting. One is Maxim’s in Paris, which…
Market values
Origin City is a good name for this restaurant, whether it knows it or not. It is at West Smithfield,…
A pastiche pub
Poundbury is the King’s idealised town in Dorchester, built on his land to his specifications: the town that sprung out…
Et tu, Bruton?
At the Chapel, Bruton, is a restaurant and hotel in a former chapel in Bruton. This was once an ordinary…
Homage to Hobbiton
Sarehole Mill is four miles south of the centre of Birmingham. If this were a fairy tale, and it should…
Plainly perfect
The BBC made a very odd documentary about the renovation of Claridge’s: The Mayfair Hotel Megabuild. They filmed, agog, as…
First draught
I am not sure the vast Bierschenke bierkeller in Covent Garden is successful, even if it is skilful: I worry…
Museum pizzas
As the government withers this column falls to ennui and visits Pizza Express. As David Cameron, who left the world…
Roar of approval
The Red Lion, East Chisenbury, is in the Pewsey Vale on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Wiltshire’s strangeness surpasses even…
Strangeness and charm
The restaurant 2 Fore Street lives on Mousehole harbour, near gift shops: the post office and general store have closed,…
No mucking about
The Pilchard Inn sits at the entrance to Burgh Island, a minute tidal island off the coast of south Devon.…
Alice in gastroland
The Alice lives in a ground-floor room of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, which venerates the fantastical and the savage,…
Fat of the land
Lady Bamford’s Cotswold fairy-land Daylesford Farm has sprouted leaves. It is no longer a farm shop, which should be a…
Court with appeal
The Sessions Arts Club is a restaurant inside the Old Session House in Clerkenwell, a pale George III building where…
Express joy
Darjeeling Express lives at the top of Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street, which was once the world-famous embodiment of…
Call that Nice?
Mister Nice is not so much a restaurant as a pre-dawn thought flung into the drag between Piccadilly Circus and…
Tea junction
The Cédric Grolet at the Berkeley lives in the shiniest hotel in Knightsbridge, though I prefer the Mandarin Oriental, because…
Culinary art
The Mount St Restaurant lives above the Audley Public House on Mount Street, ‘a traditional neighbourhood pub, carefully restored, and…
Icon of the Blair years
Restaurant and dog years are similar, and so the Wolseley, which is 20 this year, seems as if it has…
Great Scott’s
Scott’s, Richmond, is a fish, champagne and oyster bar, and a new branch of Scott’s, Mayfair. The original Scott’s was…
