Food
Rich pickings
Alex Dilling at the Hotel Café Royal is a minute restaurant above Regent Street, which has the type of British…
Beyond satire
Bacchanalia is the new restaurant from Richard Caring – I sense he would like me to call it a ‘landmark’…
A Ukrainian victory
Mriya lives at the end of Old Brompton Road where South Kensington turns into Earl’s Court and, as if by…
Power vacuum
The rude fingers of Battersea are repointed, and barely rude at all. The power station by Giles Gilbert Scott and…
Theme of despair
Chessington World of Adventures sits in a bowl near the A3. I went in the 1970s when it was a…
All muted
The Piazza is not a piazza – a realisation which is always irritating – but a restaurant in the eaves…
Pig heaven
Labour is 30 points ahead, and in honour of this I review the Impeccable Pig in Sedgefield (Cedd’s field), a…
Italian underworld
Bardo St James’s Restaurant – a name which reads like a map – is a vast new Italian restaurant in…
Fine diner
Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior…
Hot cakes
Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in…
A personal best
In 2014, Nuno Mendes, a chef from Lisbon by way of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchens and his own Viajante in Bethnal…
My lunch with Liz
Sometimes this column has a guest reviewer: a dining companion. It was Liz Truss in late summer 2011, for the…
Civilisation in a sausage
When the Tory party set itself on fire last week a restaurateur told me: ‘Don’t worry, Tanya, we’ll still be…
Gorgeous George
The George, Fitzrovia, was Saki’s local, and a pub for men talking about cars when Great Portland Street was called…
Child’s play
Ave Mario looks like Clown Town, a soft-play centre in Finchley with a ball pit so large you could drown…
A tea fit for a Queen
I went to a garden party at Buckingham Palace once. It is coloured in my memory like childhood. There are…
Et in Arcade ego
I should know better than to visit restaurants assembled as if from disparate bricks, like thrift-shop Duplo: but the ever-credulous…
Let us eat cake
Amid the bronze cladding of Soho, with its pop-up, suck-down restaurants – the Cadbury’s Creme Egg Café was a nadir…
Into the labyrinth
I am never bored with Harrods, only disgusted, and it is disgust of the most animated and exciting kind. It…
Maine offender
Last week Chris Corbin and Jeremy King lost controlof the restaurant group they founded: Corbin & King, which made theWolseley,…
For the chop
Blacklock is the fourth restaurant of that name – there are others in Soho, Shoreditch and the City of London.…
The waste land
I was going to be jolly this week, for variety and denial, but I changed my mind. Instead, I wonder…
A victim of its own mythology
Langan’s, a brasserie off Piccadilly with curling orange neon signage calling its name, is under new management after it fell…
The hunt for breakfast
The centre could not hold, at least for Piggy’s. The drama of being the only greasy spoon in the West…
Lillie’s pad
The Cadogan hotel, Chelsea, is where Oscar Wilde was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, in Room 118,…
