Food
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,…
A slice above
It is a truism that there is never enough schnitzel (‘slice’, German); or, rather, schnitzel does not get the attention…
Just bring me a boiled egg
The Connaught Hotel’s formal dining room was always, to me, a place of childish myth; more comforting for being mythical.…
Soho consolations
Soho is so gilded nowadays that even drug addicts look down on it. The wasteland without must match the wasteland…
Spanish gold
Piccadilly is losing its patina of dirt, its cadaverous character. It is overpriced and over-renovated,a meeting place for luxury goods.…
Sentenced to chicken
NoMad is a new hotel in what used to be Bow Street Magistrates’ Court: a preening piece of mid-Victorian classicism…
Faking it
Whitcomb’s is in The Londoner hotel on the south-west corner of Leicester Square. The Londoner calls itself ‘the world’s first…
Totally bats
There is a Batman restaurant in London, or rather there was: Savini at the Criterion on Piccadilly Circus. Savini was…
The real Greek
Lemonia lives in the old Chalk Farm Tavern in Primrose Hill, which is better known as the set of Paddington.…
News from nowhere
The residents of Mayfair are misnamed: they do not really live here. They live in Mayfair like I live on…
Fit for a king
A French creole restaurant rises in the sullen ruins of London. It is called Louie, for French king or trumpeter,…
Ode to joylessness
Browns is a famous fashion boutique in deepest Mayfair. It occupies a curved cream townhouse on Brook Street, which seems…
