Food
Cabbages and kings
The first pastry cook Chaïm Soutine painted came out like a collapsed soufflé. The sitter for ‘The Pastry Cook’ (c.1919)…
Elle Decoration meets pub food
The Mandrake is a new ‘design hotel’ in London, which means it is for people who treat Elle Decoration magazine…
In silent misremembrance
Foxlow is near Golden Square in west Soho, where drunken hacks used to take long drunken lunches before having stupid…
Our big fat problem
The good news is that Theresa May has dropped the threat to withdraw universal free school meals. Thank God (and…
A perfect feast with Roger Allam
J Sheekey is one of Richard Caring’s older, and better, restaurants. Since he has dowsed the suburbs of London in…
Tapas but no phantom
I am always surprised to remember that Andrew Lloyd Webber has taste; it must be remembrance of Cats. I was…
Cold foam and spindly legs
Bibendum is a hushed restaurant on the first floor of the Michelin House on the Fulham Road. (Bibendum is the…
Great news for fatties: it’s really not your fault
I’ve noticed for some time now that thin people, genuinely slim ones, have a secret loathing of fatties. Kindly though…
Diary
Why do we assume all doctors are good? We don’t think there are no bad cooks or bad plumbers. But…
Cool and underground
The Keeper’s House sits in the basement of Burlington House, a restaurant in disguise. It is quite different from the…
Concept
‘It was nothing special, but it was a pub,’ said my husband, looking up from his copy of Bar magazine…
Guilty displeasures
It is now entirely cool to adore the uncool. But what about the things we can’t admit to not enjoying?
Soho in Somerset
It is summer and the listless metropolitan thinks of grass. It cannot afford to stay at Durslade Farmhouse, Somerset, a…
Lost in Piccadilly
Batman owned the Criterion in The Dark Knight, but could he do anything about British Telecom? Savini at Criterion, an…
The cult of clean
It starts with tidying your sock drawer. It ends with emptying your mind
The bitter taste of victory
The Parliament Hill Café is a drab glass box at the bottom of Hampstead Heath, near the farmers’ market and…
Send in the Alsatians
Islington is a bellwether, and also a joke: the most unequal borough in London, where social housing leans against £4…
Marco Pierre, why?
Wheeler’s is such a dreadful restaurant that I wonder if Marco Pierre White even knows his name is on it.…
Low life
Before we left for Sunday lunch at the Les Deux Garçons restaurant, Aix-en-Provence, I checked the reviews on Tripadvisor. I’m…
Easy to swallow
Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of…
The 5 per cent of people who get to decide everything
What happens when 95 per cent of people like something, but 5 per cent of people prefer something else? You might think…
Italian cuts
Sartoria is a pale grey restaurant on Savile Row. As evidence that this is London’s destination street — if menswear…
Game show
A few years ago, a distinguished cove in the diplomatic service was made High Commissioner to Australia. To prepare himself…
Past Caring
Le Caprice is a monochrome patch of the 1980s behind the Ritz Hotel, in the part of St James’s that…
Barometer
The outsiders Did the seven members of Harold Wilson’s cabinet who campaigned to leave the Common Market in the 1975…
