Food
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…
That sinking feeling
The Feng Shang Princess is a floating Chinese restaurant on the Regent’s Canal in north London, which flows from Little…
Faroe Islands: A whale of a time
The Faroes are a wonderful place to visit, discovers Camilla Swift
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…
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…
The Pit of hipsterdom
Penny is an all-day café in the former Pit Bar in the basement of the Old Vic, a famous and…
The young entrepreneurs making the best of Spain’s crisis
Lara Prendergast finds delicacies amid the dilapidation in Andalucía
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…
High steaks
Smith & Wollensky is a restaurant from The Shining: a terrifying American steak joint by the Thames, four months old,…
La Baule
The reaction of the chap on the door at Le Bidule told me that they weren’t used to seeing English…
Foodies without the faff
I cannot review the Gay Hussar every time the Labour party behaves like a self-harming teenager (‘I don’t want to…
Comic relief
Mum’s, or to use its full title, Mum’s Great Comfort Food, is a restaurant in Edinburgh designed to soothe itinerant…
