Restaurants
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,…
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…
A feast for the eyes
Jonathan Meades on the art of menus
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…
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…
Off the table
Restaurant prices are no longer worth it
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…
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,…
Market mischief and bad politicsmean business is never dull
Enough of stagflation forecasts, each more frightening than the last. Enough – for now – of energy policy sermons, as…
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…
