Restaurants
Wedge salad in the shadow of the Tudors: Sargeant’s Mess reviewed
Sargeant’s Mess (2018) is a tourist catcher’s net in restaurant form by the Tower of London (c. 1078). It has views…
Food that’s prettier than you are: The Petersham reviewed
The Petersham is a fading hotel on Richmond Hill. I went to a bar mitzvah there in 1986, which gives…
Dear Mary: As best man, can I seduce the groom’s sister?
Q. We often take friends to what my husband calls a ‘poncey’ pub which has won numerous awards and where…
Too good for the kleptocrats of Knightsbridge: Harry’s Dolce Vita reviewed
In 2007 Mikhael Gorbachev starred in a Louis Vuitton advert. He was driven past the Berlin Wall with Louis Vuitton…
As restaurants go, it’s important – and it knows it: the River Café reviewed
Jilly Cooper’s fictional hero Rupert Campbell-Black has ‘never been to Hammersmith’. I have but I wish I hadn’t. I love…
A new addition to north London’s underwhelming restaurants: Café Hampstead reviewed
Café Hampstead is a new café in — big reveal! — Hampstead, the gaudiest of the old villages on the…
It’s survived universal suffrage and two world wars: restaurant Rules reviewed
Rules looks as if it voted for Brexit, and now finds itself inside an eternal Christmas Eve, where it is…
Farmacy’s food is the worst I have eaten in London
Farmacy, which opened last year, is London’s most fashionable ‘clean eating’ restaurant; it is, therefore, a restaurant for people who…
The queen of hotels
Jean-Georges at the Connaught — formerly the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel, but it was renamed during the first world war,…
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…
Tapas but no phantom
I am always surprised to remember that Andrew Lloyd Webber has taste; it must be remembrance of Cats. I was…
Your problems solved
Q. We moved recently and new neighbours invited us to join them for dinner at a nearby restaurant. I planned…
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…
Nicholas the miraculous
Miracles are not ceased. A few years ago, a kindly educational therapist took pity on John Prescott and set out…
Soho in Somerset
It is summer and the listless metropolitan thinks of grass. It cannot afford to stay at Durslade Farmhouse, Somerset, a…
Barometer
London’s other mayor How many people could name the capital’s other mayor, the Lord Mayor of London? The office, officially…
Lost in Piccadilly
Batman owned the Criterion in The Dark Knight, but could he do anything about British Telecom? Savini at Criterion, an…
Diary
Killing time in a Heathrow first-class lounge, I notice how many men adopt an unmistakable ‘first-class lounge’ persona. They stand…
Marco Pierre, why?
Wheeler’s is such a dreadful restaurant that I wonder if Marco Pierre White even knows his name is on it.…
Easy to swallow
Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of…
Italian cuts
Sartoria is a pale grey restaurant on Savile Row. As evidence that this is London’s destination street — if menswear…
Past Caring
Le Caprice is a monochrome patch of the 1980s behind the Ritz Hotel, in the part of St James’s that…
That sinking feeling
The Feng Shang Princess is a floating Chinese restaurant on the Regent’s Canal in north London, which flows from Little…
