A great Dane: Snaps + Rye reviewed

Snaps + Rye is a Nordic-themed restaurant and delicatessen on the Golborne Road, at the shabby and thrilling edges of Notting Hill, just north of the Westway, a road I uncomplicatedly love, probably because it takes me from Notting Hill to places I like better. Notting Hill fell to gentrification long ago — it gasps with boredom — but here London feels like a real city, though only just. ‘This home is not a shop,’ says a sign in a nearby window, with as much feeling as signage can muster. Or should muster. ‘Nothing is for sale.’

It is a bitter time for restaurants and those who love them. Nearby, the exquisite Ledbury has already closed, as if it knows something we don’t, disproving Gordon Ramsay’s idiotic claim that pandemic will sweep through the world, cleansing poor restaurants from our sight — alongside the fat, the sick and very old — in a kind of Hitlerian-themed eugenics programme, but for restaurants.