Lemonia lives in the old Chalk Farm Tavern in Primrose Hill, which is better known as the set of Paddington. It is not surrounded by fields filled with duellists under a hill of primroses these days, but it is still vast, pale and beautiful: a survivor in the sprawl. There has been a tavern on this site for so long — it was first recorded in 1678 when a corpse was carried to it — that it is possible John Keats drank here. I hope so. It is not a beaker of the warm south – it is slightly too near Camden and its stink of pigeon and bleach for that — but it is close enough.
Some restaurants hold memories of pleasure: this is one such place. It was the Tavern twice — with interruption — then the Lotus pub themed for car lovers, in a time when alcohol and petrol could plausibly mix, and then Lemonia, a Greek restaurant, for almost 40 years.
When last year I urged readers to cherish their neighbourhood restaurants or lose them, I meant Lemonia. It has the same kind of blinding identity as Oslo Court, or the Coffee Cup in Hampstead, or the Daily Mail, but with slightly better food. I cannot pretend I want to eat the Daily Mail, but I ate my sadness in the Coffee Cup when the alcohol ran out, and Oslo Court is as much a private hospital as a restaurant. Some restaurants exist for diners to pretend to be something other than what they really are: to be fashionable is really the opposite of identity. It is, at heart, monied cowardice; an uncertainty that would be forgivable if the food was not so close to ashes.
A woman can only really describe so many variations of lighting fixtures before she longs only to suck an apple, eat a wrench.
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