Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The worst food in London

At first glance it looks wonderful, but it smells wrong and it falls apart dully in your mouth. It is ersatz

issue 25 November 2017

Farmacy, which opened last year, is London’s most fashionable ‘clean eating’ restaurant; it is, therefore, a restaurant for people who hate food. This ‘clean eating’ epidemic grows as we fall into decadence and see food, rather than our own mouths, as the source of our calamity — how can we be saved from food? It is Bunyadi, the pop-up naked hobbit restaurant again, but without wit: same food, less fun, and no tree stumps at all except metaphorically, on the tops of people’s necks.

It is owned by Camilla Fayed, the daughter of Mohammed Fayed, and there is probably much to divine about that family dynamic here, had I stayed, but I didn’t.

The restaurant is on Westbourne Park Road near Notting Hill, which claims a fashionable status that even I, who have watched the districts of London bloom with postcode dysmorphic disorder, could never understand; it is a pit near the Westway with expensive children’s clothing shops, and people who are angry that they cannot afford to live in Mayfair.

The restaurant itself is 1970s in style: with pot plants and rustic wooden wall-coverings, it looks like the Sanctuary Spa in Covent Garden (sadly now closed) in which Joan Collins cavorted naked on a swing in The Stud.

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in