Food

The Odeon cinema in Whiteleys, Bayswater, has refurbished; it now has eight ‘Lounges’ where you can watch a film and stuff your face with only 49 others, planted on leather seats like fellow passengers on a spaceship to nowhere. Other London cinemas do food (the Everyman, the Electric) but the food is mostly olives and

Reviewing the Delaunay is like reviewing Nelson Mandela. You cannot be rude. This restaurant, a new sister for the ­Wolseley, is as Teflon-coated as David Cameron’s head. And it is very similar to the Wolseley, which was also slobberingly reviewed because people think of it as foreign, but good foreign, which means pastries, not immigrants,

I came to the Gay Hussar for gags about the Labour party; to find some wreckage of its glory days. Except the Labour party doesn’t have glory days — only tiny breaks in the blue space-time continuum when a) it isn’t eating itself and b) it manages to convince a country of snobs that voting

34 is the new restaurant from Richard Caring, the ‘Lex Luthor of Mayfair’, who owns The Ivy, Le Caprice and Annabel’s. In my research, which I undertake before every review — clams tend not to have a back-story — Caring emerges as a character from a Sidney Sheldon novel, or perhaps Lace: ‘Which of you

The new hotel W looms like a giant fridge over Leicester Square. They demolished the poor old Swiss Centre to build it as part of the regeneration programme because some people don’t know that some things can’t be regenerated. I often pass through Leicester Square on a Saturday night and it is like watching the

What to say about Occupy London? I support it, because I always judge a movement by the quality of its enemies, and also because its position at St Paul’s cathedral makes a certain type of writer wander around, pondering, ‘What would Jesus do about Occupy?’ There have been many articles asking ‘What would Jesus do

Wolfgang Puck, who is a globally famous chef, has opened Cut on Park Lane. Beef is Cut’s thing and who doesn’t like beef? Except I am convinced that if cows, like women, discovered their own strength, there would be a cow coup, like in Planet of the Apes. (This is a very personal fantasy.) How

The St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, by Marriott, is 14 syllables long, which is too many. The best hotels have two syllables or at most three, but I can’t spend my life looking for two-syllable hotels with restaurants to review because I would go mad and so would you. Even so, the glorious red building,

Dorsia is the fictional restaurant in Bret Easton Ellis’s excellent novel American Psycho. The psycho, a banker called Patrick Bateman, longs to secure the 8.30 p.m. slot at Dorsia, but he can never get it; instead he walks through Manhattan killing other bankers, and sometimes prostitutes. Dorsia is like Jay Gatsby, an ever-receding metaphor, except

The Playboy Club on Park Lane was re-opened by Hugh Hefner in June, like an ancient bra he had suddenly remembered was lying under his bed. It has a casino, a bar, a barber’s shop, and a restaurant. My being here is pure masochism, and I should really write the review in the style of

Oslo Court is the Jewish mother birthday party venue, or lunch if the Jewish mother must be home in time to be medicated — a convention, a summit, a trough for Jewish mothers. And so, when you telephone for a reservation, they will ask you, having as yet no idea who you are — do

The Hotel du Vin is a mini chain of tasteful hotels, usually found in ‘heritage’ cities — Henley, Cambridge, wretched Tunbridge Wells. The Hotel du Vin is a mini chain of tasteful hotels, usually found in ‘heritage’ cities — Henley, Cambridge, wretched Tunbridge Wells. They have baths in bedrooms, rush-matting and white linen, and, although

The Savoy Grill is a famous restaurant in a famous hotel and it knows it. Although it is managed by Gordon Ramsay, with his TV horns and tabloid nightmares, it is still reeling with self-importance, an elderly debutante who once jumped on John Wayne in the loo. The view is of a taxi rank and

I am in Padstein. It used to be a fishing village, just north of Newquay. It was Padstow then. But then came Rick Stein. Padstein has the smell of a theme park. This is a village made over by one man; it belongs to him. In my hand I have a map of every Rick

It is an old London fairytale that there are no good restaurants in Hampstead. When the good restaurants were being handed out, Hampstead was ignored, betrayed, disgraced — given only a Carluccio’s, a Café Rouge and a quite disgusting Chinese place that has a ridiculous water feature and its own bridge. This is the story,

Rules is the restaurant where Edward VII ate himself to death and, in a way, it looks like him. It is spacious and regal and covered in velvet. His personal dining room upstairs is a cocktail bar now, with a lump of Stilton as focal point and memorial. Downstairs there are stags’ heads and a

Maybe it’s the rising heat, but this season’s edition of Spectator Scoff has a rather more prickly, edgy feel to it — some beefy controversies to fire up your mental barbecues. Maybe it’s the rising heat, but this season’s edition of Spectator Scoff has a rather more prickly, edgy feel to it — some beefy