Labour is 30 points ahead, and in honour of this I review the Impeccable Pig in Sedgefield (Cedd’s field), a medieval market town and pit village south of Durham. It is Tony Blair’s former constituency and Camelot, but nothing lasts for ever. Blairism had pleasingly flimsy beginnings. Sedgefield had yet to choose a Labour parliamentary
Bardo St James’s Restaurant – a name which reads like a map – is a vast new Italian restaurant in one of the pale imperial palaces off Trafalgar Square, near Pall Mall and The Phantom of the Opera, which goes on because snobbery and sado-masochism are among the many things that never die. You might
Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior design and even its own restaurants. The Ned, its City hotel with ten restaurants, is genuinely insane, like Thorpe Park for people who are scared of roller-coasters; and no restaurant for adults should sell fishfinger
Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in a haunted mirror in which the only thing that matters is your survival. This duplicity is important to understand, because the road from Cicero to Caesar is so short it may lack potholes. Cake is
In 2014, Nuno Mendes, a chef from Lisbon by way of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchens and his own Viajante in Bethnal Green, opened a restaurant at the Chiltern Firehouse hotel. This is a redbrick Edwardian castle in Marylebone, which used to be a fire station, but no longer is. This restaurant was skilful: both blessed and
Sometimes this column has a guest reviewer: a dining companion. It was Liz Truss in late summer 2011, for the now long closed Bistro du Vin in Dean Street: a Hotel du Vin without a hotel, and so bereft. It had a bookshelf on which all the books were painted neon, and they flew out
When the Tory party set itself on fire last week a restaurateur told me: ‘Don’t worry, Tanya, we’ll still be here when it’s over.’ She was wrapping a scotch egg as she said it, and it’s very true. There is a soothing continuity to restaurants: no matter what fresh hell, people need to eat. I
The George, Fitzrovia, was Saki’s local, and a pub for men talking about cars when Great Portland Street was called Motor Row. I imagine them sucking down gin and weeping for early Jaguars; a ghostly Max de Winter rising to leave for Manderley; Mr Rolls and Mr Royce squabbling over ale. Felix Mendelssohn and Dylan
Ave Mario looks like Clown Town, a soft-play centre in Finchley with a ball pit so large you could drown in it and lie undiscovered for years. Apart from the crucifixes on the walls, of course, which are specific to Avo Maria. (I have yet to find a soft-play centre that looks like St Peter’s.)
I went to a garden party at Buckingham Palace once. It is coloured in my memory like childhood. There are good Canalettos and fitted carpets inside because that is self-confidence. In the garden the Queen stood with diplomats, safe from confessions, tears and requests for football tickets. (People do this. They write to her for
I should know better than to visit restaurants assembled as if from disparate bricks, like thrift-shop Duplo: but the ever-credulous person sees the world anew each day. I thought Arcade, a glass restaurant on New Oxford Street, which somehow manages to be worse than old Oxford Street, might have some of the drama of the
Amid the bronze cladding of Soho, with its pop-up, suck-down restaurants – the Cadbury’s Creme Egg Café was a nadir – Maison Bertaux hangs on, the oldest French patisserie in the UK, and 151 this year. It was founded by Monsieur Bertaux, a Communard fleeing France with a book of recipes. Their loss, our gain.
I am never bored with Harrods, only disgusted, and it is disgust of the most animated and exciting kind. It is Nabokov’s fish-tank of a department store, but with lampshades, not hebephilia. Its wares have surpassed its beginnings, which were haberdashery. Charles Harrod’s first shop was at 228 Borough High Street when George IV, who
Last week Chris Corbin and Jeremy King lost control of the restaurant group they founded: Corbin & King, which made the Wolseley, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel under Piccadilly Circus where, if they were lucky, tourists would tumble as if into a fairy pool. Corbin and King understand that a superb restaurant looks after its
Blacklock is the fourth restaurant of that name – there are others in Soho, Shoreditch and the City of London. It sits in a former royal coach-makers in an alley near the Garrick Club under signage that says ‘Chop’. We descend to a cavern. The walls are exposed brick, the floors are dark wood, and
I was going to be jolly this week, for variety and denial, but I changed my mind. Instead, I wonder if, when Vladimir Putin – insert your own nickname, mine is unprintable – talks about the weakness of western civilisation (I paraphrase) and, therefore, our unwillingness to resist tyranny in the shape of a balding
Langan’s, a brasserie off Piccadilly with curling orange neon signage calling its name, is under new management after it fell into administration in 2020. It is a famous brasserie — London’s version of La Coupole — once owned by Michael Caine, a famous actor, and Peter Langan, a famous drunk, who would crawl across the
The centre could not hold, at least for Piggy’s. The drama of being the only greasy spoon in the West End — in Air Street, of all places — was too much, and it swelled, panicked, and fell apart. Yesterday I ate a mean sliver of almost cold bacon inside hard white supermarket bread. The
The Cadogan hotel, Chelsea, is where Oscar Wilde was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, in Room 118, which is now memorialised as the site of the arrest. Institutional homophobia is a weird thing to commemorate in fabrics, but everything is a tourist attraction these days. The hotel is a tall red late-Victorian
It is a truism that there is never enough schnitzel (‘slice’, German); or, rather, schnitzel does not get the attention it deserves. Restaurants do serve it, of course. Fischer’s does a fine Wiener schnitzel, as part of its riotous pre-war Vienna tribute act, and elderly people, I am told, queue for it while wearing slankets.
