Food

Brasserie Zédel is a grand salon under Piccadilly Circus and the only place I desired when lockdown (or lock-in) ceased and I was allowed to visit London. It is, for me — and everyone is different in their yearnings — everything a restaurant should be: very beautiful; well run (by Corbin & King of the Wolseley and the Delaunay); not insultingly priced; and, as it is windowless, pleasingly unreal: an enchanted basement, if you will — a depository for dreams. I arrive early on the first night, walking through silent London, resisting the urge to lie down in the road. This used to be the Regent Palace Hotel, the grand

We cannot bear more drive-through or take-out or near-fatal snack. I am convinced of the boredom of my female ancestors, which is another truth pandemic threw out, and eventually all gags run out to dust. I am happy to leave my review of Penzance McDonald’s where it belongs, which is unwritten. Food is love after all; or it should be. So I email Ollie Dabbous, formerly of Dabbous, now of Michelin-starred Hide and the most gifted chef working in Britain today. His food looks exquisite but — and this is unusual — it tastes better than it looks. He says he will give me a cooking lesson on Zoom from

Drive-through restaurants were invented so Americans could spend more time in their cars. I don’t blame them. American cars are wonderful if you like cars with fins; so, in theory, is fast food, which is more accurately called fast death, even if they did not know that in 1947. There is a contradiction to the drive-through method of collecting food, a puzzle: if you drive, you have time to wait. But such things are not designed to be sensible. I wonder what other services could be made drive-through: lawyers and podiatrists, but my preference is for libraries and, possibly, sex. These restaurants have thrived in pandemic, which again contradicts the

Now that I have considered Monster Munch I decide to eat one mindfully. I put it in my mouth, and it is as if I can taste it for the first time. It is repulsive, and I feel cheated. This is, then, an intervention. My husband wrote in these pages that I am always watching Spooks and eating Monster Munch. It was a giggle that went on for 400 words but is eating Monster Munch really so depraved? Doesn’t Jay Rayner eat Skips in the darkness when he is alone? Didn’t A.A. Gill eat Frazzles? I know I do, but only when I am depressed — which is quite often

What does a critic do when her genre collapses? Mostly I panic. I speak to restaurateurs who believe that without government help into 2022, many British restaurants will close. Most restaurants rent their premises; even if landlords defer collection, the debt will be unpayable. Most restaurants operate on slender margins; they cannot secure finance even in happy times. It is a scandal that the government has excluded monies from the service charge ‘tronc fund’ from the 80 per cent calculations in the Job Retention Scheme, even though it has received National Insurance contributions on it for years, and many restaurant staff are getting only 40 per cent of their earnings.

Sunday lunch was always roast beef and, in the traditional way, the Yorkshire pudding was served first with gravy, supposedly because if you were full of cooked batter you wanted less meat. Monday saw cold meat, jacket potatoes and pickles, while the beef bone went into the pot with lentils, pearl barley, carrots and onions and bubbled on the hob for days, the basis of every dinner until Friday’s fish and Saturday’s sausages and mash, before Sunday came round again. That is what everybody had and, like all housewives, my mother made the most of every morsel. Throughout and after the war, waste was a crime. I hate cooking and

A fictional Spectator restaurant critic called Forbes McAllister appeared on Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge. He was played by Patrick Marber and was obviously based on Keith Waterhouse — bow tie, mad eyes — even if Waterhouse was never the restaurant critic at this magazine. McAllister was on TV to show off Lord Byron’s duelling pistols ‘and a lock of his stupid hair’. He bought them to annoy Michael Winner, then restaurant critic at the Sunday Times. ‘Are you entirely motivated by hatred?’ Partridge asked McAllister. It was his best ever question. ‘Yes, I think I am,’ said McAllister. ‘Rather perceptive of you. I hate you.’ Partridge then

Stop the clocks: Fortnum & Mason is still delivering hampers. I am not surprised, because this shop — or rather this myth disguised as a shop — sold condiments to the Empire, and it wouldn’t let a global pandemic thwart the consumption of those condiments. It was among the earliest fans of globalisation, which is now something I have to explain to my son. He doesn’t understand globalisation, although he knows some dogs come from abroad. He does understand a Fortnum & Mason hamper though; he knows it is a consolation, although he wouldn’t call it that. As soon as the lockdown began, I ordered an Easter basket and an

People power Boris Johnson said that the reaction to the coronavirus crisis showed ‘There really is such a thing as society’ — an apparent reference to an interview Mrs Thatcher gave to Woman’s Own in 1987. A reminder of what she actually said: ‘I think we have gone through a period when too many people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!”… and so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people,

I love eating while watching bad films like Battleship, so I love takeaway food from local restaurants. I am not rich enough to like the idea of takeaway from Simpson’s in the Strand and a plastic lid does not have the drama of a silver-plated dome. But eating takeaway food while watching Battleship is not my job, or at least it wasn’t until now, in the era of pandemic. The fine restaurants shuttered swiftly but the local restaurants offered takeaway, and I supported them. It is not indolence to order takeaway in the time of pandemic and, if you don’t, when this is over there will only be either Simpson’s

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and it sits like a red-brick crab on the Euston Road, on the site of an old goods yard between St Pancras and Euston. The older British Museum Library, whose collection was founded on the books of George III, Sir Hans Soane, Robert Harley and Sir Robert Cotton, was in the British Museum, but that gorgeous reading room is now a glass atrium with overpriced cafés and shops selling historical tat for children: cultural vandalism, then, and incitement to migraine. Instead we have the red-brick crab. It was opened by the Queen in 1998 and it is Grade I-listed,