Food

I am working my way around the restaurants of the Old War Office (OWO), now an acronym and Raffles hotel on Whitehall, because the swiftness with which the great institutions of the state have become leisure opportunities for the wrongfully rich is dark, mesmerising and, if you don’t mind too much anarchy, funny. I have reviewed the cold, painted Saison, and the lively Italian Paper Moon, which a kind reader wrote to say he loved and which I do not expect to survive. It is too joyful and well-priced for the wrongfully rich and their internal landscape of nude cashmere and paranoia. It squeaked through. The transience of the exterior

The Park is the new restaurant from Jeremy King, and it sits in a golden building to the north of Hyde Park, just off Queensway. This is an interesting district compared with Knightsbridge – it is still capable of reality – but isn’t every-where interesting compared with Knightsbridge? The Park is Art Deco of course: the presiding aesthetic of familiarity, snatched joy and inevitable doom. It looks like an exquisitely appointed cruise ship of the mid-20th century King is a specialist in grand cafés. He opened the Wolseley in Piccadilly and the Delaunay on the Aldwych, though he lost them to his feckless backers in 2022, and has begun again

It’s probably escaped most people’s attention, what with the football, the election, the Ukraine war, the horrors of Gaza, the assassination attempt and the revelation that the most powerful human on the planet has the intellectual sharpness of a daffodil. But in the past few weeks, the world of travel has been roiled by a surprising innovation: Michelin stars for hotels. Though the stars are stylised as ‘keys’. This may not seem like big pommes de terre, but it is quite important. Because, if the concept takes off and hotels start striving for Michelin accolades, then we can expect the best and most ambitious to go the same way as

In Spain, you can eat all day – and we did. Earlier in the summer, I spent two days in Andalusia, and most of the 48 hours were taken up by mealtimes. A breakfast of the sweet porridge poleá started the day, then ham-tasting for a mid-morning snack, followed by a two-hour lunch. Spanish law requires that each Iberian pig gets 10,000 square metres to roam – a Cinco Jotas pig gets twice that Spanish chef José Pizarro led the way, taking us to his favourite restaurants and showing us where he sources his ham and caviar. I ate some of the best fish I’ve ever tasted – seafood croquettes on

The Langham is a Victorian Gothic hotel opposite the BBC in Portland Place. It’s an odd place: haunted house near the wreckage of Newsnight. Perhaps I think this because the last time I came here I interviewed Jeremy Paxman about his ghosts: when he was anxious he banged the wall. The time before, my godmother collapsed at tea in this very room, now Chez Roux. It’s a vast, dimly lit silver space. The lights are long and slender, like giant earrings. Palms wobble. A palm court is a Victorian conceit; the Titanic also had one. I wonder if they were here for Napoleon III, Guy Burgess, or Sherlock Holmes. I

The oldest and best chophouse in London was Simpson’s Tavern in Ball Court Alley off Cornhill (since 1757 on that site): Charles Dickens’s favourite chophouse, and mine. Simpson’s was locked out by landlords who impersonate cartoon villains at the end of 2022 for failing to pay pandemic arrears promptly. Simpson’s said they survived world wars, the plague and the Industrial Revolution, but not a landlord who doesn’t understand chops. (This part I paraphrase.) We settle into a spindly table for what is, by any measure, an exceptional roast lunch Court proceedings are ongoing: meanwhile it’s a ruin. It was vandalised in May, as these things tend to be. Now it

I am fretting about this restaurant column’s election coverage and then I alight on something superficially grand and lovely, which has been hollowed out and is now useless and barely able to function: a shell. It is the Wolseley 2 – the Wolseley City – and this is perfect. I name it the election restaurant, and Tories should eat here while they still have their shirts Few restaurants are important, though I treasure Martha Gellhorn’s description of an operating theatre for the wounded of the Spanish Civil War which was once a restaurant in a grand hotel. But was it any good? Tales of society folk eating are self-serving: real

Last week saw a flurry of media reports, of whose headlines one of the worst preceded one of the best reports. ‘Eating too many ultra-processed foods has been linked to a higher risk of early death,’ barked the Telegraph – but went on to explain carefully and fairly a ground-breaking report. Other broadsheets opted for the easy option: big report, ultra-processed food, death. Food-type blaming can be a comforting evasion of a simple truth: overeating makes you fat The report caught my eye because I’ve been consistently sceptical about sensationalist books and statements demonising in wholesale terms the consumption of foods categorised, in pseudo-scientific language, as ‘ultra-processed’. I question the

Ottolenghi is an Israeli deli co-owned by Yotam Ottolenghi, an Israeli Jew, and Sami Tamimi, a Palestinian Muslim. They met in Baker & Spice in London, where they bonded over the dream of persuading more British people to eat salad. This is an ideal story of co-existence (I have met a group of Israeli Jews and Arabs dieting for peace) and I thought the new Ottolenghi in Hampstead might be picketed by idiots shouting for peace but meaning war. (Martha Gellhorn was right about slogans. Never shout them: even ones you agree with.) It is fine in that I wish I were in the Middle East to eat the original

Five Guys is a burger house from Arlington, Virginia, based on the premise that if you can serve a drink, cut a fringe, or make a hamburger, you will always make money in America. Thirty years and 1,700 restaurants later, it sits on Coventry Street off Piccadilly, soaking up the alcohol of a thousand British stomachs. If central London is a strip-lit bin alley between palaces, this is its restaurant: vital but fraying. I am here because I will not eat at McDonald’s, even when I am sad. I do not think my McDonald’s burger is all from the same cow, and this disturbs me: I can eat one cow happily,

Arlington is named for the 1st Earl of Arlington and his street behind the Ritz Hotel. It used to be Le Caprice, which was opened in 1947 by the Italian Mario Gellati, who would not, by the new rules, get into Britain now, but this is not a column about pain. In 1981 Le Caprice was taken over by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, and it became the most fashionable restaurant in London. Princess Diana dined here and when Jeffrey Archer was released from prison, he ate here. None ofthese dishes could be improved. Five stars, no notes After an interregnum from Richard Caring, under which Le Caprice closed in 2020

One parent in our class WhatsApp chat raised a pressing concern: her daughter was coming home every day with a full water bottle. Were other parents faced with the same unsettling discovery? There followed a lengthy discussion of how much water was left in each child’s bottle. Some children, when confronted, testified that they had drunk water during the day and then filled up the bottle at school. Anyone who expects children to enjoy cooked courgette has forgotten what it was like to be a child This was not good enough for the concerned parent. She took the matter to the teacher. ‘I am concerned my daughter is not given

Dear Jackie is the restaurant in the new hotel Broadwick Soho on Broadwick Street in Soho, which is most famous, if you are an infectious diseases nerd, for being the site of the 1854 cholera outbreak and its cure. Dr John Snow isolated it to the street’s water pump, noted local brewers were immune, and proved cholera is not airborne. When children stopped dying, Soho eased into its time of moral rot. This is as spirited an attempt to re­animate the 1970s as I have found beyond musical theatre This is a changeable thing. Drama fled Soho in the 1970s, and Broadwick Soho is an attempt to put it back.

Noble Rot, which is named for a sickness that afflicts grapes, a self-aware name for a restaurant in London, is becoming a chain. Don’t get me wrong. The Rots in Lamb’s Conduit Street and Greek Street (which replaced the Gay Hussar that died in sympathy with the intelligent left) are two of the best restaurants we have. My only complaint is that, like the Plastics in Mean Girls, they know how lovely they are and have their own promotional magazine. This food has a loving intensity to it, and it is as good as you will find in London Now they have expanded into Mayfair – but the least horrifying part,

The Newt is an idealised country house in Somerset which won the World’s Best Boutique Hotel award last year. It is small, beautiful and mind-meltingly expensive, even for the Bruton Triangle and its mooing art galleries. Poor Somerset! It never wanted to be monied enough to have a triangle, but the rich make their own mythology. Since they paint every-thing grey – and now green, I learn at the Newt – they need it. A triangle fills the day. The Newt is for people who think that Babington House is stupid (it is) and though the Newt has its own issues – like the King, its taste is almost too

Hôtel de Crillon sits on the Place de la Concorde, a vast square renamed for bloodshed, then the lack of it – it was the Place de la Révolution, with knitting and bouncing heads. Now it is placid, and the Crillon is the most placid thing in it. No one does grand hotels like the French, except perhaps the Swiss, who have nothing better to do. Hôtel de Crillon was one of twin palaces commissioned by Louis XV before the French butchered his grandson and his wife outside them: it looks like Buckingham Palace but prettier and with possible PTSD. It has been a hotel for 115 years and next