Food

It is enough to drive a fellow to the bottle. I am not given to agnosticism. My view is that if the evidence seems to sustain a conclusion, weigh it and arrive at one. On Brexit, I find that impossible. Most of my friends have no problem. From Remoaners to rejoicers, they all deal in certainties. I cannot emulate them. My intellect seems to have turned into a cushion, bearing the imprint of the last person I spoke to. I refuse to believe that the Bank of England has turned into the equivalent of an M.R. James ghost story, a delightful way of giving everyone a good scare on a

Caffè Concerto is a chain of Italian cafés sprouting, lividly, across London and the world. There is one on Piccadilly, one on Regent Street, and one on the Haymarket. There is one in Birmingham, and one in Westfield. (The precise address is an ungaudy unit 2000a, but presumably it is hidden behind florist-ry). There is one in Qatar. There is one in Saudi Arabia. There isn’t one in Venice, although the website has a photograph of Venice. It’s too Venetian for Venice. The style is very Italian, in that it is a combination of great style and no style at all. (Not bad style. Just an absence, something forgotten or

Tish is a new grand café in Belsize Park, north London, but kosher. There are not really enough Jews to fill a kosher restaurant in London, and they tend to fall into dust, like the ten tribes, and the temple. 1701, the unwise and subtle restaurant by Bevis Marks synagogue, has gone; Bloom’s in Golders Green has gone, too. Most British Jews aren’t kosher because chicken without butter isn’t worth having, even if you do believe that bushes speak and people want to kill you. Mostly, the food will kill you. But not always. The north London restaurant most favoured by Jews is Oslo Court, which is actually a specialist in

Darkness, but not the blanket of the dark. This was a sinister darkness, beset by smoke and flames, by the clash of steel, by screams, by terror, by horror. The victims were Huguenots on the quayside at La Rochelle in 1688. They had heard the good news. James II had been overthrown, so it was safe for French Protestants to seek refuge in England. Others wished to violate their safety. For the previous three years, since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had helped to cost King James his throne), the Huguenots had been persecuted. Swaggering, bullying dragoons had been billeted in their homes. Now, as the oppressed

The Pig at Combe is a restaurant in a country house hotel in a valley in Devon. I actually went to the Combe when it was only a country house hotel but, unlike Martha Gellhorn looking around a hotel function room in Spain and realising it had been an operating theatre in the Civil War, I did not recognise it. I spent three hours eating there, and I missed it until I looked it up and realised I spent a slightly haunted night here 15 years ago, after covering something Jane Austen-related nearby. That is an occupational hazard of the female newspaper feature writer, and that cold blue-and-white wall-paper will

I couldn’t find Gazelle. I walked up and down Albermarle Street, in which Oscar Wilde once plotted his own doom in the Albermarle Club, and I couldn’t find it. I had to go to Caffè Nero opposite the Ritz Hotel and email my dining companion — where are you? Are you there? Does Gazelle exist? Or is it a modern European restaurant and cocktail bar so exclusive that it exists only in the imaginings of the International Private Jet Set who have turned Mayfair into something so ugly it could only be purchased at Harrods? Is it an imago that serves breakfast? It’s not an imago that serves breakfast, he

Q. My husband and I have been invited to the birthday party of a distinguished public figure with whom we have had a discreet, or, at least unboasted of, relationship over many years. The invitation is displayed on the dresser in our kitchen. Recently a woman visitor to our house saw the invitation and cried: ‘Wow! How did you two get invited to that?’ Mary, I felt her astonishment was not only maladroit but also passive aggressive. How should I have replied to her veiled insult? — Name and address withheld A. You might have responded: ‘Oh dear. I’m sorry. Have you not been invited? The only reason we’ve been

Politicians are having a terrible time of late, along with the rest of us — it’s not much fun watching the remnants of the post-war consensus shatter — and so here is Albert Roux consoling them with a new, glossy restaurant on the door-step of their rotting legislature palace. Food at the Palace of Westminster is not the best, although Corbynistas think it is. They think peers bathe in champagne while laughing and that MPs don’t have to butter their own toast. Well they will learn post-Revolution. They will learn to use a butter knife and how to talk righteously to a nationalised media. It’s called Roux at Parliament Square,

The Petersham is a fading hotel on Richmond Hill. I went to a bar mitzvah there in 1986, which gives you a good idea of how fashionable it is. I grew up near Petersham. I always thought it smelled of eternal summer, but it was the late 1970s. The Petersham is also a new restaurant in Covent Garden, a sequel to Petersham Nurseries, the garden centre café by the Thames, in Petersham, that won a Michelin star in 2011. So, the name is either a deranged lack of imagination or a monument to Petersham. I hope it is a monument. It deserves it. Now there is another Petersham restaurant, in

Hide is a £20 million restaurant at the Green Park end of Piccadilly, on the three lower floors of a brutalist box by Clarges Street. From outside it looks like an illustration from a storybook: people eating while illuminated in glass boxes. It is a restaurant to be looked at from outside, a restaurant with no skin. Hide is the fourth restaurant from Ollie Dabbous, who is the most talented British chef of his generation, even if you think that dowsing food in flowers is very irritating. Dabbous, which opened in 2012, offered fairy food near Tottenham Court Road, which needs it badly: strange decapitated eggs, a carpet of flowers,

In 2007 Mikhael Gorbachev starred in a Louis Vuitton advert. He was driven past the Berlin Wall with Louis Vuitton luggage and the photograph was printed in Vanity Fair. It was baffling and reassuring, but nothing lasts forever. A few years ago I went on the Kleptocracy Bus Tour. It is run by a man called Roman Borisovich and it tours London — and sometimes Oxford —identifying kleptocratic crimes, feuds, housing, anxieties and behaviours. During a recent tour, a neighbour of Andrey Guryev, the fertiliser magnate who bought Witanhurst in Highgate, testified that a voice from a security box had asked him to stop strimming his own hedge. Of course,

Jilly Cooper’s fictional hero Rupert Campbell-Black has ‘never been to Hammersmith’. I have but I wish I hadn’t. I love the Westway because it takes you away from Hammersmith. Even so, it possesses the River Café — it is not a café — a famous and influential Italian restaurant. It was ten when Tony Blair came to power, but inside it is as if he were still here, playing air guitar while chatting about PPP. It is inaccessible, taunting its clientele to go to Hammersmith. It feels as if it takes more than an hour to get to the River Café from anywhere that is not Hammersmith. How do they