Food

News today that the government is going to try to improve NHS food with that old New Labour favourite, the league table. Not that I’m knocking it – I’ve been working on my own league table for the ‘hotel services’ of the top private hospitals in London, canvassing the views of various rich but poorly friends. I’m hoping the full results will be published in Spectator Health, but just as a taster I can reveal that the top spot for food is King Edward VII’s (who keep quite a decent cellar too) and the bottom is The Lindo Wing, where I had the misfortune to eat recently myself. Not only

There is a whiff of Weimar in the air in Britain. Barely a week now passes without some further denigration caused by anti-Semitic, sorry, pro-Palestine demonstrators targeting businesses run by Jews/stores selling products produced by the Jewish state. You know, like Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Marks and Spencer, Starbucks and so on. Most of this fairly random targeting of whatever business sounds a bit Jewish goes unnoticed. Sometimes protestors manage to get the business closed – as with the Ahava store in liberal, enlightened Brighton. Generally they just succeed in intimidating shoppers and making it easier for people to shop elsewhere in some non-Semitic store. Sometimes the protestors, like this young man

Last week I experienced the horror of Stansted Airport. I had paid for a fast track through security to avoid the hell of standing in a queue for an hour behind people grappling to put their haemorrhoid cream and K-Y Jelly into a see-though bag and struggling to the conveyor belt with their trousers around their ankles. My flight being massively delayed, I set off for a restaurant named The Bridge where the food was so bad I began to wish it was an actual bridge from which I could throw myself off. Of course, the bit of egg and bacon I ordered cost more than my flight (I was

In the past few weeks my poor dog Maisie has been screamed at, threatened, vilified and monstered, just as she is every summer. Why? Because as soon as the weather promises to be nice a significant number of idiots dust down their Tupperware and schlep a picnic to a public park. Why is it, then, that dogs who make a dash for the chicken drumsticks laid out within sniffing distance and on their own turf are accused of theft and bad behaviour? In what way can we possibly blame scavenging animals from taking food from the ground? And this is in a world where women who go out late at

As usual I enjoyed Hugo Rifkind’s column in the Times today. His central point that fights, whether on Europe or Scotland or whatever, can’t be ducked forever and that complacency is fatal is all very sound. But that’s not what really caught my eye. No, I was taken by his reminder that Roger Helmer, Ukip’s sword-bearer in the Newark by-election, reckons that Indian restaurants are the only good thing to have come from immigration and I remembered that, gosh, Mr Helmer is hardly alone in thinking that. Pretty much anytime anyone writes about immigration commenters will chunter that it’s all very well for you swanky, hoity-toity media types to bore on about

There is so much to hate about massively successful TV series Masterchef that I have been glued to it for ten years. But then I always watch Nigel Farage when he pops up on TV, and even sit through that advert for Sheilas’ Wheels. But let me explain why I think Masterchef is so bloody annoying to me, a food-lover and enthusiastic cook. First there are the hosts, John Torode and ‘Mr Spanky’ Greg Wallace, and their parroting of puerile comments. You know what I mean: ‘Saltiness coming from the…’, ‘Sweetness running through…’, ‘Flavours of the sea’, ‘Tang of the…’, ‘ABSOLUTELY beautiful’. Then there is the question of John Torode’s upper lip: where

Do we really mean to kill investment banking, or are we trampling it by accident in a fit of righteous zeal? By ‘we’ I mean politicians, regulators and public opinion, and by ‘kill’ I mean rendering it unattractive or unviable for any shareholder-owned financial business except on the most limited scale — and as uncertain a career choice as, say, Liberal Democrat politics or freelance journalism. The announcement last week of a radical scaling back of Barclays’ trading and deal-making arm has stoked a debate that had been smouldering for some time; for background reading, I recommend recent articles by Philip Augar in the FT and Frances Coppola in Forbes.

Do you know where the chicken in your lunchtime sandwich came from? Where it lived and how it died? For most people, the answer’s probably no, so it might have been a surprise to discover that many restaurants, supermarkets, and even schools have been selling halal meat without labelling it as such. Of course there are people who will argue for both sides of halal. I can understand why people are so against it, as Melanie McDonagh explains in her blog. After all, slitting an animal’s throat while it’s still conscious isn’t the nicest way of doing things. But I’m not sure that halal – or even kosher slaughter, which