London

Each suburban soul yearns for the Soho of their youth. It isn’t that Soho was better in the 1990s when I invaded the Colony Room, twitching, and took a fag off Sarah Lucas. It is that I was. This was the view of a friend after I last wrote on Soho restaurants. We once ran holding hands through the sprinklers in St James’s Park laughing at Peter Mandelson, who was passing with his dog, and that is my memory of the Blair years. So Soho, which is thick with metaphor anyway — its very name is a hunting call: death for one and ecstasy for another — is a district

Bellamy’s is a Franco-Belgian brasserie in Bruton Place, a dim alley in the charismatic part of Mayfair; the part that has not been ruined. There isn’t much you can do with an alley except blow it up. It feels like a survivor from a more ancient time: 2004. Its rivals from that time are broken or gone. Annabel’s is now enormous. The Ivy is a franchise like KFC. The new generation of fashionable restaurants have glittering statuary by cretinous artists, professional PRs and spin. They are ideas. What use is an idea when you want three courses of French–Belgian cuisine for £29.50 a head in central London? Bellamy’s is named

I grew up in south-west London in the 1970s when Italian restaurants had exposed brick walls and paper tablecloths in red and white squares and giant pepper pots and were owned by people called Franco who slapped your father on the back. The lasagne came in individual dishes, oozing deep red tomato sauce so hot it stuck to the edges of the dish and burnt your tongue. You cried the first time, but not again, because you loved Spaghetti Junction more than your own home. The perfect Italian restaurant was fixed for me then, in 1979, and that was it, because restaurants are about joy, not food. And so I

Next year the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) will offer one degree, in design, technology and the humanities, to teach students to solve ‘complex problems’ like (they suggest) knife crime. Really? The key to problem solving is the development of two essential faculties — the imaginative and the critical. Can LIS really teach for those — or just how to pass exams? The philosopher Seneca insisted that the search for what really counted (his example was virtue) ‘cannot be delegated to someone else’. He illustrated it by telling the story of Calvisius Sabinus, who had the brains and bank account of the Roman equivalent of Sir Philip Green. His memory was

Will I be allowed to take my dog to Europe after 29 March? A trivial question, you might think, in these feverish times, but one that might be an indicator of what the EU thinks of us and how/if they’re going to make us pay for leaving. I took Boss, my Battersea rescue, across France this Christmas and it couldn’t have been easier. The dog was barely noticed on the way out and given a fast, friendly check on the way back. Why should anything change? A pet on the road doesn’t get extra germs just because of the colour of its passport and yet nobody has any idea what’s

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

To London for much too brief a visit: a marriage, lunch with Commodore Tim Hoare, and a look-see for a house. Yes, I am returning to live in London, but under one condition. It’s called Corbyn, and if he comes in, I’ll stay away. It’s rather cowardly, I know, but I did live in London during the closed shops of the early 1970s. I experienced the joys of the three-day week, the uncollected rubbish, the hospitals without electricity, and the unions exercising power over the government until a certain Margaret Thatcher put a stop to it. I find it hard to understand how people can root for Labour when the

Which is more diverse: London or Devon? That’s not a trick question. London is much more diverse than Devon. But let’s tweak the question slightly. Which is more diverse: a pub in London or a pub in Devon? Here the answer is not so easy. Though low in ethnic diversity, a pub in Devon might contain a more representative mix of ages, educational backgrounds, earnings, wealth, sexual proclivities and political opinions than a pub in central London. London, for all its vaunted diversity, is a place where you can practise extreme homophily — spending your time exclusively with people nearly identical to you. People largely socialise with contemporaries from work.

Battersea Power Station once generated nearly a fifth of London’s power. It must have hummed and clanked almost as much as it does today while its transformation proceeds noisily. Graphic prints of it are two a penny across the capital, but I’m fond of them because the power station is my near neighbour. I still thrill to glimpse it framed by rows of Victorian semis, especially now that the new chimneys are lit dramatically at night, red crane lights dotted about them like a spiky ruby crown. Across the world it has celebrity status, thanks to the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals. The band’s inflatable pink piggy caused

I wouldn’t normally visit Coq d’Argent, which I think means the chicken of money. It is a moderately famous restaurant in a pink and brown tower in the City of London, once owned, as so much has been, by Sir Terence Conran, and now by D&D, specialists in soulless food barns. As restaurants go, it feels unlucky. It has — how to put this? — a circular roof garden from which people sometimes throw themselves off. One was a restaurant critic, but his last meal was not at Coq d’Argent. That was at Hawksmoor in Spitalfields. He had good taste, then, and he quoted Samuel Johnson on Twitter as he

The New York Times is at it again. It was only back in May that Mr S was forced to call into question the paper’s coverage of Britain, after a curious article on ‘Austerity Britain’ by one Peter S Goodman appeared, complete with a slew of glaring omissions. Well, now it seems that the NYT has staggered off its stool for another bruising round. A food review of London has been published in its Blighty-sceptic pages, and it can’t be said to be very much better than poor Mr Goodman’s. The author, Robert Draper, has written an article about the capital’s food scene, in which he praises the city for having