Restaurants

The River Cafe has grown a thrifty annexe, and this passes for democratisation. All restaurants are tribal: if dukes have Wiltons, ancient Blairites have the River Cafe. It is a Richard Rogers remake of Duckhams oil storage, a warehouse of sinister London brick, and a Ruth Rogers restaurant. Opening in 1987, it heralded the gentrification of Hammersmith, which has stalled now that Hammersmith Bridge is closed to traffic and sits dully on the Thames, a bridge of decline. The River Cafe appears, thinly disguised, in a J.K. Rowling Cormoran Strike novel where a literary agent murders her client because he writes Swiftian pastiche, and it is a good place to

The immaculate bourgeois socialists of north London – that is not code for Jews – like to eat and drink in the former servants’ quarters of Kenwood House, because this is a mad country.  Kenwood is beautiful. It is Hampstead’s best house, standing at the top of the heath, near the head waters of the River Fleet, the river of the journalists. Further down the hill the immaculate bourgeois socialists gambol in the swimming ponds, which is apparently a fashionable thing to do. I prefer the lido, but I am not afraid of working-class teenagers. Hampstead Heath is an excitable woodland. There was a what-is-a-woman debate at the Kenwood Ladies’

La Môme is the new ‘Mediterranean’ restaurant at the Berkeley, Knightsbridge’s monumental grand hotel. It has changed, as all London’s grand hotels have changed: it is Little Dubai in the cold and the chintz is on the bonfire. Fairy lights hang from the awning of the entrance, as if in an eternal Christmas. I barely recognise it, though I ate an impersonation of a mandarin in its overwrought Instagram-friendly bakery two years ago, and it was inferior to a real mandarin. I cling to that. Designers must keep busy: this means grand hotels are always getting renovated – it’s life of a kind. The lobby feels gold, though that may

Monday, and Camden council have yet again failed to empty my food waste bin. They never miss my rubbish or dry recycling – it’s only ever the smelly stuff. I give my neighbour’s brown bin a little kick. Emptied! This feels personal. I call the council. ‘Look, this is a nightmare,’ I say. ‘This is the second week in a row. Are we on a blacklist?’ Pause. ‘Our operatives are too busy to keep lists,’ says the lady. Hang on – you mean if they weren’t so busy, they would? Things my husband and I have bickered about this week: my devotion to an ugly but comfortable pair of rubber

The Audley Public House is on the corner of North Audley Street and Mount Street in Mayfair, opposite the Purdey gun shop where you can buy a gun and a cashmere cape, because the world has changed. The Audley is a vast pale-pink Victorian castle, and it meets Mayfair in grandeur and prettiness. If the Audley looks like it could puncture you with an ornamental pinnacle, it also seems frosted with sugar – but that is money. This is the tourist Mayfair of the affluent American imagination: the pharmacies and grocers have gone, replaced by fashion (Balmain, Simone Rocha) and the spirit of Paddington Bear. Woody Allen shot Match Point

We were discussing civilisation, as one does, and its relationship with cuisine. Pasta in Italy, paella in Spain, the roast beef of Old England; wurst in Germany, burgers in the States –though with those latter examples we are moving away from the concept. What about Japan, a complex society which is full of paradoxes? For three-quarters of a century, the Meiji Restoration was the most successful revolution since the Glorious Revolution itself. It was part of a process which opened Japan to western influences and vice versa. Rather as in the UK, ancient forms were preserved, which helped to ensure social stability during a period of rapid change. Japan often

Many of us will remember, misty-eyed, how things changed around the turn of the century. How Britain ceased to be a nation brutalised by rationing and rissoles and instead blossomed into a utopia of celebrity chefs, endless food TV and a population seemingly willing and able to eat out most nights of the week. We no longer regarded ourselves as poor cousins to European nations with ‘cuisines’ – hell, Michelin stars glittered from every orifice. We had the uncalibrated zealotry of converts. In the years following the pandemic, UK hospitality came blinking back into the light, adopted a collective fixed grin and the can-do attitude of small businesspeople, and did

The Savoy Hotel is a theatre playing Mean Girls with a hotel attached to it, so you can expect it to both dream and fail. That is a polite way of saying that its new restaurant, Gallery, is not a success, but the Savoy will survive it. Though it didn’t survive the Peasants’ Revolt. It burned down, courtesy of medieval far-leftists who I would suspect were less annoying than modern far–leftists. They could hardly be more so, and I’m sure Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote some of the Canterbury Tales on this site, would agree. Gallery is beige at its most self-deceptive: flounces, columns, mirrors I review Gallery because it is