Restaurants

The brilliant thing about Hong Kong is that you don’t have to worry for a second about all the culture you’re missing. That’s because there’s absolutely nothing to do there except shop (I got a seriously nice bespoke dinner jacket for just £400 from Lafarfalla Tailor) drink and, most importantly, eat. Oh all right, so there are some half-strenuous walks you can do in the surprisingly uncrowded countryside just outside the city (you can cab it from the centre to the pretty Shek O beach — which on weekdays is half-deserted — in just 25 minutes) but even then the main purpose of the exercise is to end up in

I hoped that Bronte would be filled with Victorian writers licking ink off their fingers and bitching about Mrs Gaskell being a third-rate hack; but it is not to be. (Do not think I am vulgar. My description is accurate. Wuthering Heights is a rude novel, and Jane Eyre is worse. St John Rivers, its Christian Grey, is surely a Spectator subscriber). It is, instead, a finely wrought and glossy restaurant off Trafalgar Square, designed, I suspect, for advertising executives. It used to be the Strand Dining Rooms but it died and now there’s this. It is named for Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Bronte. His title, it is believed,

CBeebies Land is a small dystopia inside Alton Towers, a theme park where people sometimes get their legs chopped off by a rollercoaster called The Smiler. There is a gothic mansion by Augustus Pugin, the Nietzsche of cushions, which has been allowed to fall into ruin, because it is less important than the Runaway Mine Train and a ‘ride’ covered in plastic frogs. It broods like Manderley; around it, people play with water cannon and eat sugar until their eyes are dead. I was going to suggest that parliament convene at Alton Towers while the Palace of Westminster is repaired, so they could feel the Pugin; but they might be

Friends have a house in Provence, near the foot of Mont Ventoux. Even in a region so full of charm and grace, it is an exceptional spot. Although nothing visible dates from earlier than the 18th century, the house is in the midst of olive groves and there has been a farm dwelling for centuries. I suspect that one would find medieval masonry in the foundations. Beginning life as a simple farmhouse, it has been bashed about, added to and poshed up. On the western side, the exterior has pretensions to grandeur. The other elevation is more feminine; you expect to find Fragonard painting a girl on a swing. At

The Sail Loft is under a castle on a mountain on an island in the sea; for that, I could forgive it anything. It is on St Michael’s Mount in Marazion near Penzance, an island so charming and devoid of internet connection it almost strips me of words. If I lived here I would not write again; I would not need to. I would be happy, and who judges fish when they are happy and finds it not enough? It is accessible along a granite causeway for four hours each day — then the path goes back to the sea and one must take a boat; it is more ruthless

In or out? Almost two months on and I’m afraid the great debate shows no sign of abating, certainly not in our divided household. And while we’ve had several referendums over the matter, the result is always a stalemate. The only upside is that this argument has nothing to do with Brussels. It’s far more rudimentary. The battle in Palmer Towers is whether we eat in or out when wanting to see friends. My wife Joanna — who, as it happens, was for In over the country’s EU membership — is a firm outer, while I, who voted Out on 23 June, am a determined inner. As with the EU

Cliveden is a good review for a divided country and I have waited, not too long, for it to feel resonant for Spectator readers; it aches with class-consciousness. It has food pens dependent on your status — whether you are eating in the National Trust grounds, or the swanky (I love this word; it’s so bitter) hotel inside the ‘manor’. And even if you are staying in the swanky manor, famous as the venue where John Profumo exploited the not-recovering child-abuse victim Christine Keeler — don’t call me a sighing Guardianista, I have done my research and she once aborted a child with a pen — in a swimming pool,

Cafe Monico, as if named by an illiterate playboy, is on Shaftesbury Avenue between The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Les Mis, so if you want to be in an Asperger’s syndrome/-singing French revolutionary restaurant sandwich it is the café for you, and only for you. It is from Soho House, whose quest to make the whole of Britain a crèche-restaurant with table-tennis tables and photo booths for moronic remembrance goes on. There are more Soho House franchises now than Ivy franchises; even Chiswick has one. It is confusing, but if it upsets the media executive class, who must find new ponds to preen and fight

In the 1970s, when there were many fewer restaurants in London, Locket’s was much the best place to eat around Westminster. The IRA once paid it a compliment by -trying to bomb it. If a lobbyist -invited one to lunch there, it meant that a) his firm had a large budget, b) he was hoping for important information — or c) he was feeling like a good lunch. The food was a pre-nouvelle cuisine London version of sophisticated French food: dishes such as Tournedos Rossini or Steak Diane; you get the picture (the upper-middle-class version of prawn cocktail and Black Forest gateau). Locket’s catered for trenchermen’s appetites, and I remember

I have been waiting, like a heroine in fiction, for the specialist lasagne restaurant. London has long been heading this way for the benefit of the consumer-simpleton who can only process one piece of information at a time. It is clearly a response to the glut of choice in late capitalism, and so close to Karl Marx’s home in Dean Street that I can almost feel his cackling shadow. Less choice for your aching head, child, but isn’t it really more choice? The choice not to choose? That phenomenon brought us the pop-up Cadbury’s Creme Egg restaurant, which only served food made with Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. Because people are mad,

The Keeper’s House sits in the basement of Burlington House, a restaurant in disguise. It is quite different from the grand cafés of St James’s and Mayfair, which are raging exhibitionists with banquettes splayed like limbs. It is secretive and it knows, consciously or not, the tricks of children’s literature: the looking-glass, the wardrobe and the door. It is an 18th-century basement transformed, by magical whimsy, into a restaurant. To visit the loo is a quest for which you need a Gandalf, a hobbit and a lamp. Burlington House looks like an English mansion that stared at Palladio, had a panic attack and exploded. It is clever-clogs land, home to