Restaurants

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

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

Rules looks as if it voted for Brexit, and now finds itself inside an eternal Christmas Eve, where it is always Christmas, and always Brexit. And what a gay Brexit, with swags and flounces and light bouncing through the windows on to Maiden Lane, like a child’s vision of hope. Or is it illusion? Does a chimney contain Arron Banks as Father Christmas with gifts in his sack marked ‘depression’, ‘delusion’ and ‘starvation’? Will he get stuck and go shouty-crackers on Twitter? Is Nigel Farage sipping a pint of lager, pretending to be a good elf? The sort of elf that politically alienated elves can identify with and follow, until

Farmacy, which opened last year, is London’s most fashionable ‘clean eating’ restaurant; it is, therefore, a restaurant for people who hate food. This ‘clean eating’ epidemic grows as we fall into decadence and see food, rather than our own mouths, as the source of our calamity — how can we be saved from food? It is Bunyadi, the pop-up naked hobbit restaurant again, but without wit: same food, less fun, and no tree stumps at all except metaphorically, on the tops of people’s necks. It is owned by Camilla Fayed, the daughter of Mohammed Fayed, and there is probably much to divine about that family dynamic here, had I stayed,

Jean-Georges at the Connaught — formerly the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel, but it was renamed during the first world war, at about the same time the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was deprived of his British peerages, which was one of the funnier events in the war — is the informal restaurant at the Connaught Hotel, and it opened this summer on the curve of Carlos Place, Mayfair. The Connaught is an English hotel with a German heart. It is therefore the hotel equivalent of our Queen, and the best hotel in the world. It is better than its sister Claridge’s, from which Dwight Eisenhower ran away in 1944. He

Foxlow is near Golden Square in west Soho, where drunken hacks used to take long drunken lunches before having stupid drunken ideas. My favourite stupid drunken idea was from a Guardian hack and it involved renting an ice-cream van and asking Nick Cohen and A.A. Gill to drive around in it, selling ice creams, bickering and hopefully breaking down, before writing up the experience for a Silly Season special. But drunken hacks no longer take long drunken lunches in Soho. They get drunk at home, if there is one, or drink in the queue at Eat, if they can afford to eat. The piece was not commissioned, the years passed, and

I am always surprised to remember that Andrew Lloyd Webber has taste; it must be remembrance of Cats. I was surprised, for instance, to learn that he once owned Pablo Picasso’s portrait of d’Angel Fernández de Soto, which I always thought of as my Picasso because it looks like my friend Hadrian Wise, who used to come to Merton College bar in his pyjamas. We once rolled a joint as long as The Spectator because he loved The Spectator. High as I was after the Spectator-length joint in 1994, I never thought I would write for it. Neither did he. Now Lloyd Webber, whose masterpiece is Phantom of the Opera,

To the Ned, as diarists say when they can’t provide a rational reason for their voyage: the colossal banking hall transformed into ten restaurants, or one super-restaurant with ten menus, by the owners of Soho House, who are sucking up all the press coverage the age of churnalism can grant. I cannot yet decide what is more chilling: a Soho House open to all or a Soho House safely hidden behind its semi–weaponised membership criteria. I began to loathe the brand when I saw the table-tennis tables and selfie booths at Shoreditch House. I wouldn’t care if the media class played table tennis and took selfies until their hands and

Cafe Football is in the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, east London, a shopping centre with a faulty name. It isn’t in the west, and it isn’t in a field. (The original Westfield is in Shepherd’s Bush. That is in the west, but not in a field. It is by the A40 and it is like America without the joy.) Westfield Stratford City sits in a puddle of chain cafés and restaurants and shops. It has been on my review list for three years, 2.9999999 of which I have spent cowering in north London. Stratford was — shall we call it renovated? — for the London Olympic Games in 2012,

It is rare for me to write a love letter to a London restaurant, but Joe Allen, which is 40 this year, deserves it; if you have any sense you will throw off misery and go there now for hamburgers. It is not really a London restaurant, which may be why I love it, but a Manhattan restaurant (established on 46th Street in 1965 by a man called Joe Allen) that was transplanted to London in 1977; the idea of Manhattan, anyway, which is more vivid in imagination than in life. I like to imagine the cast of All About Eve in Joe Allen, talking nonsense about ‘the theatre’ as