Restaurants

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

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

I see this column as an essay on cultural polarisation: artisanal butter can only take you so far into wisdom. I cower in Covent Garden, mourning Tory romanticism, and stare, cold-eyed in St James’s, at oligarchic mezze. Sometimes I eat by mistake. I couldn’t get into the fashionable noodle place in Soho, whose Instagram-made queue stretched to Cambridge Circus on Saturday night. It reminded me of the crowds at royal weddings: both camp for dreams. So, I went to Wingmans instead.  Wingmans – it lost the apostrophe, it’s a decadent age – calls itself ‘London’s best wings’. They are chicken wings, not angel wings, and this is Pottersville, not Bedford

Back to the past: it’s safer there. There is a themed restaurant dedicated to George VI of all people, near Berkeley Square – a sort of Rainforest Café for monarchists who won’t sink to the Tiltyard Café at Hampton Court. I was looking for a restaurant my husband might like – Brexit, meat, maps of the Empire at its height in colour – and I found the Guinea Grill in Bruton Place. George VI isn’t a vivid monarch. He lived in the shadow of queens – one Mary, two Elizabeths – and on film he is always crying, or dying. In The Crown (Jared Harris, marvellous) he lost his lung.

For British people, America is an idea brought by cinema, and The Dover, the New York Italian bar and restaurant in Mayfair, meets a version of it. It’s not quite the ballroom in Some Like It Hot, not quite Rick’s Café in Casablanca, but it’s as close as you will find near Green Park Underground, and that has a charm to it, because Americans can speak. It’s from Martin Kuczmarski, formerly of the once preening, now ragged Soho House. He has named his company Difficult Name. There’s a message there, and a story, and it made a glorious restaurant with the tagline ‘A good place to be since 2023’. It

Home Kitchen is in Primrose Hill, another piece of fantasy London, home to the late Martin Amis and Paddington Bear. It is a measure of the times that Elizabeth II had no literary chronicler – no Amis, no Proust for her – but was, almost against her will, given Paddington Bear instead. When I saw the small bear at her memorials, I thought: is that her genre? Infants’ fiction? Couldn’t she do better? The question that follows is, of course: would they have eaten together at Home Kitchen? The barley is doughty, fragrant and from the earth. The crumble is from God To do so – and forgive this fiction,

The Ambassadors Clubhouse is on Heddon Street, close to Savile Row and the fictional HQ of Kingsman, which was a kind of privatised MI6. I wonder if the Kingsmen eat here, being clubmen. Heddon Street needs fiction because its reality is one-dimensional. It is an alleyway behind Regent Street, and it used to be interesting. There was an avant-garde café under the Heddon Street Kitchen called The Cave of the Golden Calf. Ziggy Stardust was photographed for his album cover outside No. 23; from Heddon Street you could hear the Beatles play their final concert on the roof of 3 Savile Row in 1969. This is dense, fierce, very sophisticated

Sally Lunn’s is a teashop in Bath. It sits in a lane by the abbey, and the Roman baths. Paganism and Christianity jostle here: Minerva battles Christ, who wins, for now. Sally Lunn’s calls itself ‘the oldest house in Bath’ (c. 1482). It is rough-hewn, with a vast teal window and pumpkins on display. The pumpkins might be plastic. I don’t know. Tourists queue in the hallway behind a large wooden cutout of a woman who might be Sally Lunn. She is a semi-mythical woman: the Huguenot refugee Solange Luyon, who came to Bath in the 1680s with brioche in her hands. No one knows if she really existed. At the

At Julie’s at the fag end of Saturday lunchtime, Notting Hill beauties are defiantly not eating, and the table is covered with crumbs. Restaurant Ozymandias, I think to myself. This is no longer a district for the perennially wracked, or unrich. The Black Cross – Martin Amis’s ideal pub in London Fields – is now a sushi joint. Of course it is. The omelette is bright yellow and tough, like a hi-viz croissant Julie’s, which is named for its first owner, the interior designer Julie Hodgess, mattered in the 1980s. I don’t trust restaurant myth-making – let longevity be the judge, and this is the third Julie’s on the site

Cloth is opposite St Bartholomew the Great on Cloth Fair. People call this place Farringdon, but it isn’t really: it belongs to the teaching hospital and the meat market and William Wallace who died a famous death here and has only a little plaque in turn. Smithfield embraces the dead. Sherlock Holmes met Dr Watson here and, for BBC1, jumped off the roof of the hospital. If Cloth calls itself a ‘neighbourhood wine bar’, which sounds less threatening than ‘restaurant’, its true customers are the dead, and that is no criticism. The chips are marvellous, and this matters. I always judge a restaurant on the chips I am early, so