Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold is The Spectator's restaurant critic.

When will James Bond drive an SUV?

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I once read that after watching a James Bond film men speed in their Honda Civics: they might do 35 mph in a built-up area. If this is so, it is due to the Aston Martin Bond has driven since 1964 (the DB5 in Goldfinger, a man with ‘a cold finger’). The DB5 has appeared in

‘Lifeless and necrotic’: Native at Browns is an ode to joylessness

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Browns is a famous fashion boutique in deepest Mayfair. It occupies a curved cream townhouse on Brook Street, which seems sunken and shuttered. Perhaps it is the lingering effects of the pandemic or because it’s late summer, but the interior — carefully designed over multiple eyries over many floors, like gold teeth fallen on a

High on the hog: The Pig at Bridge Place reviewed

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The Pig at Bridge Place is not a pig in possession of a country house, but I would be for it. You cannot have enough pigs, or any edible fauna. It is, rather, a hotel inside a Jacobean mansion — or, rather, part of a Jacobean mansion, the rest burnt down, and is all the

A Damascene moment in London: Imad’s Syrian Kitchen reviewed

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Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is an eyrie off Carnaby Street, a once-famous road which seems to exist nowadays to sell trainers to tourists who have fallen, as if by wormhole, out of the Liberty homeware department with its pathological dependence on florals. No matter. Nearby, in Kingly Court, which is like Covent Garden before it fell

Olivia Potts, Rory Sutherland and Tanya Gold

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14 min listen

On this week’s episode, Olivia Potts says angry chefs could soon get their comeuppance. (00:56) Then, Rory Sutherland says over-qualification is leading to collective idiocy. (06:28) And finally, Tanya Gold wonders why people eat lobsters. (10:16)

The politics of eating lobster

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Lobsters like to live in gullies on the sea floor, or under sand, and I understand how they feel. But you can’t hide from politics. An amendment to the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill will make it illegal to post shrink-wrapped lobsters alive, or boil them alive, which turns them from blue to Father Christmas scarlet.

An utterly convincing dreamworld: The Ritz reviewed

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The Ritz is still here, and still gaudy. No grand hotel in London feels quite so complete, if pink; as if it landed like a Tardis on Green Park. There is no real life here, and there shouldn’t be. Each guest travels with their own novella. There are jewels in the window and brides on

Wally Funk: meet the 82-year-old jetting into space with Jeff Bezos

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The moon would be more interesting with Wally Funk on it, and clearly Jeff Bezos agrees: the entrepreneur has just invited the 82-year-old female aerospace pioneer to join him on his inaugural space flight later this month.  In 1961, when she was 22, Wally took the physical tests to become an astronaut. They were grisly –

Harry Potter meets Ikea: Backlot Cafe reviewed

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Harry Potter is a fictional orphan locked in a cupboard by his aunt and uncle, after which he discovers a magical world and a better class of nemesis than his ugly suburban relatives. It seethes with class. The Dursleys are lower-middle-class, golf-club-haunting gammons. I suspect their MP is Dominic Raab, and I suspect they vote

A careful parody: Noble Rot Soho reviewed

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Noble Rot sits in Greek Street, Soho, on the site of the old Gay Hussar, which squatted here from 1953 like a rebuke. Some people loved this Hungarian ‘left-wing’ restaurant, with its terrible food, its library of Labour-themed political biographies, its raging cartoons and fond memories of Harold Wilson. But you can’t eat political biographies

The Lexus LC is why I’ll always love petrol

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The only car I have felt unsafe in is a Morgan. It was a sort of pink leather bath on wheels that screamed down the road while men over sixty waved at it. I was right to be nervous. The delivery man crashed it on the way home. A photograph of the crushed Morgan –

Bird-brained: Brood, by Jackie Polzin, reviewed

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This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness — that belong to the nameless narrator of Brood. That is incidental. It is a novel about a miscarriage — ‘our baby had been a girl’ — and, because it is a novel about the

Bad food is back: The Roof Garden at Pantechnicon reviewed

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The Roof Garden is a pale, Nordic-style restaurant at the top of the glorious Pantechnicon in Belgravia — formerly a bazaar — opposite a Waitrose I didn’t know existed. (Waitrose seems too human for Belgravia. Food seems too human for Belgravia.) This thrilling building, which should be a library — it has Doric columns —

Richard Dobbs, Tanya Gold and Rory Sutherland

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17 min listen

In this episode, Richard Dobbs reads his piece on why he’s considering giving up his second vaccine for people more in need (00:55); Tanya Gold reports from her Kent road trip in a Ferrari (07:50); and Rory Sutherland on the unexpected joys of lockdown and why we may miss it when it’s gone. (12:45)

Where I love to eat

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We can enter restaurants on Monday, and I wondered if I should tell you where to eat if you want the most fantastical or expensive or original food in London, or where I will eat in the early days of re-opening. What have you missed? A ball of ice on wheels containing champagne bottles at

Pretty food with a side order of pollution: 28-50 reviewed

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You cannot have cars and dining tables in the same dreamscape: it doesn’t work, unless you think carbon monoxide is a herb, or are wearing full Hazmat, like some teachers. London is in much denial about its air pollution; in the East End child asthmatics are choking. But we must embrace it for a few

The strange allure of off-road vehicles

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The Duke of Edinburgh was carried to his tomb in a modified Land Rover, and this is apt. He walked away from a highspeed collision in Norfolk a few years ago because – and probably only because – he was driving a Land Rover Freelander. The Land Rover, which was intially the off-road Rover, is

Back to the future: Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill reviewed

The west end of London is still pale and necrotic, but there are points of light. Hatchards the bookseller is open and its memorial to the Duke of Edinburgh is relatively, blissfully, restrained: a portrait in the window, with minimal text for a writer to trip up on his own sycophancy. People are buying whisky