Tanya Gold is The Spectator's restaurant critic.
24 min listen
It’s the 10,000th edition. This week’s episode features historian Tom Holland on the Spectator’s winning recipe; Douglas Murray on why he loves journalists; Mary Wakefield on coronavirus uncertainty; and Tanya Gold on what it’s like to be the magazine’s restaurant critic.
A fictional Spectator restaurant critic called Forbes McAllister appeared on Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge. He was played by Patrick Marber and was obviously based on Keith Waterhouse — bow tie, mad eyes — even if Waterhouse was never the restaurant critic at this magazine. McAllister was on TV to show off Lord
Stop the clocks: Fortnum & Mason is still delivering hampers. I am not surprised, because this shop — or rather this myth disguised as a shop — sold condiments to the Empire, and it wouldn’t let a global pandemic thwart the consumption of those condiments. It was among the earliest fans of globalisation, which is
Lamorna Ash came to the fishing port of Newlyn in south-west Cornwall to write a memoir. This is not unusual. There is a tendency, as old industries die, to watch them covetously and with awe; to paint them a paradigm of all that is lost. In the 19th century, fishwives posed for the artists of
17 min listen
The Spectator is meant for sharing. But in the age of coronavirus, that might not be possible. This new podcast will feature a few of our columnists reading out their articles from the issue each week, so that you don’t miss out. It’s a new format, so tell us what you think at podcast@spectator.co.uk. Douglas
I love eating while watching bad films like Battleship, so I love takeaway food from local restaurants. I am not rich enough to like the idea of takeaway from Simpson’s in the Strand and a plastic lid does not have the drama of a silver-plated dome. But eating takeaway food while watching Battleship is not
It was sunny on Monday so I took the children swimming in Mousehole harbour. It was almost empty but a woman sanding a boat on the quayside scowled at me. She couldn’t hear the children’s Cornish accents, which might tell her that I live here. There have been tensions for years between native Cornish and
‘Miss World 1970’ is the rather glorious title that Jennifer Hosten won. That was the year that the contest, then the greatest show on earth, was disrupted by feminist activists, who threw flour bombs at the host, Bob Hope. It is retrospectively called the foundation of the woman’s movement.The immediate trigger was Hope’s gag that
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and it sits like a red-brick crab on the Euston Road, on the site of an old goods yard between St Pancras and Euston. The older British Museum Library, whose collection was founded on the books of George III, Sir Hans Soane, Robert Harley
I meet Miriam Margolyes in her large Victorian house in Clapham. She is very small and round, with a shock of grey hair, and the clear and open gaze of a curious child. There is an innocence to her, like someone who has not quite grown up. She has a wonderful voice, which bought this
Ugly Butterfly is a zero-waste restaurant and champagne bar on the King’s Road, Chelsea. The ‘champagne bar’ addition is so awful as to be pantomime villainous — I think of zero-waste diamonds and zero-waste wars — but perhaps they need this kind of duplicity to seduce the punters, who move so slowly towards wisdom? ‘Zero-waste’
The Yard is a defiantly themed restaurant in Hyatt’s new Great Scotland Yard Hotel, an Edwardian red-brick block which once housed the Central Detective Unit of the Metropolitan Police and its constituent darkness. You have to work hard to dispel that kind of horror, and Hyatt tries: the hotel is extraordinarily lush and over-styled, even
Wild Honey is a ludicrous name for this restaurant: there is nothing wild about it, and I do not think that is even its intention. Rather, it is a cloistered, almost sombre restaurant in the grandest part of the West End, almost opposite the Athenaeum Club, whose goddess, I fancy, is weeping metal tears. I
The Michelin Red Guide is a marketing device to sell tyres by selling pastries. The guide was invented in 1900 by Michelin, the French tyre company, which is now the second-largest tyre company in the world. The guide initially covered restaurants in France, then spread to Belgium, the Alps, Germany, north Africa, Britain and, eventually,
Julie’s is a 50-year-old restaurant in Holland Park, London, newly emerged from three years of closure as plushly renovated as its customers. The website calls it ‘a Holland Park favourite, neighbourhood classic and hangout for the Hollywood set, high society and rock stars since 1969’. Whenever I hear the words ‘high society’ I reach for
Simpson’s in the Strand stopped serving breakfast in 2017, after it had been renovated to stop it smelling of cabbage. Fat men wept, but worse things have happened here. Simpson’s is built on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, in which Geoffrey Chaucer, Gaunt’s brother-in-law, wrote part of The Canterbury Tales. The palace
Locket’s is a new café from the owners of Wiltons in Jermyn Street. Wiltons is the restaurant that dukes visit when they have fallen out with White’s. It has a sign featuring a lobster that looks like Benjamin Disraeli wearing a top hat. When a bomb fell nearby in 1942, its anxious owner immediately sold
The theme music to Legoland in Berkshire is the theme music to The Exorcist. It appears from speakers hidden in the grass. I hear it as I wander out of some un-enchanted wood filled with Lego: we have lost our ancient woods and need new ones. These ones smell slightly of drains. The Exorcist music
The Roth Bar & Grill exists on an art-farm called Durslade in Bruton, Somerset, which is also the country outpost of the Hauser & Wirth gallery, which is the silliest art gallery in Britain. It specialises in decapitated gnomes. It is only 13 miles from Babington House, Soho House’s monstrous country house with its playrooms
We Jews have evolved to be neurotic; so neurotic that, in certain circumstances, the Syrian border feels slightly safer than Muswell Hill. I’ll take Muswell Hill. Polls say that only 7 per cent of British Jews will consider voting for Labour on 12 December, while 47 per cent of British Jews will consider leaving the
