Tanya Gold is The Spectator's restaurant critic.
Oxford is a pile of medieval buildings filled with maniacs, and is therefore one of the most interesting places on earth. It is easy to go mad in Oxford — it’s the damp — or grow other worlds, like John Tolkien, whose Middle Earth, I suspect, was largely an emotional defence against the conversation at
The Camelot Castle Hotel is a pebble-dashed late-Victorian excrescence on a cliff. It overlooks the ruins of Tintagel Castle. A baby-blue Rolls-Royce Wraith and a floral Aston Martin are parked outside. They are the owners’ cars. Everyone else is in a banger. This hotel played the lunatic asylum in the 1979 Dracula starring Frank Langella,
The Market Hall Victoria is an international food shed opposite the station terminus. I have long hated Victoria, thinking it the most provincial part of central London. It longs for the provinces, it impersonates them, it summons them. It is odd because the station itself is beautiful: a grimy Edwardian fantasy with tall grimy chimneys
The Pirate Bar is an oddity, even for this column: a bar and restaurant themed in homage to a pirate, whom I consider to be generic, and Leonard Cohen. It is in Hydra, a three-hour boat ride from Piraeus, and Cohen’s home in the 1960s with his muse — this means unpaid female servant who
The Goring is a tiny grand hotel near Victoria Station and the Queen’s garden wall. Victoria is not pleasant — traffic fumes —but this only makes the Goring more determined to be the grandest of all London’s tiny grand hotels. That it is in the wrong place — it should be in Mayfair in 1858
The Prada Café is both a cake shop and a historical inevitability. It sits on Mount Street, almost opposite the Connaught hotel, and between what used to be Nicky Clarke’s hairdressing salon and a luggage shop so expensive it has a queue outside. People are queuing up to explore late capitalism through the prism of
Decks is a restaurant built on the Sea of Galilee. It is Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu’s favourite restaurant (it is occupying the sea, if you like) and it is huge: two storeys of decking (hence ‘decks’) walking into the sea where Jesus of Nazareth fed his 5,000 Biblical Corbynistas. The view is of young Jewish
I am obsessed with Fortnum & Mason, and the jams of the England that never was but could be. It is, of course, a class-based obsession for the lower-middle to the upper-middle classes (but not below or above): a very pantomime of Englishness. It is, essentially, imperialism made gaudy with jam. Where do you think
As the left sinks into psychosis, what remains? The answer is sugar, profanity, snacks and toys. Protest now resembles Clown Town, a dystopic toddler play barn near Finchley Central. To mark the American President’s trip to London this week, the Donald-Trump-in-a-nappy balloon rose again. There was also a Donald Trump robot. It sat on a
As the left sinks into psychosis, what remains? The answer is sugar, profanity, snacks and toys. Protest now resembles Clown Town, a dystopic toddler play barn near Finchley Central. To mark the American President’s trip to London this week, the Donald-Trump-in-a-nappy balloon rose again. There was also a Donald Trump robot. It sat on a
Café Diana is a Princess Diana-themed greasy spoon in Notting Hill Gate. It is a mad place, but it is still the sanest part of Notting Hill because it has the integrity to state its madness bluntly. There is a huge photograph of Diana smiling in the window because she was happy to collaborate in
I am not surprised that Jamie Oliver’s restaurant empire has collapsed into administration. I reviewed his flagship restaurant on Piccadilly, Barbecoa, in 2017, and damned it because the food was bad and the atmosphere non existent. (Well, it was almost empty; you cannot create joy in a void). I knew Oliver was in trouble before that
Ergon House is an epicurean boutique hotel in downtown Athens. (I quote the blurb — I never write ‘boutique’ willingly.) Did Pericles know that Athens had a downtown? I shall dispense with the politics, except to say that we should return the Parthenon friezes, for it’s lonely on the Acropolis, and only a fool would
Each suburban soul yearns for the Soho of their youth. It isn’t that Soho was better in the 1990s when I invaded the Colony Room, twitching, and took a fag off Sarah Lucas. It is that I was. This was the view of a friend after I last wrote on Soho restaurants. We once ran
Bellamy’s is a Franco-Belgian brasserie in Bruton Place, a dim alley in the charismatic part of Mayfair; the part that has not been ruined. There isn’t much you can do with an alley except blow it up. It feels like a survivor from a more ancient time: 2004. Its rivals from that time are broken
I grew up in south-west London in the 1970s when Italian restaurants had exposed brick walls and paper tablecloths in red and white squares and giant pepper pots and were owned by people called Franco who slapped your father on the back. The lasagne came in individual dishes, oozing deep red tomato sauce so hot
I love the drug of television, which is slightly less awful than the drug of social media because the conversation is one way, and so I have been rewatching Whitechapel. It’s a drama series about murder, and possibly the supernatural, set in Whitechapel, and it is slightly rude to its residents because it posits the
Imperial Treasure is a restaurant in the part of St James’s where Leopold von Hoesch, the German ambassador to George V, buried his dog Giro after Giro electrocuted himself by eating a cable. (Everyone is a food critic. Giro was merely an unlucky one.) And this seems apt. Because it’s rare to see people in
Titania McGrath, 24, is a radical intersectionalist vegan activist, feminist slam poet and the author of Woke: a Guide to Social Justice. She won’t meet me in person for security reasons – she fears doxxing – or send me a photograph of her face. Rather, she consents to an interview by email from her gîte
A serious restaurant for serious times: the Ledbury in Notting Hill. It’s a good time to do it, as the dreams of the Notting Hill set crumple to dust and Jacob Rees-Mogg rides out in his stupid hats. It has sat in its former pub on Ledbury Road since 2005. It won — and has
