What does a critic do when her genre collapses? Mostly I panic. I speak to restaurateurs who believe that without government help into 2022, many British restaurants will close. Most restaurants rent their premises; even if landlords defer collection, the debt will be unpayable. Most restaurants operate on slender margins; they cannot secure finance even
You don’t dine in the age of pandemic: you scuttle about in the wreckage. If you can afford food, and you aren’t afraid of your neighbours, who don’t understand the government strategy and believe that if they stay indoors for eight years they will survive, and so should you, you can eat out; or rather
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
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
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
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
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
Bob Bob Cité is a restaurant dangling like testicles from the underside of the Leadenhall Building in the City of London. It is shaped like a series of yellow train carriages, for a voyage no one will ever make; the building above it manages, in the way of the age, to be both absurd and
The sandwich restaurant Pret A Manger is accused of harbouring centrists. Those are words I never thought I would type, but these are mad days. A Corbyn supporter called Aaron Bastani, the author of a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism — or, as wags call it, Luxury Space Robot Communism — has accused Rory
If you review restaurants professionally you would not think Britain wanted to leave the EU. You would think she wanted to live happily in the twinkling golden stars of Europe like Emily Thornberry’s neck fat, eating, semi-eternally, at a European-style brasserie. British restaurants are a silent acknowledgement that native food is not very good unless
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