An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
I’ve long clung hold of one small crumb of comfort from my encroaching blindness. Namely that if and when my deteriorating vision (I have albinism and nystagmus) packs up completely, I can become one of those blokes who takes his guide dog to the pub and teaches it to drink beer from an ashtray. But I won’t be doing that at any branches of J.D. Wetherspoon as things stand. As
Many years ago, when entertaining my then girlfriend (now wife) for our first Valentine’s Day, I spent a considerable amount of time and effort preparing an authentic beef bourguignon. With more than one bottle poured in during the slow-cooking process, it did not offer the lightness one might desire on such an occasion. After pushing
It was the longest pub crawl of my life – visiting numerous boozers across 250 miles over ten days – in homage to one of Britain’s most infamous drinkers, Dylan Thomas. I’m not, I must qualify, a Thomas obsessive, as this enterprise might suggest. If exposed to Thomas at length, I find myself recalling Private Eye’s 1980s characterisation of Neil Kinnock: ‘The Welsh windbag.’ Although, in fairness, even Thomas himself described his own verse as ‘a
I’m in Mexico City and spoilt for choice as to where to go for a lunchtime taco. Taquerias are everywhere, each entrance best described as a hole in the wall: you step in from the street into a dark, cavernous stone vault and go past the bar, stocked with dozens of bottles of spirits and
The exterior of the Phoenix Palace is cream with golden letters like the napkin and the Laffer curve, and it is squeezed below an Art Deco mansion block in Baker Street. The street is self-effacing, stuck between the Marylebone Road and the Sherlock Holmes museum, which exists because London is, among other things, morbid. The
‘That’s not a pasty!’ my husband declares loftily, eyeing up what most definitely is a veritable clutch of cheese and onion pasties emerging from my oven. Handsome, puffed up, golden brown (the pasties, not the husband), filled with a cheese, potato and onion filling, contents threatening to splurge. The steam rises from them like in
Imagine going into an English pub and slapping a tenner down on the bar. ‘All I can drink, please,’ you say. ‘Certainly sir,’ says the barman. ‘You’ve got two hours.’ ‘Right then,’ you say. ‘I’ll start with a pint.’ Ten minutes later: ‘Whisky, please, no ice.’ Shortly afterwards: ‘I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary.’
I was in Scottsdale, Arizona and, to put it mildly, a little squiffy. Most folk go there to play golf (yawn) but I’d gone there to drink and, after a lengthy tequila masterclass in La Hacienda and several cocktails at Platform 18 (‘best US cocktail bar’ in the 2023 Spirited Awards, incidentally) in nearby Phoenix,
Michelin stars were pitted against hygiene scores when Gareth Ward, chef-patron of the two-Michelin starred restaurant Ynyshir, was recently given a hygiene rating of… one. Ynyshir, which sits on the edge of Eryri national park near Machynlleth in Ceredigion, has held its second Michelin star since 2022, making it the first restaurant in Wales to receive two
My eight-year-old son’s eyes widened when I unwrapped a Christmas present I got from my parents: a bottle of cherry brandy from the Lyme Bay winery in Axminster. ‘Can I have some?’ Humphrey asked, for he had been hitting the cherry brandy hard over the summer. Not the alcoholic kind, of course, but the cherry
There are two great American bars in London. One is perfect to escape the winter chill, the other to embrace summer sun. In winter, the American Bar at the Savoy – London’s oldest surviving cocktail bar – is ideal. There is a reason why this warm and welcoming spot has courted popularity for so long
British pubs are having a moment. Not in Britain: you can blame Keir Starmer’s rise in business rates for that. Instead, they are branching out overseas. Take Wetherspoons, the granddaddy of British boozers, set to open next month in Alicante airport, or BrewDog, which has opened its doors in Dubai and many other international outposts
Travel to Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, and I imagine one of the last things you’d expect to find is a Frenchman making wine. But tucked away in Hakodate, Etienne de Montille, a ninth-generation winemaker from the 300-year-old Domaine de Montille in Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune, is challenging preconceptions about Japanese wine. The de Montille family has
Sometimes you find it, H.G. Wells’s door in the wall, but to tapas: a restaurant so perfect you hesitate to review it. Each critic kills the thing she loves, because to love it is to change it. But I can’t just review palaces for psychotics containing lamps that should not exist, comforting though the idiocies
Join me, if you will, for a short stroll down the Charing Cross Road, back in the days when it was festooned with bookshops and Morris Oxfords. At Cambridge Circus, there was a large catering equipment shop owned by my great-uncle, Bill Farnsworth. He made it big when he sold water coolers to the American
There are different ways to approach the tyranny of Dry January. One is to drink in secret. Another is to indulge only on feast days. Personally I have always refused to make January a miserable and puritan month, which means finding excellent red wine to transition from Christmas exuberance to the long, drawn-out evenings of
Occasionally, a French person reveals – without any malice or superciliousness – that they run on an alternative operating system from us Brits. Over the years, a surprising theme has emerged in my conversations with Frenchmen: butter. Take my first visit to Paris, more than 30 years ago. I innocently asked for butter with my
‘Evidence-based policy-making’ is very much in vogue – until, that is, the evidence doesn’t quite support what the government wants to do. Then governments tend to plough on ahead anyway, evidence or not. Just why is the government proposing to lower the drink-driving limit in England from 80mg/100ml to 50mg/100ml? To many people, government ministers
As always, I begin my year with lemons. Regular readers must forgive me for my citrus evangelism. But, as the spice and richness of Christmas fare gives way to the drudge of the diet industry and the reality of the back-to-work routine, all framed by short, dark days and cold, icy pavements, the cobalt yellow
Roast potatoes shouldn’t be complicated. We’re talking two ingredients, plus some salt and maybe herbs if you’re feeling fancy. It’s just shoving some parboiled potatoes in a hot oven, right? Yet I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve had a decent roast potato in a pub or restaurant. Bad ones
It’s strange the things that can trigger amity or affection. At the beginning of the capsule/pod coffee-maker craze, when George Clooney, with his come-to-bed eyes, was seducing the world with Nespresso machines, I bonded with my eldest daughter’s Italian boyfriend over the Bialetti Moka pot. Notwithstanding the expense and waste of the capsule coffee-makers, I
About a week into an open-ended early pandemic stay in Ortigia, the antique, tourist-beloved spit off Siracusa on Sicily’s eastern coast, I had an epiphany. I hated the food. I’d just had a few bites of a clammy aubergine parmigiana, and a plate of oily tuna steak dressed with a bit of lemon was on
Of all the months to choose for abstinence, January seems the strangest. May is intoxicating by itself; winter, when life feels threatened by the silent ministry of frost, needs cheer. Christmas and New Year are past, the birds are already singing loudly in the early mornings, snowdrops push up their green fuses, hellebores grow fresh
On the Bussel Highway, an immaculate ribbon of tarmac that takes you south of Perth, the vegetation changes dramatically in a matter of miles. Suddenly, around the town of Busselton, which is 130 miles from Perth, instead of the rough, hardscrabble soils that form the bedrock of Australia’s desert environment, you find yourself in a
Perhaps because of the Flanders and Swann song in which a louche older gentleman tries to lure a younger lady to bed with Madeira wine, the drink has unfairly acquired a fusty image. While port and sherry have experienced a resurgence, Madeira remains underappreciated despite the fact it stands as a proud monument to the
There are always new ways for drinks companies to make alcohol seem even more exciting. Smirnoff has added gold leaf to some of its vodkas (apparently it’s both real and edible); cans of Dragon Soop and Four Loko deliver heart attack-inducing combinations of sugar, caffeine and alcohol; and the appropriately named Aftershock is rumoured to
In news that will surprise no one, it emerges that vegan children are thinner, shorter and – dare we say it – sicklier than their counterparts. A recent study by the University of Florence details how children who follow a vegan or vegetarian diet are deficient in vitamins and minerals and consistently exhibit a lower
On Christmas morning, as you make your first tea or begin mixing your eggnog, spare a thought for our armed forces. Since the 1890s, they have been starting Christmas Day with a drink that sounds more like a bizarre hangover cure than a festive pick-me-up. Known as ‘Gunfire’, the drink is made of one part
30 min listen
Surely needing no introduction to Spectator listeners, Michael Gove has been a staple of British politics for almost two decades. As a Christmas treat, he joins Lara Prendergast to talk about his memories of food including: the ‘brain food’ he grew up on in Aberdeen, his favourite Oxford pubs and the dining culture of 1980s
