Food

I had this meal where I was perched on the end of a dining table inside a kitchen. My friend and I had to sit side by side. There was a dog there. I think it was a restaurant, but I’m not really sure. We were in a converted Victorian horse stable. Most of the space was outside, in the stable yard. You couldn’t book it: you had to pop your name down then head to the pub for an hour. And there were just six things on the menu, all of them cold. And the only people working there were a couple, and one waitress. And the guy from the couple went round the restaurant at the end with a bucket of his homemade vermouth, topping up people’s spritzes. And when the bill came, you just told them what you’d had.

The worst areas to eat in London are the best places to live. Hampstead, Chelsea, Chiswick, St John’s Wood: all would be lucky to have even one restaurant that would be an 8/10 in Hackney. This is disappointing because Hackney is annoying, but, hey, hipsters make good restaurants. I wonder why these areas are so lacking. Is it because St John’s Wood Man has an underpaid cook on speed dial? Is it because Belgravian Influencer orders a shawarma every night? Is it because Hampstead Family don’t eat where they sh– hmm, yes... A little bruschetta of chopped rabbit livers comes next, visible through a translucent sheet of lardo Whatever the explanation, the exception to this rule is Wandsworth Common.

It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’ve just walked into The Pineapple in north London, thus becoming the 4,825th journalist to do so since Keir Starmer became Labour leader. He once described this pub as his ‘church’. What that means is unclear. Does he take his sins here for absolution? Does he feel a sense of obligation to it? Does he come here on Sunday mornings? As the prime-ministerial handover takes place, it’s worth considering the old guy and the new guy’s approach to food and drink (this column thinks so, anyway). Starmer didn’t have a favourite novel and he didn’t have a favourite poem. But what he did like was food. He said he enjoyed going to Rossella, an Italian restaurant in Kentish Town. The tandoori salmon he made on Sunday Brunch actually looked nice.

Can there be, in Britain, such a thing as a destination Greek taverna? There are some cases where proximity is the most important thing: gyms, cafés, defibrillators. A Greek taverna falls into this category. All you need is harmless food and ambient fake vines for a catch-up with your relatives. But I’m in need of a new one. Lemonia in north London was a good option until halfway through my final meal there. A bit of lamb kleftiko decided it wanted to remain in the entrance to my father’s trachea. Choking, mouth frothing, screaming for help, oh thank God there’s a nurse over there, Heimlich, hospital, then, seven hours later, home.

The obvious thing to say about themed restaurants is that they are usually bad. The Rainforest Café in London, for instance, was nothing like a rainforest, though it is slightly more like a rainforest now it has gone. But there are exceptions. The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop in Bakewell, Derbyshire, for instance. Perhaps the sort of tourists who go to Bakewell for tarts are more dangerous than the ones who go to Bath for buns. They certainly look as if they read a lot of crime fiction and are capable of murder in their heads. But The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop out-gilds its myth. It’s rare.

Claridge’s grew nine storeys in the last decade: it’s a metaphor. The ornamental 1897 castle on Brook Street has expanded to fit the available space. Though it grew by half, it never closed, and workmen dug out the basement by hand. In one room, Claridge’s was a building site: in another, a dream world. We are trekking through metaphors now. We are up to our necks. The children eating the Nutella, banana and whipped cream crêpes look deranged Hotels are like buses: they have infinite possibilities. That is what they are for. To not be home. Like Alec Guinness, who lived in the Connaught with his share of the profits of Star Wars, which shamed him (the Connaught is the anti-Tatooine), I would like to live in a hotel.

You don’t go to a strip club expecting to put something in your mouth unless you’re an incorrigible roué. So it came as something of a surprise to find myself doing just that in the new Spearmint Rhino club. The club recently launched in Soho’s old Windmill Theatre, famous for staying open throughout the Blitz, when girls appeared naked in static tableaux to get around the era’s indecency laws. Now the venue offers both flesh and – more shockingly – food. A restaurant in a strip club has both bacchanalian promise and the risk of comic disaster. Degustation sounds so like a combination of delicious and disgusting, it suggests there is a fine line between food and sex.

Erev is an Israeli restaurant in Notting Hill, though Israeli restaurants do not call themselves Israeli nowadays. They have rebranded to Eastern Mediterranean and I don’t blame them. These are bad days for Zionists. I tried to buy an almond croissant at the progressive coffee shop in Newlyn last week while wearing an Israeli flag as a cape. My excuse was: it was election day, and Gaza was on the ballot. I didn’t get the almond croissant. They didn’t have any. Erev, though, is the subject of real protests from real people who think that eating is, under certain circumstances, a genocidal act. They stand outside and shout at diners. If you think genocide and restaurants have nothing to do with each other, meet 2026.

Simpson’s in the Strand is a dream palace, and its fortunes are as tidal as the river. It is on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, destroyed in the Peasants’ Revolt. It began as a cigar divan and chess club, was subsumed into the Savoy Hotel, built with the profits from The Mikado, and was beloved by Churchill and Wodehouse, who described it as an Elysium where you were ‘at liberty to eat till you were helpless, if you felt so disposed’. It then decayed. I’ve come here for 30 years and, grand as it was, Simpson’s smelt of beef and the 1922 committee by the end. No restaurant can live on that indefinitely, and it closed in 2020. I did not enjoy my last meal here, but I took part of its myth: when it sold off its crockery in 2023 I bought what I think is a milk jug.

Brasserie Angelica is the – is the word signature? – restaurant inside the Newman, Fitzrovia, a new hotel that has landed in the capital like a spaceship containing aliens who are into menswear. I don’t mind buildings that look like they don’t belong. Fitzrovia is charming because it feels like remnants left by other places. We have too much Edwardiana already: in the Aldwych– formerly the best surviving medieval part of London after the Great Fire – I feel like I am stomping through cakes of stone. The Newman is a wail in glass and brick on a quiet lane near Gower Street. There are pale awnings, brass fittings and uplighting: Manhattan in its last boom. It is attached to a Victorian house renovated to the standards of a grouter with OCD.

Burlington Arcade on Piccadilly has a caff down from Charbonnel et Walker, where you can buy a box of chocolates as big as a cow, though I never have. Perhaps the time is now? I am being facetious of course: it is Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud, who oversees the Maison de Haute Pâtisserie at the Connaught Hotel, and two unfortunate branches in Qatar. I wonder if the Hamas leadership visit and stick their fingers in pistachio gâteaux. The café is a marvellous construct, as the arcade is. It exists so that spoilt Regency women, the Chelsea hags of then, could shop without walking in horseshit. I know how they feel. It isn’t lunch in the common sense of it.

Mezzogiorno is a very serious, golden Italian restaurant inside the Corinthia London Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. Restaurants are increasingly gold these days, as if for a crocodile of Scrooge McDucks trooping through the wreckage of liberalism looking for money, nuts and guns. It follows the trajectory of my beloved Raffles at the OWO [Old War Office] round the corner. What was once a Ministry of Defence building – though formerly a hotel – is now a (quite good) pizza joint. When the time comes, I hope the drones know. Ignore the lie that gold restaurants serve tiny portions for tiny people. These are vast Mezzogiorno is by the gifted Francesco Mazzei, previously of Sartoria in Savile Row. Here, because this is an age in denial about hierarchy– ha!

Dover Street Counter is the tiny sister of The Dover, a very good restaurant on – who knew? – Dover Street, Mayfair. This is the site of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones Club, if following Wodehouse’s paths is your way of coping, and there is nothing wrong with that. There are some bad restaurants in Mayfair now, with slutty Roman gods and monumental Caesar salads; passive-aggressive tributes to Elizabeth II in bad cake, and enslaved fish staring at sex workers with the mute anguish of recognition. This is better. Good restaurants have the gift of suppressing fear, and this is one such The Dover is delivered by professionals for adults – that is, people who do not put intimacy on expenses, and who can recognise neo-Stalinist soft furnishings when they see them.

Corenucopia by Clare Smyth is in Belgravia, amid a line of interior-design shops, and it is prettier than all of them. It is a female paradise on the ground floor of a mansion block, dedicated to art nouveau and ‘comfort’ food. There are plaster tree branches peeking from the walls and the menu script looks elvish. It is rare that whimsy does not make me kick things, and few things are more whimsical than plaster forests, but Smyth, also of the three-Michelin-starred Core, is one of the great cooks working now. From her, whimsy is merely voice; or, rather, I forgive her. We eat malted sourdough with Ampersand butter and wild venison salami. Both are glorious There is a sanity to this restaurant, even if it is gilded for native Belgravia blondes.

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 cuisine is Cantonese. Understatement is a feint here, though; the Phoenix Palace is famous, and always on the best dim sum lists. It is beloved by Chinese tourists and students, and, weirdly, the Labour party, whose grandees smile uneasily from photographs, like hostages to the economy, and rice. The food comes near instantly.

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 of the very rich are. So here is a review of 28 Church Row, Hampstead. I will try not to make it read like a Hampstead novel about the unreliability of memory, but I might forget to do this. Church Row is the prettiest street in Hampstead: a ragtag of Georgian houses beloved by television stars who wake up one day, understand they are vulgar and buy a house that isn’t. I can’t afford one, but I saved a man from death in Church Row once, which is unusual for this column.