Food

In 2007 Mikhael Gorbachev starred in a Louis Vuitton advert. He was driven past the Berlin Wall with Louis Vuitton luggage and the photograph was printed in Vanity Fair. It was baffling and reassuring, but nothing lasts forever. A few years ago I went on the Kleptocracy Bus Tour. It is run by a man called Roman Borisovich and it tours London — and sometimes Oxford —identifying kleptocratic crimes, feuds, housing, anxieties and behaviours. During a recent tour, a neighbour of Andrey Guryev, the fertiliser magnate who bought Witanhurst in Highgate, testified that a voice from a security box had asked him to stop strimming his own hedge.

Jilly Cooper’s fictional hero Rupert Campbell-Black has ‘never been to Hammersmith’. I have but I wish I hadn’t. I love the Westway because it takes you away from Hammersmith. Even so, it possesses the River Café — it is not a café — a famous and influential Italian restaurant. It was ten when Tony Blair came to power, but inside it is as if he were still here, playing air guitar while chatting about PPP. It is inaccessible, taunting its clientele to go to Hammersmith. It feels as if it takes more than an hour to get to the River Café from anywhere that is not Hammersmith. How do they get there — by helicopter? There is a heliport at Battersea but what then? The 295 bus, apparently, and then a short walk.

Sophie’s lives in an old pornographic cinema at the south end of Great Windmill Street, Soho. It is opposite McDonald’s and the Windmill International (‘Probably the most exciting mens club in the world [if you don’t mind paying women to expose their breasts when they might do it for nothing if you were charming]’). Is it so exciting that the patrons do not care that they have been given a semi-consensual sexual experience but denied an apostrophe? It is also pleasingly close to the venue of the Second Congress of the Communist League, which took place in 1847, and prompted the commission of the Communist Manifesto, and all on the first floor of the Red Lion pub which is now a cocktail bar called Be At One. Quite so.

Café Hampstead is a new café in — big reveal! — Hampstead, the gaudiest of the old villages on the hills around London. Hampstead was once, mysteriously, home to progressives too many to type; refugees from Belsize Park carrying their most precious back copies of the LRB in plastic sacks. Why did they live in Hampstead? What for? They have moved out now, or died, and the truth died with them. We will never know what it was that they thought they wanted, or saw; whether it was always betrayal, or the wife made them do it. You can mock, and I do, but Hampstead is less interesting without them; there is little to laugh at these days, even if it is usual to see James Corden and Ricky Gervais in the street, looking for things to put in their mouths.

There is a restaurant on the stage at the National Theatre in London. It is called Foodwork, and it is part of the set of Network, an adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 masterpiece about a news anchorman called Howard Beale who goes mad and is given a new show — The Howard Beale Show — to preach the gospel of despair. If you think this sounds dull, imagine Huw Edwards threatening suicide after an item about ducks. Beale is played by Bryan Cranston — Peter Finch in the film — and the restaurant will close when the run ends. Ephemera, then; chase the art, chase the cake. I do not know why they built a restaurant here; some critics have complained that the set, which is Foodwork and a television studio, is too noisy: an oddity, a mistake.

As dreams of winning the Ashes became, well, the only word is ash, for 4-0 is not a number even I would minimise, there is a place — a restaurant actually — where you can hold the Ashes in your hands. Calm down. What, as I imagine myself telling Chris Grayling all the time, would your cardiologist say? They may not be the real Ashes — the person looking after them was vague, like a parent telling a child that Father Christmas would probably come down the chimney on Christmas Eve, they couldn’t really say, but it’s quite likely. This restaurant is the Long Room at Lord’s Cricket Ground, the home of Maryle-bone Cricket Club. I don’t have a sport — just arguing — but if I make mistakes, please write in like angry birds.

Rules looks as if it voted for Brexit, and now finds itself inside an eternal Christmas Eve, where it is always Christmas, and always Brexit. And what a gay Brexit, with swags and flounces and light bouncing through the windows on to Maiden Lane, like a child’s vision of hope. Or is it illusion? Does a chimney contain Arron Banks as Father Christmas with gifts in his sack marked ‘depression’, ‘delusion’ and ‘starvation’? Will he get stuck and go shouty-crackers on Twitter? Is Nigel Farage sipping a pint of lager, pretending to be a good elf?

Henrietta is a restaurant in a boutique hotel on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, around the corner from the actors’ church St Paul’s, which is very plain. It is as if, when actors die, their feathers are put away and they die as they really are: plain. As Uncle Monty might say: I choose the Doric. Henrietta Street is full of tall, sad houses — the kind London does so well in fiction and in life. They are grand and desolate; you can imagine misery behind them. This one is red brick and, because it is a boutique hotel, they have tried to build a fairyland behind the façade: wealth and whimsy are unwilling collaborators but I can see the attraction, and it is all denial. London is so Edwardian in looks, but now it has the Candy Brothers to shower it in glass.

Farmacy, which opened last year, is London’s most fashionable ‘clean eating’ restaurant; it is, therefore, a restaurant for people who hate food. This ‘clean eating’ epidemic grows as we fall into decadence and see food, rather than our own mouths, as the source of our calamity — how can we be saved from food? It is Bunyadi, the pop-up naked hobbit restaurant again, but without wit: same food, less fun, and no tree stumps at all except metaphorically, on the tops of people’s necks. It is owned by Camilla Fayed, the daughter of Mohammed Fayed, and there is probably much to divine about that family dynamic here, had I stayed, but I didn’t.

Knead is the first of Paul Hollywood’s new strain of bakeries that sell coffee, and which will encircle capitalism. This one is outside Euston station and I think the name — Knead, meaning squashed under fists, specifically Paul Hollywood’s fists — is designed solely to make you think of his big hands. Lots of people who watch The Great British Bake Off like Paul Hollywood’s big hands, and his PR team know it. He could knead Europe away; he could make Britain anything you want it to be. He and Mary Berry (now transformed into Prue Leith after the move from BBC1 to Channel 4) bridge the abyss in the British character. They are dignity and filth. There is much oblivious sex and politics in Bake Off, which is why it is a hit.

Jean-Georges at the Connaught — formerly the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel, but it was renamed during the first world war, at about the same time the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was deprived of his British peerages, which was one of the funnier events in the war — is the informal restaurant at the Connaught Hotel, and it opened this summer on the curve of Carlos Place, Mayfair. The Connaught is an English hotel with a German heart. It is therefore the hotel equivalent of our Queen, and the best hotel in the world. It is better than its sister Claridge’s, from which Dwight Eisenhower ran away in 1944. He could face the Nazis, but not the ‘whorehouse pink’.

Veneta is a Venetian restaurant inside the St James’s Market development south of Piccadilly Circus. I do not like this development because it has no identity and great cities should have identities. It is not like St James’s, and it is nothing like a market either. It is a cold and glassy spot with a stupid name, and it is, with other developments from here to Hyde Park Corner, the reason that people now hate London or do not recognise it as London, because it is beginning to resemble a giant Nespresso capsule. Someone once told me that in a million years the only evidence of our civilisation will be nappies and Nespresso capsules and I think this may be true, and future alien visitors will think we invented caffeine and babies and then blew ourselves up by mistake.

Foxlow is near Golden Square in west Soho, where drunken hacks used to take long drunken lunches before having stupid drunken ideas. My favourite stupid drunken idea was from a Guardian hack and it involved renting an ice-cream van and asking Nick Cohen and A.A. Gill to drive around in it, selling ice creams, bickering and hopefully breaking down, before writing up the experience for a Silly Season special. But drunken hacks no longer take long drunken lunches in Soho. They get drunk at home, if there is one, or drink in the queue at Eat, if they can afford to eat. The piece was not commissioned, the years passed, and I am now a guest at the funeral of my own profession each day. A.A. Gill is dead, Nick Cohen is sober, and even Silly Season has gone.

J Sheekey is one of Richard Caring’s older, and better, restaurants. Since he has dowsed the suburbs of London in multiple outposts of the Ivy (there is one in Wimbledon, another in Richmond and presumably one pending in Penge), J Sheekey increasingly feels like an island in a sea of pointlessly aspirational green. The rise of the Ivy — the original celebrity brasserie, which is code for an indifferent restaurant full of awful people eating shepherd’s pie — is an inevitable consequence of the rise of celebrity culture. This is anti--culture, and the Ivy is, therefore, an anti--restaurant. So many celebrities, and now so many Ivys to put them in. The age of narcissism has many tentacles.

I am always surprised to remember that Andrew Lloyd Webber has taste; it must be remembrance of Cats. I was surprised, for instance, to learn that he once owned Pablo Picasso’s portrait of d’Angel Fernández de Soto, which I always thought of as my Picasso because it looks like my friend Hadrian Wise, who used to come to Merton College bar in his pyjamas. We once rolled a joint as long as The Spectator because he loved The Spectator. High as I was after the Spectator-length joint in 1994, I never thought I would write for it. Neither did he. Now Lloyd Webber, whose masterpiece is Phantom of the Opera, because it is all about him, has decided to host a tasteful restaurant in Victoria called the Other Naughty Piglet.

Tate St Ives is a pale 1980s block, with a fat rounded porte cochère and sea-stained walls. It is the kind of house Iron Man would build if he lived in New Malden, but St Ives has always welcomed money. It is an oddity in the land of cows, pilchards and tin, beloved of retirees, surfers and urban survivalists. You can, for instance, buy a £100 rucksack at a shop called the Common Wanderer, which also sells the book Wildside: The Enchanted Life of Hunters and Gatherers. I suspect this enchantment is news to the Cornish, and always has been. St Ives is a place of tribes then, with at least three different villages sitting above the beach where surfers frolic. Then there is the art gallery. It is very self-consciously an artistic ‘hub’.

Katz’s Delicatessen, established 1888, is a theme park of Jewish-American food, with tribute gift shop, on the lower east side of Manhattan. There is nowhere more Jewish than Katz’s except Haredi Brooklyn, but if you go there you don’t come back. Katz’s offers a gentler Jewish experience, if you can conceive of such a thing, or it at least attempts it; it offers a kind of Judaism you can enjoy over lunch, which I find amazing because I have never managed it. (No one, for instance, talks about the Holocaust in Katz’s, not because they don’t want to but because they can’t. Try saying Treblinka with a dumpling in your mouth.

Bibendum is a hushed restaurant on the first floor of the Michelin House on the Fulham Road. (Bibendum is the name of the Michelin Man; as such, he is the only restaurant mascot I can think of who is a morbidly obese drunk, and here of all places. It is a noble gesture in a district full of Prada and control). The building is extraordinary — an art-deco whim standing on a corner like Cinema Paradiso without the dreams. It was once the headquarters of the Michelin tyre company; as such, I admire the ambition of placing a tyre company in what is essentially a Venetian palace, but perhaps tyres were considered special then. In the Congo, for instance, rubber took a lot of people with it.

Hip Chips is a specialist crisp restaurant in Old Compton Street, Soho; no, it is stupider than that. It is a specialist posh crisp restaurant and it is a grave disappointment to the compulsive overeater. The Bacon Nik Nak Shack would surely be a better idea because crisps, like leisure wear and coaches, can never really be posh. They should not even, ideally, be fresh; the joy in eating a packet of Pickled Onion Monster Munch is in the mingling of the Monster Munch and your own blood as the skin on the roof of your mouth melts off, and there it is. But these are details: who am I to stand against the tide? Even so, the success of the Cereal Killer Café in Brick Lane shows exactly how much infantile adults will pay to have their infantilism sanctioned by consumer capitalism.