Food

The McDonald’s in the Olympic Park has 1,500 seats and is the biggest McDonald’s on earth. Let us ignore the cognitive dissonance of McDonald’s sponsoring the Olympics because we have screamed about that. Let us forget other complaints about the Olympics because, with many golds won by Team GB (an acronym that comes with its own nationalist resurgence and exclamation mark), there is obviously no better way to spend our GNP than on making people run around in circles very fast. Except this is a very self-hating McDonald’s which seems entirely in denial about being a McDonald’s.

Brasserie Zédel is the pinkest restaurant I have ever seen. It is pig pink, Barbie pink, icing-sugar pink and tongue pink. It is so pink that I photograph the napkin, and look at the napkin many times to remind myself that such a pink restaurant exists where it does, in a district reminiscent of cracked heads and bilious fear and tramps set alight: west Soho. I love west Soho. East Soho upsets me, because you can buy posh ­whisky, smart cheese and a leather dog collar for £300, to prove you went to Soho, saw the tarts and the House of Karl Marx, and came back to Notting Hill without a spot on your conscience or, worse, stayed at the Soho Hotel, a corpse dressed in Cath Kidston chintz.

I thought I would hate Bulgari. (At least they have stopped calling it Bvlgari). Ah, you might say, surely Bulgari, a tentacle of LVMH, the ‘luxury goods giant’ that makes rubbish for women too hot to work, but too bored to stay awake, does not belong in a restaurant column? Has Gold, who avoided being doused in Pol Roger by Charles Moore at the Spectator summer party and found the cognitive dissonance of that assault very frightening, gone mad and decided to review accessories? Will somebody else be swallowing the cartoon chicken (see above)?

Mari Vanna is in Knightsbridge, near those pale loitering houses that would be ripped up if only their owners could pay off the council, to be replaced with giant Barratt Homes, with Homes, or maybe Barratt, wrought in gold. The grotesque Candy & Candy development by Hyde Park, all man-of-steel strut, gazes at Harvey Nichols the way a troll stares at a baby. This is the land of basement swimming pools and female sorrow, Lamborghinis, fat teenagers, domestic slavery, tyrants going shopping, and Louis Vuitton bags for dogs. Saddam Hussein would love it. In the midst of this nightmare, Mari Vanna sits like a dollhouse on the road to Kensington.

Nick Clegg and sex. What doesn’t the dude know about it — he told Piers Morgan he had slept with ‘no more than 30 people’? He recently took his wife, Miriam González Durántez, the best of the political wives (no interviews, no photoshoots and their kid is called something like Zorro) to the ‘sexiest’ restaurant in London, as a reward for letting George Osborne telephone the house. It’s called Clos Maggiore, it is in Covent Garden and it has been open for 11 years. (Not a sexy age, 11, but bear with me). I’m not sure a restaurant can actually be sexy but PRs think everything is sexy — spoons, Utterly Butterly, Nick Clegg. So sexy, says the Times, and gave Clos Maggiore an award for sexiness.

Dabbous is the place where stoned pixies would dine if they were into food. I have a fever and think of fairies and ghost trains to nowhere all day. But it is really Dabbous — Dabbous — that did this to me. Dabbous is a girl with her skirts up at Oxford — she has a reputation. For being wonderful — foodie food for those who aren’t really foodies or won’t identify as such; eating there is like going to the opera, and finding people who can look you in the eye. The critics have all come, and fallen down wormholes made of their own superlatives. Now it is booked up until the apocalypse. The chef is Ollie ­Dabbous, 31, formerly of The Fat Duck and Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.

The Bread Street Kitchen is a big restaurant near the Mansion House, brought to you by Gordon Ramsay’s big rage; he is the man who, at one point or another, has owned 13 Michelin stars, millions of TV viewers and a turkey called ­Nigella, which he may or may not have murdered and made into a turkey burger. In fact, he had a shed of celebrity turkeys: there was also a Gary (Rhodes), a Jamie (Oliver), a Delia (Smith) and, most unkindly, an Ainsley (Harriott). At this point someone should really have called Chefs’ Anonymous. The Bread Street Kitchen opened nine months ago, which gives us time to see if Gordon Ramsay Holdings, an empire of breadsticks and butter pats, is failing after a series of scandals and crises.

Fortnum & Mason is a major attraction at the UK heritage theme park, the equivalent of the gorilla at London Zoo; this is corroborated by its two branches in Japan and by the fact that it is always full of Germans holding hands in the truffle department and smiling. It is, or rather was, the Costcutter to the Empire and the F&M historian can have much fun in its archives: it was the first shop in Britain to sell Heinz baked beans; it holds the royal warrant for jelly beans; it claims to have invented the scotch egg, although this claim is apparently disputed in Glasgow.

Quo Vadis is the restaurant in the house where Marx wrote Das Kapital, and today it is full of tulips. I always expect Soho restaurants to house crackheads and refugees from Esquire, their bloody hands echoing the streets that smell equally of dirt and soap, like a man who wants to wash but finds he can’t. I have hated Soho since I saw a man punch his way out of a brothel and a teenage prostitute buy a cuddly toy that was bigger than she was, in a ghastly montage of the free market. I don’t know why people come to Soho, except in novels. I prefer Kew Gardens but I am old now; my Soho moment has passed.

Poor Hawksmoor. So obviously the genius of English Baroque, and yet he always comes last in the histories, behind flashy Vanbrugh (duh) and dull Wren (meh). It was probably a class thing — what isn’t? — because Hawksmoor was from Nottingham, and a clerk. So it feels good to walk into a chophouse bearing his name. It isn’t much, but it’s something. Hawksmoor Guildhall is the third of three restaurants from Will Beckett and Huw Gott. The first is in the shadow of the Christ Church, Spitalfields, and the second is in Seven Dials, Covent Garden. Perhaps a chain beckons — Beefeater, but more joyful, with fewer hostages, I mean day-trippers. Anyway, Hawksmoor is famous for meat. Giles Coren cried here, but he cries everywhere.

Sometimes I think luxury is a joke played on the rich by the not-so rich. In my mind, people on the 20p tax rate have a focus group, and design things to sell to the rich, and laugh. And I think this explains sandals with mink T-bars, most watches and now Hix, a restaurant under a hotel in Belgravia. Hix looks like a Travelodge. I do not say that to be mean, or because I can. It occupies a dim half-basement under a hotel. You may not have visited a Travelodge, but I have, and the restaurant is always a half-basement under a hotel, with shouting children and a buffet. So it is exactly like a Travelodge, with the children removed.

Novikov is an immense two-storey restaurant in deepest Mayfair. It serves Asian on the ground floor and Italian in the vaults. This is not an austerity restaurant, or anything near; it is bigger than a Harvester and full of the glow of fortified money. There are actually people smoking outside in happy clumps. For some reason I think of a T’Pau gig. This barn is the baby of the Russian restaurateur Arkady Novikov, ‘the Blini Baron’. He must like pretty girls because there are many of them employed here, in identical pink dresses, tossing their hair all over the place, as if they want to be free of it. And their legs! If I had legs like that I’d run around shouting, ‘Legs! Legs! I have legs!

The Grand Hotel, Brighton, is the most beautiful hotel in England. It is bright and shiny like Simon Cowell’s teeth, surrounded by something very ugly, like Simon Cowell’s face. It even managed to look beautiful when the IRA blew a cartoon hole in it, from which Margaret Thatcher emerged covered in dust and more dangerous than ever, like ­Grendel’s mother. Maybe it is the memory of all that adultery, but the Grand is a happy place, the hotel that Londoners flee to, have bad sex and look out the ­window at the English Channel, a stretch of water so boring it looks more like paint than water. The English Channel is a disgrace and it knows it; it doesn’t even try to be a sea.

The Odeon cinema in Whiteleys, Bayswater, has refurbished; it now has eight ‘Lounges’ where you can watch a film and stuff your face with only 49 others, planted on leather seats like fellow passengers on a spaceship to nowhere. Other London cinemas do food (the Everyman, the Electric) but the food is mostly olives and the audience won’t talk to you because they are evil. The Electric, particularly, has the vibe of a Notting Hill serial killer convention; when watching a horror film at the Electric, you sense the audience is rooting for the demon/Antichrist/hot slayer of priests. The Lounge does real food, by Rowley Leigh of Le Café Anglais, which is on the same floor at Whiteleys although, the PR assures me, the Lounge has its own kitchen and chef.

Reviewing the Delaunay is like reviewing Nelson Mandela. You cannot be rude. This restaurant, a new sister for the ­Wolseley, is as Teflon-coated as David Cameron’s head. And it is very similar to the Wolseley, which was also slobberingly reviewed because people think of it as foreign, but good foreign, which means pastries, not immigrants, and the German army, not the French. ‘Alert diners might well catch a glimpse of, among others, the authors Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser,’ wrote the New York Times chillingly, as if that were a good thing. Its ceilings are lower, its draft broader but the lamps and the tablecloths, the cakes and the cutlery are all the same as the Wolseley.

I came to the Gay Hussar for gags about the Labour party; to find some wreckage of its glory days. Except the Labour party doesn’t have glory days — only tiny breaks in the blue space-time continuum when a) it isn’t eating itself and b) it manages to convince a country of snobs that voting Labour doesn’t mean they aren’t posh or mightn’t, at some vague point in the future, become posh. Now it has spat out a leader who makes David Cameron look normal. ‘Beaker from the Muppets,’ says my boyfriend, when Ed appears on TV. ‘Not the face. The expression.’ And the Gay Hussar is Labour’s canteen. The food, I should remind you, is Hungarian.

34 is the new restaurant from Richard Caring, the ‘Lex Luthor of Mayfair’, who owns The Ivy, Le Caprice and Annabel’s. In my research, which I undertake before every review — clams tend not to have a back-story — Caring emerges as a character from a Sidney Sheldon novel, or perhaps Lace: ‘Which of you bitches has my entrée?’ He is unpopular with the WASP establishment because A) he is Jewish and B) he is orange. And so the myths, fuelled by Tatler, float. He survived the 2004 tsunami by sheltering behind an atoll. He has a nuclear silo under the J Sheekey Oyster Bar, which is pointed at Pizza Express. His face is made of diamonds. Etcetera.

The new hotel W looms like a giant fridge over Leicester Square. They demolished the poor old Swiss Centre to build it as part of the regeneration programme because some people don’t know that some things can’t be regenerated. I often pass through Leicester Square on a Saturday night and it is like watching the golden calf incident, but in 1981. You will see a man punching a woman, or some children dressed as wizards waving at a boy (usually Daniel Radcliffe) who looks sorry he ever heard of wizards. It is the holy of holies of Trash Culture (London branch) and it smells terrible. Anyway, W, which has a restaurant I will get to shortly, wasn’t built. It landed. It is immense, white and windowless.

What to say about Occupy London? I support it, because I always judge a movement by the quality of its enemies, and also because its position at St Paul’s cathedral makes a certain type of writer wander around, pondering, ‘What would Jesus do about Occupy?’ There have been many articles asking ‘What would Jesus do about Occupy?’ The answer, of course, is very simple. Jesus (or rather Joshua) of Nazareth was Jewish. So, when faced with any problem, including the implosion of the global financial system and the erection of lots of tents near St Paul’s cathedral, he’d eat something. He’d eat something anyway. The Bible is full of stories of Jesus stuffing his face.

Wolfgang Puck, who is a globally famous chef, has opened Cut on Park Lane. Beef is Cut’s thing and who doesn’t like beef? Except I am convinced that if cows, like women, discovered their own strength, there would be a cow coup, like in Planet of the Apes. (This is a very personal fantasy.) How I can see them, stampeding down Whitehall and into the Treasury, taking George Osborne hostage. Anyway, I secure a 10.30 p.m. slot on a Monday, which is too late for hunger, but not for celebrities and lighting designed to make everyone look like the Gold Blend couple (‘How was Milan?’). You enter Cut through an art deco, Miami-esque entrance. The restaurant is essentially a corridor except, due to mirrors, it is a very long corridor, with the cars of Park Lane beyond.