Food

The St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, by Marriott, is 14 syllables long, which is too many. The best hotels have two syllables or at most three, but I can’t spend my life looking for two-syllable hotels with restaurants to review because I would go mad and so would you. Even so, the glorious red building, which looks like the backside of Christchurch after a dust storm, is at last restored and it has fine dining by Marcus Wareing in a restaurant called The Gilbert Scott. In we go to the vast curved room, which is at the front of the hotel, with views of the Euston Road, which, as ever, looks like downtown Chernobyl hosting a Chicken Shack convention. And guess what? The walls are mustard-coloured. You know how some stylistic crimes are so complete they destroy everything?

Dorsia is the fictional restaurant in Bret Easton Ellis’s excellent novel American Psycho. The psycho, a banker called Patrick Bateman, longs to secure the 8.30 p.m. slot at Dorsia, but he can never get it; instead he walks through Manhattan killing other bankers, and sometimes prostitutes. Dorsia is like Jay Gatsby, an ever-receding metaphor, except it does breadsticks. And now it has opened in London, on the Cromwell Road, courtesy of a quartet of Swedes, whom a friend who understands clubland calls ‘ocean-going club fucks’. It is a private members’ club, with a nightclub in the basement and a bar above, but the restaurant will take anyone. You cannot telephone for reservations because they have no telephone yet, and so, foolishly, I email the PR.

The Playboy Club on Park Lane was re-opened by Hugh Hefner in June, like an ancient bra he had suddenly remembered was lying under his bed. It has a casino, a bar, a barber’s shop, and a restaurant. My being here is pure masochism, and I should really write the review in the style of Stephen King’s The Shining — Red Rum, Red Rum! But here I am, with my boyfriend. He had to telephone to get a table, because in theory, it is Members Only — Frank Sinatra, James Bond, the King of Bhutan. But they let him in, so it isn’t. We go in. It is clean, expressionless, like a movie actress. ‘Normally a bunny would show you upstairs,’ says the girl behind the desk, ‘but she is on a tour.’ Like a Big Bus Tour of the counter-counter sexual revolution?

Oslo Court is the Jewish mother birthday party venue, or lunch if the Jewish mother must be home in time to be medicated — a convention, a summit, a trough for Jewish mothers. And so, when you telephone for a reservation, they will ask you, having as yet no idea who you are — do you need a cake? You should always say yes. Because who doesn’t need a cake? It inhabits the ground floor of an expensive but ugly apartment block in St John’s Wood. But that just adds to its lustre in Jewish mother circles. It is a restaurant that has been disguised as the home of your cousin. Weave past Jaguars — also called Jew Canoes — and you are in. It is decorated in snarling pink; they say that Dame Barbara Cartland came here once, and disappeared into the décor.

The Hotel du Vin is a mini chain of tasteful hotels, usually found in ‘heritage’ cities — Henley, Cambridge, wretched Tunbridge Wells. The Hotel du Vin is a mini chain of tasteful hotels, usually found in ‘heritage’ cities — Henley, Cambridge, wretched Tunbridge Wells. They have baths in bedrooms, rush-matting and white linen, and, although the name is French, they feel amazingly class-conscious, and therefore English. I like them, principally because of what they are not — neither unknown and dangerous boutique hotels, nor the dreaded Marriott. I fear the Marriott, because its ancient founder, J.W. Marriott, who looks like a cadaverous gnome, has his own in-house TV channel, on which he does a 24-hour talking head about himself.

The Savoy Grill is a famous restaurant in a famous hotel and it knows it. Although it is managed by Gordon Ramsay, with his TV horns and tabloid nightmares, it is still reeling with self-importance, an elderly debutante who once jumped on John Wayne in the loo. The view is of a taxi rank and a queue of tourists in sports jackets being shepherded by a man dressed as a penguin. But still the very name is awe. The refurbishment is done and the piles of brown leather that made me think of camels have gone. It is art-deco glossy now, gloomy and sexy, with chandeliers and lustrous walls, which are possibly aubergine. I didn’t know aubergine could do lustre, but now I do. It is an exhibitionist, a date restaurant, for late-night negotiations with lovers. And I am with my mother.

I am in Padstein. It used to be a fishing village, just north of Newquay. It was Padstow then. But then came Rick Stein. Padstein has the smell of a theme park. This is a village made over by one man; it belongs to him. In my hand I have a map of every Rick Stein outlet in town, numbered for ease of access — four restaurants, five hotels, a cookery school, a cottage, a pub, a gift shop, a patisserie, a delicatessen. People queue to buy Rick Stein chutney, drink Rick Stein-endorsed wine, eat Rick Stein chips or sleep on Rick Stein pillows. He is expanding into Falmouth, opening a bookshop. Perhaps he will write all the books. Who knows? He actually lives in Australia, which makes me wonder how much he likes the town he created.

It is an old London fairytale that there are no good restaurants in Hampstead. When the good restaurants were being handed out, Hampstead was ignored, betrayed, disgraced — given only a Carluccio’s, a Café Rouge and a quite disgusting Chinese place that has a ridiculous water feature and its own bridge. This is the story, anyway, as told to frightened children in north-west London. I thought I would try to break the spell, and find a restaurant worth paying for, so I do not have to go to Camden and fight my way through fetish boots and tall angry men who smell. There may be one, it is said — just one restaurant in Hampstead that passes. The Villa Bianca. It is an Italian restaurant that looks like a white Dickensian shop on a charming paved lane.

Rules is the restaurant where Edward VII ate himself to death and, in a way, it looks like him. It is spacious and regal and covered in velvet. His personal dining room upstairs is a cocktail bar now, with a lump of Stilton as focal point and memorial. Downstairs there are stags’ heads and a painting of Margaret Thatcher as Britannia, with pointy breasts. From a distance, it looks as if she is topless. The customers are the sort of people who like to watch powerful women topless. That is, they are powerful men, in groups or, quite often, alone. Rules has single booths for these lonely creatures — well, they can accommodate two small people, or one very fat man, and it is always one very fat man who is there, wiping the blood from his mouth with a blinding white napkin.