Food

There are cursed restaurants and cursed women, and this makes them no less interesting. One is Maxim’s in Paris, which knows it – it gaily sells ties in a charnel house decorated for the Masque of the Red Death – and another is the Criterion at Piccadilly Circus, which doesn’t. One day it might meet

Origin City is a good name for this restaurant, whether it knows it or not. It is at West Smithfield, the only surviving wholesale market in the City of London (I do not count Borough, which is a snack shack impersonating a greengrocers and is only spiritually in the City). Covent Garden sells face cream

Poundbury is the King’s idealised town in Dorchester, built on his land to his specifications: the town that sprung out of his head. (‘My dream,’ says Harry Enfield in The Windsors, ‘was always to build a mixed-used residential suburb on the outskirts of Dorchester.’) It is so fascinating that I dream, briefly, of moving in

At the Chapel, Bruton, is a restaurant and hotel in a former chapel in Bruton. This was once an ordinary town in Somerset, with a note in the Domesday Book, a ruined priory and a famous dovecote on a hill. Bruton is known for a flood in 1917 – it was the second-largest one-day rainfall

Sarehole Mill is four miles south of the centre of Birmingham. If this were a fairy tale, and it should be, it would follow that Birmingham swallowed Sarehole a century ago, like a dragon and its prey. I like Birmingham: I like its optimism, its violence and its multiplex, which can match any American Midwest

The BBC made a very odd documentary about the renovation of Claridge’s: The Mayfair Hotel Megabuild. They filmed, agog, as the hotel grew eight new storeys – three above, and five below – between 2014 and 2021 while staying open: guests slept and ate, unaware of ‘Narnia doors’ to the building site. (That Narnia is

I am not sure the vast Bierschenke bierkeller in Covent Garden is successful, even if it is skilful: I worry it is the wrong place for it. People go to Covent Garden to buy gym clothes, watch musical theatre and pick up men, not to find Wagner and pigs and the drumbeat of the earth:

As the government withers this column falls to ennui and visits Pizza Express. As David Cameron, who left the world stage humming, said of Tony Blair: ‘He was the future once.’ So was David Cameron, and so was Pizza Express: I bet they meet often. It was founded in 1965 by Peter Boizot, who shipped

The Red Lion, East Chisenbury, is in the Pewsey Vale on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Wiltshire’s strangeness surpasses even Cornwall and its menhirs: it has the greater volume of ghosts. I once spent an eerie day in Imber, the deserted village on the plain – the inhabitants were given 47 days’ notice to leave

The restaurant 2 Fore Street lives on Mousehole harbour, near gift shops: the post office and general store have closed, leaving a glut of blankets and ice cream, the remnants of Cornish drama. It’s a truism that Mousehole is hollowed out – tourism changes a place, and no one knows that better than Mousehole. Eating

The Pilchard Inn sits at the entrance to Burgh Island, a minute tidal island off the coast of south Devon. The island is home to the Burgh Island Hotel, an eerie Art Deco masterpiece built by the son of a screw mogul, which dominates the view from Bigbury-on-Sea like Coney Island: it is more apparition

The Alice lives in a ground-floor room of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, which venerates the fantastical and the savage, as Oxford does. The savage lives in the Randolph’s dedicated crime museum with cocktails: the (Inspector) Morse Bar. The Alice is named for two women: Alice Liddell, the daughter of the ecclesiastical dean of Christchurch

Lady Bamford’s Cotswold fairy-land Daylesford Farm has sprouted leaves. It is no longer a farm shop, which should be a humble thing. I went to the Chypraze farm shop at Morvah last month, for instance. The proprietor only had honey, he said, and also pork, because he had just killed a pig. Daylesford is a

The Sessions Arts Club is a restaurant inside the Old Session House in Clerkenwell, a pale George III building where the criminals of Middlesex were once judged in splendour. It’s common for fine once-public buildings to become private buildings now: the old War Office on Whitehall will be, come summer, Raffles at the OWO. The

Darjeeling Express lives at the top of Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street, which was once the world-famous embodiment of Swinging London but now seems the global capital of the sports shoe. No matter – Kingly Court, which is built in the shape of a medieval coaching inn, is a happy nook: it is shut away,

Mister Nice is not so much a restaurant as a pre-dawn thought flung into the drag between Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street. Mayfair is becoming a drug for me, in that I both hate it and can’t stop eating here: a recent review was so poisonous that the owner telephoned, with fake bonhomie, to ask

The Cédric Grolet at the Berkeley lives in the shiniest hotel in Knightsbridge, though I prefer the Mandarin Oriental, because it looks like the crown of a toppling king: no matter what they spend on it, it seems in danger of falling into Hyde Park. The Berkeley operates a pass the parcel for restaurants and,

The Mount St Restaurant lives above the Audley Public House on Mount Street, ‘a traditional neighbourhood pub, carefully restored, and where history and contemporary art collide’, and which once appeared in a Woody Allen film called Match Point. It is owned by Artfarm, founders of the Hauser and Wirth Gallery, who have created an art