Food

The St Pancras Brasserie and Champagne Bar by Searcys is as expansive as its name, but ghostly. It is an immense Art Deco restaurant spilling on to an empty platform at the station. When restaurants opened their patios and gardens, I fretted that they would be too busy to be enjoyed: a diner would cling to a square of Astroturf, fearing to sink. But not here: the people have been removed, and they have not returned. Inside, it is empty if not shuttered: a great, golden brasserie with dark wood, dark leather and pale globes of light. The door to the loo is so tall I imagine they stole the idea from Mr Greedy (and the giant who loved peas).

The west end of London is still pale and necrotic, but there are points of light. Hatchards the bookseller is open and its memorial to the Duke of Edinburgh is relatively, blissfully, restrained: a portrait in the window, with minimal text for a writer to trip up on his own sycophancy. People are buying whisky on Jermyn Street. The greasy spoon Piggy’s in Air Street survives and if before you merely loitered outside restaurants and ate your food from a bucket you can now sit down, though a strange sort of duck marshal lurks in St James’s Park, and I do not trust him. I do not think he is really watching the ducks. I celebrate the end of this lockdown at Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill in Swallow Street.

This week my son came home from school and asked me if it was true that the Jews killed Jesus. Um, I said. Read the Gospels. Read Hyam Maccoby. Ask your father. My husband is a religious maniac, though Christian. Any patriarchy will do. He insists I pretend to be an ultra-Orthodox Jew for festivals, and finds recipes for weird ceremonial breads. ‘Can’t we make Judaism fun?’ he asks. I reply, aghast: ‘It isn’t supposed to be fun.’ My Judaism is rather Holocaust--centric. I told a family therapist after my parents’ divorce: ‘I lost a father and gained a Shoah.

Restaurant-goers who cannot let go of restaurants — for professional or other reasons — are floating on a sea of takeaway boxes, which have none of the glamour. Which of us fell in love on a takeaway? I wish I did not have to write about them, nor you to read about them, but if this is the worst thing that happened to you this year — packaging — it is not so bad. I have already begun a small counter--revolution by shopping at the greengrocers and the cheesemongers, and I suggest you do the same. Even so, they are faintly mesmerising by volume: a box-themed version of the Rumpelstiltskin myth, which is familiar to all children, and adults with an eating disorder. Perhaps it is a metaphor: we float on glut and are lucky, if not happy.

The Stein’s at Home steak menu box (£65) says ‘Love from Cornwall’: it is not for people who live in Cornwall. It is, rather, a cardboard mirror of Padstow, Rick Stein’s slate-covered, teal-painted, monstrous Cornish Center Parcs for upper-middle-class holiday-makers, and it has its own whimsical map of Rick Stein outlets in case you stray too far from the Rick Stein path, like Dorothy heading to her death. I went to Padstow during the first lockdown and heard guilty testimony: some natives enjoyed pandemic because Padstow was almost real again. But that is over now, and here comes the counter-revolution to reassert itself in cardboard. People will follow later.

Dining in catastrophe used to be more interesting: but we must be fair. It was a smaller (and wetter) catastrophe: the Acqua Alta in Venice. That is when the sea rises and you put bin bags on your legs; and people push you off the duckboards while other people waltz in the water, sweetly and poorly; and inexperienced tourists turn to hotel managers and say, with loss in their eyes: when can we go outside without bin bags on our legs? The experienced hotel manager will reply, with mirrored grief: ‘Madam, it is the sea [and what do you want me to do about it, you imbecile]?

The Compass Group boast of serving 5.5 billion meals a year, so you might think they would be good at it. Rather they walked into the most grotesque crisis of the pandemic with their subsidiary Chartwells: catchphrase ‘Eat, Learn, Live’. I might steal that. I am stockpiling one syllable words. When deputised to provide a week’s worth of school lunches to children eligible to receive free school meals, Chartwells sent food boxes so meagre that parents posted photographs of lonely carrots online. Perhaps the Compass Group was compensating for an operating profit of a mere half a billion pounds in 2020 when they are used to three times that. The cruelties of pandemic are so many! The boxes were supposed to contain £30 worth of food.

The Corbin & King dining and home entertaining box includes dishes from the Delaunay, the Wolseley and Brasserie Zédel ‘delivered to your home and finished by you’. My husband doubts it, because it comes from London, of which some Brexiters are more suspicious than the whole of France, and because it is not ‘cooked from scratch’. He claims he never heard this phrase before he married me, but he had the sort of rural Wiltshire childhood where he would roam the fields chasing hot air balloons while his mother stood in the kitchen in an apron with a spoon waiting for him. ‘It’s like being a latchkey kid,’ he moans, as I stroke the box with tiny whimpers of joy. Then he says: ‘What’s a latchkey kid?

Welcome to the sunlit uplands which, for me, contain small plastic tubs of stock, which is just the opening to the year I wished for. Even local restaurants are closed for takeaway now and I cannot face my husband’s excellent British cooking (roasts, stews, pies, like a speaking Regency cookbook). When each day is Christmas Day its lustre declines; it is like being bored and rich. I should not have ordered two ribs of beef for three people. Even Virgil Dog is off beef now, and that is disgraceful. So I subscribe to Simply Cook, a bestselling meal kit that is delivered by post. We are in danger of existing by post, and I am taken in with a pretty website and the promise of that which is lost: spurious variety.

There is straw inside the Fortnum & Mason Christmas Treat Hamper (£100). As the straw drifts through the house, it begins to resemble a stable. I like this. Hampers are dependent on plants for their mystery: without them they would be just a carrier bag full of food. Restaurants are closed to those who live apart, unless you are in Cornwall or the Isle of Wight. So, this is the Christmas of hampers; of alcohol, sugar and baked and dried goods. There are gin hampers and beer hampers and vegan hampers. There are hampers for dogs (‘woofly good’) and hampers for cats (‘the hampurr’). There is a Branston Pickle hamper, which is mostly Branston Pickle, plus socks with Branston Pickle written on them. I think that’s excellent.

Turnips is an haute cuisine restaurant inside a greengrocer in Borough Market in London. I suspect others will try this conceit soon — it is the sort of dishonest fantasy affluent anti-vax mothers enjoy as they peddle their oblivious self-hatred on smartphones made of minerals hewn by child slaves — but not like this. Turnips is indisputably magical. Perhaps I say this because it is almost completely outdoors but still warm. These are mad times, even for mad times. Borough is a good place to feel the throb of the ancient city; but particularly now. It has the toughness and ennui of a district that says: global pandemic, kids? What else you got? Look at late-capitalist masculine inadequacy disguised as a skyscraper called the Shard. What else you got?

Lockdown is hurting everyone except the chickens. I have bought them a conservatory because Philippa, a Light Sussex, looks like ancient pants in rain. It is really plastic sheeting to hang under the henhouse; they need it because the rain is horizontal. They stare out like chickens from film noir. I have exhausted local take-aways, and you cannot get fresh hampers here. Someone sent me stock cubes for beef stroganoff in the post, which feels joyless, but everyone is selling condiments — you can lick them, call it lickdown — or chocolates or alcohol, as if for a loveless Valentine’s Day. What do I seek? Thai food.

It’s a good day to stab something and tear out its heart. Elaine Lorys is the only female master fishmonger in Britain. She stands in an apron in the Stevenson fish shop in Newlyn amid the brightness of the autumn sun and signage offering mussels, oysters and clams; bass, bream and red mullet; crab and scallops; fish cakes and fish pies. Much of the fish is caught by Stevenson boats and landed at Newlyn, and is available for delivery across the UK during lockdown. The harbour is across the road, looking fine and functional, apart from the mossy medieval pier that the Mayflower may have sailed from: a local tale says the ship stopped here for water on its journey from Plymouth to Cape Cod. If a pier could look bewildered by reality, this one would. I know how it feels.

Oxford is not an easy city to homogenise; but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. I found a vast shopping centre where the Westgate used to be, looking as shopping centres do: lonely, despite its similarity to every other shopping centre. This was confirmed by the signage. New York City loves and misses you, said a sign, which I doubt: surely New York has things to worry about beyond the citizens of Oxford being unable to shop in New York City if they cannot get what they want at the Westgate? Still, I like the idea of shopping centre lamenting shopping centre across the ocean; it expresses the fashionable neurosis that objects are sentient, and worthy of compassion. Oxford is an ideal place to believe this, because the stones are the most convincing thing here.

Pity the gilded restaurants of Mayfair, if you can: they are dying. Some have reopened; they ache on like men with no legs but a glut of polenta. Occasionally, a brave one will open for customers who simply do not exist and so hangs about like a character in a Vladimir Nabokov novel: interesting but superfluous. Where are the rich? In Tuscany? On MS The World, the floating block of luxe flats? In the vault? Because they are nowhere to be seen: they are like plushly appointed Borrowers. A journalist wrote his report of the reopening of the Savoy Hotel in the Strand last month. They had six guests in a hotel reconfigured — for social distancing — for 100.

London is gasping — so where to go but Soho, which is so good at despair? It is often necrotic but now, of the central London districts, it feels the most alive. Mayfair is a pretty corpse — I pity the luxury services industry, for its clients are in hiding — but Soho’s restaurants have spread themselves on to the streets and it feels as interesting as it used to, a place that has found its purpose again. It has been over--gentrified — the renovation of Raymond’s Revue Bar is horrifying, because they closed the revue bar and kept the signage — but now it feels giddy and important: a home for the insensible and the brave. Soho has known worse things, after all.

A ghost review, now, of a ghost restaurant: the Connaught Grill, which is yet to reopen after pandemic shuttered its renovated self, which opened only in January this year. Cut off at the knees then; or strangled at birth. It feels apt to review something thwarted. I heard it may reopen for Halloween. I hope it does. We need variety in restaurants: to save the art. I never went to the Grill’s previous incarnation of 1955 to 2000, when it was famous for hosting Michael Caine and Princess Diana (I pull these out at random, but I could have pulled out Lulu and Nicolae Ceausescu) and for resisting nouvelle cuisine in favour of French cuisine, but I did not have to.

Pandemic has brought many truths, the most minor of which is: I can’t cook steak. I thought I could. I burnt butter and seared meat and — lo! — perfect steak. Then I asked Matt Brown, the executive chef at Hawksmoor, the best steak restaurant in London excepting Beast (and Beast is a charnel house and a metaphor, and it is weird) to help me improve my steak in a Zoom lesson and — lo! — I cannot cook steak. I was kindly disposed to Hawksmoor because of its name. Names are important. I have fallen in love with people because of their names. Hawksmoor is the real hero of the English Baroque. You cannot review a name though. You cannot eat a name. But you can review the breakfast at the Guildhall branch. (There are nine branches now.

Snaps + Rye is a Nordic-themed restaurant and delicatessen on the Golborne Road, at the shabby and thrilling edges of Notting Hill, just north of the Westway, a road I uncomplicatedly love, probably because it takes me from Notting Hill to places I like better. Notting Hill fell to gentrification long ago — it gasps with boredom — but here London feels like a real city, though only just. ‘This home is not a shop,’ says a sign in a nearby window, with as much feeling as signage can muster. Or should muster. ‘Nothing is for sale.’ It is a bitter time for restaurants and those who love them.

Sexy Fish is an Asian fusion barn in Berkeley Square, near the car dealerships and the nightingales, if they are still alive. It used to be a bank — NatWest! — and it still feels like it cares for nothing but money, even as it deals in sticky chicken, which means a good deal more than money to chickens. I wonder whether the blazing vulgarity of such restaurants — it has a large mirrored crocodile crawling up the wall, and that is the subtle part — will survive the terror of Covid-19, or whether it will go the way of the Russian Tea Room in New York City, which is empty apart from a glass dancing bear. We are initially refused entry due to my companion’s flip-flops.