Drink

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 – Eliza Doolittle didn’t need it – and Billingsgate awoke one morning to find itself on the Isle of Dogs. Somehow the cows hung on in West Smithfield. We owe them a lot but I would say that, I am a restaurant critic. Somehow the cows hung on in West Smithfield. We owe them a lot This is the most interesting part of the City of London: St Bartholomew the Great, of God and Four Weddings and a Funeral – the one where Charles was punched, fairly – and Cloth Fair.

Paris has enough great restaurants to maintain its claim to be the world capital of gastronomy. That said, Parisian residents insist that these days, it is possible to eat badly in their city. Yet I still think that this would require especial incompetence. In Brussels, a strong second in the pecking order, it would be even harder. There is a splendid establishment called Comme Chez Soi. Almost 100 years old, it has established a worldwide reputation without losing contact with its roots. The last time I was there, I observed a couple of ladies-who-lunch, Brussels fashion. There was no question of a watercress salad on a bed of lettuce leaves, washed down with Perrier water.

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 for the completeness of the vision – who doesn’t want to live inside art? – and the portrait of the British class system in housing. Here it is, at last, laid out like a textbook: journey’s end. We order via app and pay in advance: there is a shortage of what tabloids call flunkeys It is becalmed on a Sunday evening, and sun saturated: there is almost no one about. Perhaps the residents are indoors, enjoying the lushness of their fittings.

The Romans wrote the history, or at least the myths. But long before Romulus murdered Remus, the Mediterranean – the Great Sea – was the principal conduit of civilisation. The Greeks spread their wings across the wine-dark seas, to the extent that even later Romans accepted that much of southern Italy was actually Magna Graecia. The Greek settlements included the city of Sybaris. Although it was destroyed around 2,500 years ago, it has passed into the language. Sybaritic – the very word is expressive – denotes ease and pleasure, the beauties of nature amid the adornments of art and architecture: champagne and dancing girls. Sybaris is in Calabria, the toe of Italy. In more recent times, history has not been kind to the region.

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 measured in the UK – but another calamity was coming. In 2014 the art gallery Hauser & Wirth, with branches in London, Zurich and New York, decided it needed a premises in Bruton, and a restaurant called the Roth Bar and Grill. There is also an Instagram-friendly farmhouse to rent on this site. When I toured it, the price was £666 a night, including the art and, I hope, a food gift basket and, I suspect, an ancient native Briton graveyard.

We were talking bulls. A friend of mine, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, is a remarkable character who can claim at least two distinctions. First, he must have been about the worst-behaved boy in the modern history of Eton College. He claims that this is an understatement and that he heads the role of infamy since the days of Henry VI. He was certainly put ‘on the Bill’ – that is, for a disciplinary interview with the headmaster – on 68 occasions. So he was fortunate that corporal punishment had been abolished before he arrived, though his career of rapscallionry was possibly not the strongest argument for its demise. A great wine, drawing on tradition and terroir as well as modern techniques He must have come close to expulsion.

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 mall in competitive dystopia and idiocy. Birmingham has energy, and that swallowed Sarehole, but unfortunately for Birmingham, there was a writer who cared: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.Sarehole was his childhood palace, and now, more reluctantly I would imagine, his memorial pizzeria.

I once drank some excellent port at Ted Heath’s table. The invitation came as a surprise, but it almost certainly had nothing to do with the monstre (un)sacré. The dinner took place during a Bournemouth party conference at the Close in Salisbury. Ted had an unofficial PPS, a then Tory MP called Robert Hughes. Rob had a sense of fun and mischief. There would have been little scope for either while he was enduring the sullen maunderings of the Incredible Sulk. Anyway, he was given a chance to amuse himself when asked to organise a dinner party. He included me. The young are being encouraged to drink port and even mix it – a criminal offence This would not have been Ted’s choice. I had never been polite about him in print, nor to him in person. But he was at one disadvantage.

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 where guests aren’t indicates what Claridge’s employees cannot put into words without spontaneously combusting.) Labourers dug the basement by hand and impersonated the Artful Dodger when management toured. The BBC described the new penthouse at length without mentioning that it is gross, with a grand piano in a glass box on a terrace like a Richard Clayderman-themed nightmare. A roof was assembled off-site and stuck on as for a doll’s house.

It was the English summer at its most perverse. We were drinking Pimm’s while hoping against hope for better news from Old Trafford. As the clock ticked and the rain was unrelenting, one of our number emitted a groan which seemed to start from his boot soles. ‘Why can’t there be a bit of global warming in Manchester?’ The girls were growing restive. ‘I can just about put up with you lot discussing cricket, but not if it’s an excuse to talk about the weather’ was one eloquent complaint. A fair comment, so we changed the subject, while keeping a surreptitious weather eye on Manchester. All unavailing. The caravan of tension now moves on to the Oval. How much more can the human nervous system endure?

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: Covent Garden is more Kit Kat Club than Twilight of the Gods with sausage. I am not saying you must be into Götterdämmerung to enjoy this restaurant. It just helps. There is no atmosphere I can find, and I think this is deliberate: a beer hall is an existential void to fill  It used to be in the City of London, and that worked. City men are savages, mining for gold: they would absolutely kill a pig. That is what beer halls are, base: wheat, fat, sweat.

“I like bars just after they open for the evening,” Terry Lennox tells Philip Marlowe in the early pages of The Long Goodbye. “When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar — that’s wonderful.” They’re drinking gimlets — gin and Rose’s lime juice — which some people, though not me, consider a type of martini.

Some subjects invite an eternal recurrence. One such is Tuscany. The other day, I wrote about that glorious region: its mastery of la dolce vita, its almost effortless command of civilisation. Indeed, Tuscan civilisation is a tautology. Since then, I have paid a brief visit. There was only one shadow. How can one find the words to equal the subject matter? Wine was produced here long before we Brits had even discovered woad My host was Grahame McGirr, a successful banker who has always been fascinated by wine, which led him to buy a vineyard near Monte-pulciano. I commented on some of his wines after a tasting in London. They were impressive: promise, stimulated by ambition. He pressed me to report on the promise in situ – the things one does for friends.