Food

The Peninsula is a new hotel at Hyde Park Corner. It is part of the trend for absurd expense: rooms start at £1,400 a night and express the kind of preening mono-chrome blandness that will be the London of the future. It is a building of great ugliness – I would type the names of planners who allowed it, but on these pages it is incitement to violence. It sits on its six-lane round-about between the Lanesborough hotel and a long peeling red-brick late Victorian terrace that once appeared in a Stephen Poliakoff film about how things always fall apart. This food knows nothing of beauty, delicacy or comfort: it’s a grift It isn’t really a hotel, I think, staring: it doesn’t have that much identity.

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 its destiny, which is to be an Angus Steakhouse (this might lift the curse, the Angus Steakhouse has its own magic) but it isn’t there yet. Restaurant after restaurant favours hope over experience here: Marco Pierre White (Mark White) passed through, spilling acronyms about. I suppose it serves it right for being in the neo-Byzantine style. Don’t restaurant developers watch horror films?

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.

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.

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.

The last meal my parents had before I graced the world with my presence was fish and chips, so I like to think it forms part of my origin story. Growing up on the coast, fish and chips featured in all its forms: bags of chips clutched on windy beach walks; takeaway fish suppers brought home by Dad, steam escaping from cardboard boxes; and the ultimate luxury, a sit-in experience at Colmans, the South Shields king of fish and chip restaurants, accompanied by a slice of bread and butter and a cup of tea. I was built on fish and chips; salt and vinegar course through my blood. Battered fried fish was brought over to London by Jewish immigrants coming from Spain and Portugal, via the Netherlands, as long ago as the 16th century.

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.