Food

Mezzogiorno is a very serious, golden Italian restaurant inside the Corinthia London Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. Restaurants are increasingly gold these days, as if for a crocodile of Scrooge McDucks trooping through the wreckage of liberalism looking for money, nuts and guns. It follows the trajectory of my beloved Raffles at the OWO [Old War Office] round the corner. What was once a Ministry of Defence building – though formerly a hotel – is now a (quite good) pizza joint. When the time comes, I hope the drones know. Ignore the lie that gold restaurants serve tiny portions for tiny people. These are vast Mezzogiorno is by the gifted Francesco Mazzei, previously of Sartoria in Savile Row. Here, because this is an age in denial about hierarchy– ha!

I am not in the habit of bringing viral TikTok recipes here. It is a safe space, away from digestive biscuits submerged in yoghurt masquerading as cheesecake, baked oats, or sugary instant coffee whipped up like foam (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, ignorance is bliss). No, here we are in the realm of tried-and-tested vintage recipes. So why am I letting marry me chicken into this sacred place? For the uninitiated, it first popped up a decade ago on an American food website called Delish, but it became the most-searched recipe on the New York Times in 2023. It’s a simple concept: chicken cooked in a creamy, tomatoey sauce that is so delicious that the person to whom you serve it will get down on one knee.

Dover Street Counter is the tiny sister of The Dover, a very good restaurant on – who knew? – Dover Street, Mayfair. This is the site of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones Club, if following Wodehouse’s paths is your way of coping, and there is nothing wrong with that. There are some bad restaurants in Mayfair now, with slutty Roman gods and monumental Caesar salads; passive-aggressive tributes to Elizabeth II in bad cake, and enslaved fish staring at sex workers with the mute anguish of recognition. This is better. Good restaurants have the gift of suppressing fear, and this is one such The Dover is delivered by professionals for adults – that is, people who do not put intimacy on expenses, and who can recognise neo-Stalinist soft furnishings when they see them.

The British hold a steamed pudding close to their hearts. Like a culinary hot-water bottle, it may not be terribly elegant but it’s hard not to feel comforted and delighted by its presence. Most, however, follow a similar formula: a sponge cake mixture that is steamed into ethereal lightness and topped with a gooey, drippy sauce. This isn’t to decry them: I could never be fatigued by the spongy similarity of a golden syrup pudding and a bronzely glistening ginger one but they all come from the same sponge playbook, so I was intrigued to find one that doesn’t fit the mould.

Corenucopia by Clare Smyth is in Belgravia, amid a line of interior-design shops, and it is prettier than all of them. It is a female paradise on the ground floor of a mansion block, dedicated to art nouveau and ‘comfort’ food. There are plaster tree branches peeking from the walls and the menu script looks elvish. It is rare that whimsy does not make me kick things, and few things are more whimsical than plaster forests, but Smyth, also of the three-Michelin-starred Core, is one of the great cooks working now. From her, whimsy is merely voice; or, rather, I forgive her. We eat malted sourdough with Ampersand butter and wild venison salami. Both are glorious There is a sanity to this restaurant, even if it is gilded for native Belgravia blondes.

The exterior of the Phoenix Palace is cream with golden letters like the napkin and the Laffer curve, and it is squeezed below an Art Deco mansion block in Baker Street. The street is self-effacing, stuck between the Marylebone Road and the Sherlock Holmes museum, which exists because London is, among other things, morbid. The cuisine is Cantonese. Understatement is a feint here, though; the Phoenix Palace is famous, and always on the best dim sum lists. It is beloved by Chinese tourists and students, and, weirdly, the Labour party, whose grandees smile uneasily from photographs, like hostages to the economy, and rice. The food comes near instantly.

Sometimes you find it, H.G. Wells’s door in the wall, but to tapas: a restaurant so perfect you hesitate to review it. Each critic kills the thing she loves, because to love it is to change it. But I can’t just review palaces for psychotics containing lamps that should not exist, comforting though the idiocies of the very rich are. So here is a review of 28 Church Row, Hampstead. I will try not to make it read like a Hampstead novel about the unreliability of memory, but I might forget to do this. Church Row is the prettiest street in Hampstead: a ragtag of Georgian houses beloved by television stars who wake up one day, understand they are vulgar and buy a house that isn’t. I can’t afford one, but I saved a man from death in Church Row once, which is unusual for this column.

Kingsley Amis was obsessed with Scott’s on Mount Street, Mayfair, and he knew a lot about food. He ate himself to death. In his unwise James Bond continuation novel Colonel Sun – Ian Fleming also loved Scott’s – Amis had Bond ponder that ‘every meal taken in those severe but comfortable panelled rooms [is] a tiny victory over the new hateful London of steel and glass matchbox architecture’. Bond then presumably dropped his knickers, because there is as much projection in Amis and Fleming as there is in this column. Even so, I know how they feel about Scott’s. Mayfair is now the UAE with democracy and rain. It is gold and pink for toddler princes, and Scott’s, which is the colour of a Barbour, remains a tiny victory in brown. Of course Amis loved it.

Going to see QPR on Boxing Day has become a tradition in the Young household – and not because we hold out much hope of winning. The Hoops have only won 19 of the 71 Boxing Day fixtures we’ve played since 1882, when the club was founded. The last time was in 2018, when we beat Ipswich 3-0 at home, and we haven’t won away since 1967. But going to watch our team, however poorly we play, beats festering at home in that fallow period between Christmas Day and 1 January, so my three sons and I piled into the car for the 150-mile round-trip to Fratton Road in Portsmouth. We had an additional reason for making the journey, which was a special Christmas offer from Toby Carvery whereby anyone called Toby could eat for free.