Food

Each suburban soul yearns for the Soho of their youth. It isn’t that Soho was better in the 1990s when I invaded the Colony Room, twitching, and took a fag off Sarah Lucas. It is that I was. This was the view of a friend after I last wrote on Soho restaurants. We once ran holding hands through the sprinklers in St James’s Park laughing at Peter Mandelson, who was passing with his dog, and that is my memory of the Blair years. So Soho, which is thick with metaphor anyway — its very name is a hunting call: death for one and ecstasy for another — is a district

I grew up in south-west London in the 1970s when Italian restaurants had exposed brick walls and paper tablecloths in red and white squares and giant pepper pots and were owned by people called Franco who slapped your father on the back. The lasagne came in individual dishes, oozing deep red tomato sauce so hot it stuck to the edges of the dish and burnt your tongue. You cried the first time, but not again, because you loved Spaghetti Junction more than your own home. The perfect Italian restaurant was fixed for me then, in 1979, and that was it, because restaurants are about joy, not food. And so I

Imperial Treasure is a restaurant in the part of St James’s where Leopold von Hoesch, the German ambassador to George V, buried his dog Giro after Giro electrocuted himself by eating a cable. (Everyone is a food critic. Giro was merely an unlucky one.) And this seems apt. Because it’s rare to see people in St James’s these days. Dog bones and tourists and BBC crews shooting dramas in which actors are spying or arguing about politics are multiple. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Benedict Cumber-batch pretending to be Liz Truss pretending to be Josip Tito. But not real people. They have all gone, presumably to Zone

A serious restaurant for serious times: the Ledbury in Notting Hill. It’s a good time to do it, as the dreams of the Notting Hill set crumple to dust and Jacob Rees-Mogg rides out in his stupid hats. It has sat in its former pub on Ledbury Road since 2005. It won — and has held for seven years — two Michelin stars. It has featured in the gruesome S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants List, which is, among other things, a rebuke to tap water. Its most interesting moment was during the riots of 2011, when the nation conspired to make David Cameron return from his summer holidays early. Annoying David

I admit I had a falling out with Fortnum & Mason a few years ago over its new brasserie on Jermyn Street. It replaced a restaurant that looked like a toilet-roll cover or wedding dress, and although I had never eaten there, I felt protective of it. Why was she blown away and on what wind? Why can’t London resemble, always, something unseen in a Graham Greene novel, because I want it to? It was replaced by a smooth and very expensive restaurant for rich people, which looked like every other brasserie that has opened in London since 2000. I remember it had orange banquettes. It was too Mayfair —

Caffè Concerto is a chain of Italian cafés sprouting, lividly, across London and the world. There is one on Piccadilly, one on Regent Street, and one on the Haymarket. There is one in Birmingham, and one in Westfield. (The precise address is an ungaudy unit 2000a, but presumably it is hidden behind florist-ry). There is one in Qatar. There is one in Saudi Arabia. There isn’t one in Venice, although the website has a photograph of Venice. It’s too Venetian for Venice. The style is very Italian, in that it is a combination of great style and no style at all. (Not bad style. Just an absence, something forgotten or

Tish is a new grand café in Belsize Park, north London, but kosher. There are not really enough Jews to fill a kosher restaurant in London, and they tend to fall into dust, like the ten tribes, and the temple. 1701, the unwise and subtle restaurant by Bevis Marks synagogue, has gone; Bloom’s in Golders Green has gone, too. Most British Jews aren’t kosher because chicken without butter isn’t worth having, even if you do believe that bushes speak and people want to kill you. Mostly, the food will kill you. But not always. The north London restaurant most favoured by Jews is Oslo Court, which is actually a specialist in

Darkness, but not the blanket of the dark. This was a sinister darkness, beset by smoke and flames, by the clash of steel, by screams, by terror, by horror. The victims were Huguenots on the quayside at La Rochelle in 1688. They had heard the good news. James II had been overthrown, so it was safe for French Protestants to seek refuge in England. Others wished to violate their safety. For the previous three years, since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had helped to cost King James his throne), the Huguenots had been persecuted. Swaggering, bullying dragoons had been billeted in their homes. Now, as the oppressed

The Pig at Combe is a restaurant in a country house hotel in a valley in Devon. I actually went to the Combe when it was only a country house hotel but, unlike Martha Gellhorn looking around a hotel function room in Spain and realising it had been an operating theatre in the Civil War, I did not recognise it. I spent three hours eating there, and I missed it until I looked it up and realised I spent a slightly haunted night here 15 years ago, after covering something Jane Austen-related nearby. That is an occupational hazard of the female newspaper feature writer, and that cold blue-and-white wall-paper will