Food

Café Hampstead is a new café in — big reveal! — Hampstead, the gaudiest of the old villages on the hills around London. Hampstead was once, mysteriously, home to progressives too many to type; refugees from Belsize Park carrying their most precious back copies of the LRB in plastic sacks. Why did they live in Hampstead? What for? They have moved out now, or died, and the truth died with them. We will never know what it was that they thought they wanted, or saw; whether it was always betrayal, or the wife made them do it. You can mock, and I do, but Hampstead is less interesting without them; there is little to laugh at these days, even if it is usual to see James Corden and Ricky Gervais in the street, looking for things to put in their mouths.

I have fallen in love with the c2c, a whisker of a train that is never delayed. It operates between London and Essex; Fenchurch Street and Shoeburyness. Its name stands for ‘anything you want it to’, according to the company’s website — everything from ‘capital to coast’ to ‘commitment to customers’. Over the past year, I have become a complete convert, a cheerful champion of the c2c as it whisks me into Essex and on to the north side of the Thames Estuary, where I like to walk with a man called Malt. Joseph Conrad, who lived in Stanford-le-Hope, a town near Tilbury on the c2c line, wrote: ‘The estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous imagination. This appeal is not always a charm.’ True.

It was a culinary triumph. My hosts do not spend much time in the UK, and are determined to entertain stylishly during their visits. This Christmas they succeeded, blending tradition and radicalism. The planning began in Pall Mall on the third lunching-day in advent. We addressed the major strategic question: satiation. After bird plus pud, there is barely the energy to fall asleep in front of an old film and the rest of the day can be unsatisfactory. In recent years, I have noticed a tendency to deal with this problem by de-fanging the pudding. There is a new girlie-man breed of Christmas puds which lack the embrandied pomp of previous generations. In my friends’ case, this was not an option.

Rules looks as if it voted for Brexit, and now finds itself inside an eternal Christmas Eve, where it is always Christmas, and always Brexit. And what a gay Brexit, with swags and flounces and light bouncing through the windows on to Maiden Lane, like a child’s vision of hope. Or is it illusion? Does a chimney contain Arron Banks as Father Christmas with gifts in his sack marked ‘depression’, ‘delusion’ and ‘starvation’? Will he get stuck and go shouty-crackers on Twitter? Is Nigel Farage sipping a pint of lager, pretending to be a good elf?

Farmacy, which opened last year, is London’s most fashionable ‘clean eating’ restaurant; it is, therefore, a restaurant for people who hate food. This ‘clean eating’ epidemic grows as we fall into decadence and see food, rather than our own mouths, as the source of our calamity — how can we be saved from food? It is Bunyadi, the pop-up naked hobbit restaurant again, but without wit: same food, less fun, and no tree stumps at all except metaphorically, on the tops of people’s necks. It is owned by Camilla Fayed, the daughter of Mohammed Fayed, and there is probably much to divine about that family dynamic here, had I stayed, but I didn’t.

Dining rooms have been in the doldrums for decades. Even Mary Berry has given up on hers. ‘Most of us, I think, live in the kitchen,’ she said recently. She’s right. Plenty of us don’t have a dining room to give up on, me included. Plenty more have knocked down what once divided a dining room from a kitchen to create an airy, open-plan ‘living space’ where we do battle with avocados and everything else. We might be obsessed with what we are and aren’t eating but we don’t stand on ceremony. Nigella Lawson admits she slurps noodles ‘hypnotically’ while watching TV on the sofa. ‘If it can be eaten out of a bowl, I’m very happy to eat while I watch,’ she said.

Jean-Georges at the Connaught — formerly the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel, but it was renamed during the first world war, at about the same time the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was deprived of his British peerages, which was one of the funnier events in the war — is the informal restaurant at the Connaught Hotel, and it opened this summer on the curve of Carlos Place, Mayfair. The Connaught is an English hotel with a German heart. It is therefore the hotel equivalent of our Queen, and the best hotel in the world. It is better than its sister Claridge’s, from which Dwight Eisenhower ran away in 1944. He could face the Nazis, but not the ‘whorehouse pink’.

Foxlow is near Golden Square in west Soho, where drunken hacks used to take long drunken lunches before having stupid drunken ideas. My favourite stupid drunken idea was from a Guardian hack and it involved renting an ice-cream van and asking Nick Cohen and A.A. Gill to drive around in it, selling ice creams, bickering and hopefully breaking down, before writing up the experience for a Silly Season special. But drunken hacks no longer take long drunken lunches in Soho. They get drunk at home, if there is one, or drink in the queue at Eat, if they can afford to eat. The piece was not commissioned, the years passed, and I am now a guest at the funeral of my own profession each day. A.A. Gill is dead, Nick Cohen is sober, and even Silly Season has gone.

J Sheekey is one of Richard Caring’s older, and better, restaurants. Since he has dowsed the suburbs of London in multiple outposts of the Ivy (there is one in Wimbledon, another in Richmond and presumably one pending in Penge), J Sheekey increasingly feels like an island in a sea of pointlessly aspirational green. The rise of the Ivy — the original celebrity brasserie, which is code for an indifferent restaurant full of awful people eating shepherd’s pie — is an inevitable consequence of the rise of celebrity culture. This is anti--culture, and the Ivy is, therefore, an anti--restaurant. So many celebrities, and now so many Ivys to put them in. The age of narcissism has many tentacles.

I am always surprised to remember that Andrew Lloyd Webber has taste; it must be remembrance of Cats. I was surprised, for instance, to learn that he once owned Pablo Picasso’s portrait of d’Angel Fernández de Soto, which I always thought of as my Picasso because it looks like my friend Hadrian Wise, who used to come to Merton College bar in his pyjamas. We once rolled a joint as long as The Spectator because he loved The Spectator. High as I was after the Spectator-length joint in 1994, I never thought I would write for it. Neither did he. Now Lloyd Webber, whose masterpiece is Phantom of the Opera, because it is all about him, has decided to host a tasteful restaurant in Victoria called the Other Naughty Piglet.

Bibendum is a hushed restaurant on the first floor of the Michelin House on the Fulham Road. (Bibendum is the name of the Michelin Man; as such, he is the only restaurant mascot I can think of who is a morbidly obese drunk, and here of all places. It is a noble gesture in a district full of Prada and control). The building is extraordinary — an art-deco whim standing on a corner like Cinema Paradiso without the dreams. It was once the headquarters of the Michelin tyre company; as such, I admire the ambition of placing a tyre company in what is essentially a Venetian palace, but perhaps tyres were considered special then. In the Congo, for instance, rubber took a lot of people with it.