Food

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.

Alcoholics know that hell is denial, and there is plenty at Disneyland Paris in winter. This is a pleasure land risen from a field and everyone has after-party eyes, including the babies. The Disney hotels operate a predictable hierarchy: princesses at the top, Mexicans at the bottom. We, the Squeezed Middle, are at the Sequoia Lodge with Bambi, where I learn that I like canned birdsong, and that is fair. You don’t consume dream worlds, because that is not their nature. They consume you. We stand in the Magic Kingdom and stare at Mickey Mouse-shaped food and a fake Bavarian castle – it’s Ludwig’s, not Sleeping Beauty’s – painted pink. Disney culture is impregnable: hence the fortress. It only needs – it only feeds on – itself.

Elizabeth II was a god and a commodity: now she is gone it is time for posthumous exploitation. Lilibet’s is a restaurant named for her childhood nickname at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, on the site of the house where she was born. It was inevitable that Elizabeth II would eventually get a personal restaurant. Princess Diana ate in the Café Diana – English breakfasts and kebabs – on the Bayswater Road and George VI is the inspiration for the superb Guinea Grill – mostly sausages, or rather it is the sausages I remember – near Lilibet’s. Because that is what the British do to our monarchs and their intimates. We eat them and call it love.

I used to be a Christmas pudding denier. I couldn’t see the attraction of a dense pudding made mostly of currants; frankly, I’d rather have a trifle. Of course, I was wrong: I was judging Christmas pudding by poor examples, those that sat on the edge of a Christmas lunch tray at school or were half-heartedly doled out by other pudding sceptics (I’m looking at you, Mother). My conversion came about thanks to a party – a Christmas pudding party. Not a party for eating Christmas puddings but rather one where the guests made Christmas puddings. It was hosted by my friend Kate and I went along out of love for her, rather than love for the pud. Under Kate’s keen eye, and following her great-granny’s recipe, we creamed kilos of butter and sugar in a big plastic tub.

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, when Ben Gunn is found by Jim Hawkins, sunburnt and wide-eyed after three years of being marooned on the island, the first thing he asks Hawkins for is cheese: ‘Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted mostly.’ As a greedy person prone to daydreaming, I’ve often wondered what my ‘cheese – toasted mostly’ would be. A dozen oysters? A cold negroni in a fluted tumbler? A perfect quivering soufflé? I think it’s gravy. That’s my desert island dream, the idea I can’t shake, the touchstone I’d return to. I’d take gravy in any form: thick and rich, made from meat scraps, a thin, boozy jus whisked up from pan scrapings, even the ‘from granules’ stuff, stirred in a plastic jug moments before serving.