London

‘Do you know who I am?’ said the voice belonging to the lady who used to be my mother, crossly, at the end of the phone line. The truthful answer is no. Since the dementia took hold, a hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body. A hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body No matter what I do, no matter how many times I ring or visit her, this person who used to be my mother is always cross and disappointed. ‘Oh, you’re alive are you!’ the strange voice barks, before asking me what I’m up

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

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. That is

There are two great American bars in London. One is perfect to escape the winter chill, the other to embrace summer sun. In winter, the American Bar at the Savoy – London’s oldest surviving cocktail bar – is ideal. There is a reason why this warm and welcoming spot has courted popularity for so long and is considered the spiritual home of modern mixology, at least in this country. In the summer months, head for the American Bar at the Stafford. There you can enjoy the large terrace just a stone’s throw from St James’s Street, where similarly skilled bar staff are able to mix up pretty much anything one

The dog café had a pretty pink sign describing its many services and I stood outside it mesmerised as I realised what it was. This was not a café where dogs were allowed. This was a café for dogs. I peeked inside and there were dog baskets for the customers to lounge in as they drank their puppuccinos. There are so many things about Britain that are too subtle for me when I re-enter the atmosphere as an expat My friend and I were on our way to dinner on the Fulham Road and we ended up standing by this café as I stared with my mouth open and asked

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

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

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

People say that Carbone is Jay Gatsby’s restaurant – Gatsby being the metaphor for moneyed doomed youth – but it is something more awful and, because people are asleep, no London restaurant has been this fashionable since the Chiltern Firehouse a decade ago. It lives in the basement of the former American embassy in Grosvenor Square, which is now the Chancery Rosewood Hotel. I thought this building would smell of fear, of why-can’t-I-have-a-visa-please? The truth is that it does, but that fear is now a commodity: you can be the person saying no-visa-for-you. (‘Uniquely yours,’ says the advertising copy. It means it.) And now, if you are rich enough, you

That Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is called Panzer’s – for the instrument of Blitzkrieg – is mad, until you remember that Jews love to eat near catastrophe, and then it is merely funny. I love Panzer’s so much I am reluctant to share it, but we need all the friends we can get. I keep telling non-Jewish friends: when we burn, you will burn with us. Though I mean it as consolation, they tend to run. St John’s Wood has always existed on the edge of hysteria. Edwardian psychopaths put their mistresses here, and I once went to a children’s birthday party where Peppa Pig couldn’t park, and

When you are old enough, you can measure your life in restaurants. I remember, for instance, when the Electric Diner on Portobello Road (named for a long ago and far away war) was a place to eat brunch, a meal that shouldn’t exist and doesn’t really, though if it belongs anywhere it belongs here. It was fine but glib – Notting Hill is either a place with no imagination or too much of it, I’m still not sure. How it can tolerate the truth of Grenfell Tower across the way I don’t know either, but I don’t live here. The diner is gone, replaced by a Thai restaurant that is