Restaurants

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.

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

I am, like a strain of Withnail, in the John Lewis café by mistake. I meant to review the new Jamie Oliver café and cooking school on the third floor of John Lewis Oxford Street, but they have run out of food beyond pink cake. We have no choice but to go upwards to the fifth floor and the electricals. I have always felt safe in John Lewis, a despicable thing to think, let alone type, but that is done now. It is called The Place to Eat, which echoes, though unconsciously, Ecclesiastes 3. It is preeningly ugly. I wonder if this is another strain of common British humble-brag, like

The Lavery in South Kensington is named for Sir John Lavery, official artist of the Great War and designer of the currency of the Irish Free State, who lived here, though he died in Ireland and is buried in Putney. Lavery, of course, would no longer recognise South Kensington as his home, and his white, monumental mid-Victorian house – it’s too cold to be compared to a wedding cake, it’s a power cake – is now a fashionable restaurant and ‘event space’, which I put in quotation marks so you know I didn’t write the words ‘event space’, I just typed them out. In houses like The Lavery, I wonder