Restaurants

It isn’t normal, unfortunately, to go to the pub on your own as a youngish person. There’s no real reason for that: it’s just that, if a friend saw you, they would assume you were an alcoholic. I’ve had the odd solo pint, usually while waiting for a train, but I dread, even far from home, being assumed to be on the same path as Shane MacGowan if an old acquaintance passed by the window. This is silly and I should get over myself. Of course solo drinking is fine. As Christopher Hitchens said, solitary drinks ‘can be the happiest glasses you ever drain’. But I can’t quite be bothered to lead the resistance. So what are the options if I want to decompress while out and about? Do I ride the bus in a circle? Do I find a library?

Fifteen years ago, if you were eating at 239 Brompton Road in Kensington, just over from the Oratory, you may have been enjoying steak tartare, or grilled rabbit with mustard sauce, or tête de veau, a poached portion of calf’s head with turned potatoes. This was the former premises of Racine, a French restaurant by Henry Harris, which Michael Winner said was ‘quadruple historic’. Harris now runs Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, rated the best restaurant in the country this year, after closing the Knightsbridge site in 2015. At 239 Brompton Road nowadays, on the menu you’ll find a ‘cheesecake brownie served with vanilla ice cream, Oreos and warm Nutella and Lotus Biscoff sauce’ (£10.95).

In 1757, the same year that Admiral Byng was executed pour encourager les autres, Simpson’s Tavern opened in the City of London at 38½ Cornhill. It became a popular chophouse in Georgian and Victorian London and people think it’s where Ebenezer Scrooge has dinner in A Christmas Carol. Simpson’s survived wars, pandemics and downturns, but couldn’t get through a rent dispute in 2022. At some point in that 265-year history, someone thought it was clever to outsource the job of landlord to a group of companies in Bermuda. Four years after the tavern shut, the site was bought by the restaurateurs behind Cloth, an English brasserie in Smithfield that opened in 2024.

The worst areas to eat in London are the best places to live. Hampstead, Chelsea, Chiswick, St John’s Wood: all would be lucky to have even one restaurant that would be an 8/10 in Hackney. This is disappointing because Hackney is annoying, but, hey, hipsters make good restaurants. I wonder why these areas are so lacking. Is it because St John’s Wood Man has an underpaid cook on speed dial? Is it because Belgravian Influencer orders a shawarma every night? Is it because Hampstead Family don’t eat where they sh– hmm, yes... A little bruschetta of chopped rabbit livers comes next, visible through a translucent sheet of lardo Whatever the explanation, the exception to this rule is Wandsworth Common.

Claridge’s grew nine storeys in the last decade: it’s a metaphor. The ornamental 1897 castle on Brook Street has expanded to fit the available space. Though it grew by half, it never closed, and workmen dug out the basement by hand. In one room, Claridge’s was a building site: in another, a dream world. We are trekking through metaphors now. We are up to our necks. The children eating the Nutella, banana and whipped cream crêpes look deranged Hotels are like buses: they have infinite possibilities. That is what they are for. To not be home. Like Alec Guinness, who lived in the Connaught with his share of the profits of Star Wars, which shamed him (the Connaught is the anti-Tatooine), I would like to live in a hotel.

Erev is an Israeli restaurant in Notting Hill, though Israeli restaurants do not call themselves Israeli nowadays. They have rebranded to Eastern Mediterranean and I don’t blame them. These are bad days for Zionists. I tried to buy an almond croissant at the progressive coffee shop in Newlyn last week while wearing an Israeli flag as a cape. My excuse was: it was election day, and Gaza was on the ballot. I didn’t get the almond croissant. They didn’t have any. Erev, though, is the subject of real protests from real people who think that eating is, under certain circumstances, a genocidal act. They stand outside and shout at diners. If you think genocide and restaurants have nothing to do with each other, meet 2026.

Simpson’s in the Strand is a dream palace, and its fortunes are as tidal as the river. It is on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, destroyed in the Peasants’ Revolt. It began as a cigar divan and chess club, was subsumed into the Savoy Hotel, built with the profits from The Mikado, and was beloved by Churchill and Wodehouse, who described it as an Elysium where you were ‘at liberty to eat till you were helpless, if you felt so disposed’. It then decayed. I’ve come here for 30 years and, grand as it was, Simpson’s smelt of beef and the 1922 committee by the end. No restaurant can live on that indefinitely, and it closed in 2020. I did not enjoy my last meal here, but I took part of its myth: when it sold off its crockery in 2023 I bought what I think is a milk jug.

Brasserie Angelica is the – is the word signature? – restaurant inside the Newman, Fitzrovia, a new hotel that has landed in the capital like a spaceship containing aliens who are into menswear. I don’t mind buildings that look like they don’t belong. Fitzrovia is charming because it feels like remnants left by other places. We have too much Edwardiana already: in the Aldwych– formerly the best surviving medieval part of London after the Great Fire – I feel like I am stomping through cakes of stone. The Newman is a wail in glass and brick on a quiet lane near Gower Street. There are pale awnings, brass fittings and uplighting: Manhattan in its last boom. It is attached to a Victorian house renovated to the standards of a grouter with OCD.