Restaurants

Turnips is an haute cuisine restaurant inside a greengrocer in Borough Market in London. I suspect others will try this conceit soon — it is the sort of dishonest fantasy affluent anti-vax mothers enjoy as they peddle their oblivious self-hatred on smartphones made of minerals hewn by child slaves — but not like this. Turnips is indisputably magical. Perhaps I say this because it is almost completely outdoors but still warm. These are mad times, even for mad times. Borough is a good place to feel the throb of the ancient city; but particularly now. It has the toughness and ennui of a district that says: global pandemic, kids? What else you got? Look at late-capitalist masculine inadequacy disguised as a skyscraper called the Shard. What else you got?

Oxford is not an easy city to homogenise; but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. I found a vast shopping centre where the Westgate used to be, looking as shopping centres do: lonely, despite its similarity to every other shopping centre. This was confirmed by the signage. New York City loves and misses you, said a sign, which I doubt: surely New York has things to worry about beyond the citizens of Oxford being unable to shop in New York City if they cannot get what they want at the Westgate? Still, I like the idea of shopping centre lamenting shopping centre across the ocean; it expresses the fashionable neurosis that objects are sentient, and worthy of compassion. Oxford is an ideal place to believe this, because the stones are the most convincing thing here.

Pity the gilded restaurants of Mayfair, if you can: they are dying. Some have reopened; they ache on like men with no legs but a glut of polenta. Occasionally, a brave one will open for customers who simply do not exist and so hangs about like a character in a Vladimir Nabokov novel: interesting but superfluous. Where are the rich? In Tuscany? On MS The World, the floating block of luxe flats? In the vault? Because they are nowhere to be seen: they are like plushly appointed Borrowers. A journalist wrote his report of the reopening of the Savoy Hotel in the Strand last month. They had six guests in a hotel reconfigured — for social distancing — for 100.

London is gasping — so where to go but Soho, which is so good at despair? It is often necrotic but now, of the central London districts, it feels the most alive. Mayfair is a pretty corpse — I pity the luxury services industry, for its clients are in hiding — but Soho’s restaurants have spread themselves on to the streets and it feels as interesting as it used to, a place that has found its purpose again. It has been over--gentrified — the renovation of Raymond’s Revue Bar is horrifying, because they closed the revue bar and kept the signage — but now it feels giddy and important: a home for the insensible and the brave. Soho has known worse things, after all.

Q. Almost a year ago I attended the funeral of my godfather — a bachelor and distant relation whom I had seen increasingly infrequently. When I offered my condolences to his brother, he mentioned that godchildren had been very well catered for in the will and that as an executor he would be in touch with me in the coming months. I have heard nothing since. I really didn’t expect anything from the will and don’t need the money, but am simply curious about what has happened. Do I somehow raise this with the brother or just let it lie? Mary, I would greatly appreciate your advice on this awkward matter. — Name and address withheld A. This particular executor sounds like a decent sort — after all, he mentioned the bequests in the first place.

A ghost review, now, of a ghost restaurant: the Connaught Grill, which is yet to reopen after pandemic shuttered its renovated self, which opened only in January this year. Cut off at the knees then; or strangled at birth. It feels apt to review something thwarted. I heard it may reopen for Halloween. I hope it does. We need variety in restaurants: to save the art. I never went to the Grill’s previous incarnation of 1955 to 2000, when it was famous for hosting Michael Caine and Princess Diana (I pull these out at random, but I could have pulled out Lulu and Nicolae Ceausescu) and for resisting nouvelle cuisine in favour of French cuisine, but I did not have to.

Pandemic has brought many truths, the most minor of which is: I can’t cook steak. I thought I could. I burnt butter and seared meat and — lo! — perfect steak. Then I asked Matt Brown, the executive chef at Hawksmoor, the best steak restaurant in London excepting Beast (and Beast is a charnel house and a metaphor, and it is weird) to help me improve my steak in a Zoom lesson and — lo! — I cannot cook steak. I was kindly disposed to Hawksmoor because of its name. Names are important. I have fallen in love with people because of their names. Hawksmoor is the real hero of the English Baroque. You cannot review a name though. You cannot eat a name. But you can review the breakfast at the Guildhall branch. (There are nine branches now.

Snaps + Rye is a Nordic-themed restaurant and delicatessen on the Golborne Road, at the shabby and thrilling edges of Notting Hill, just north of the Westway, a road I uncomplicatedly love, probably because it takes me from Notting Hill to places I like better. Notting Hill fell to gentrification long ago — it gasps with boredom — but here London feels like a real city, though only just. ‘This home is not a shop,’ says a sign in a nearby window, with as much feeling as signage can muster. Or should muster. ‘Nothing is for sale.’ It is a bitter time for restaurants and those who love them.

Sexy Fish is an Asian fusion barn in Berkeley Square, near the car dealerships and the nightingales, if they are still alive. It used to be a bank — NatWest! — and it still feels like it cares for nothing but money, even as it deals in sticky chicken, which means a good deal more than money to chickens. I wonder whether the blazing vulgarity of such restaurants — it has a large mirrored crocodile crawling up the wall, and that is the subtle part — will survive the terror of Covid-19, or whether it will go the way of the Russian Tea Room in New York City, which is empty apart from a glass dancing bear. We are initially refused entry due to my companion’s flip-flops.

Brasserie Zédel is a grand salon under Piccadilly Circus and the only place I desired when lockdown (or lock-in) ceased and I was allowed to visit London. It is, for me — and everyone is different in their yearnings — everything a restaurant should be: very beautiful; well run (by Corbin & King of the Wolseley and the Delaunay); not insultingly priced; and, as it is windowless, pleasingly unreal: an enchanted basement, if you will — a depository for dreams. I arrive early on the first night, walking through silent London, resisting the urge to lie down in the road. This used to be the Regent Palace Hotel, the grand hotel of Soho. The restaurant was its dining room: Edwardiana at its most gilded and absurd.

Drive-through restaurants were invented so Americans could spend more time in their cars. I don’t blame them. American cars are wonderful if you like cars with fins; so, in theory, is fast food, which is more accurately called fast death, even if they did not know that in 1947. There is a contradiction to the drive-through method of collecting food, a puzzle: if you drive, you have time to wait. But such things are not designed to be sensible. I wonder what other services could be made drive-through: lawyers and podiatrists, but my preference is for libraries and, possibly, sex. These restaurants have thrived in pandemic, which again contradicts the Twitter craze for slow food and banana bread, which I think is a media invention, like the PM.

Disastrous decisions Sir: One cannot but agree wholeheartedly with Lionel Shriver (‘This is not a natural disaster’, 16 May). Given the unremarked impact of other diseases which she mentioned, Covid-19 is small beer. The government set out on the right path with its herd immunity policy, but was bounced into lockdown by the ‘science’, hounded by the media in full cry. We are now in a situation where employees, mainly in the public sector and supported by the unions, refuse to rise from their feather beds and return to work. This is not a situation from which we will recover easily — if at all.

What does a critic do when her genre collapses? Mostly I panic. I speak to restaurateurs who believe that without government help into 2022, many British restaurants will close. Most restaurants rent their premises; even if landlords defer collection, the debt will be unpayable. Most restaurants operate on slender margins; they cannot secure finance even in happy times. It is a scandal that the government has excluded monies from the service charge ‘tronc fund’ from the 80 per cent calculations in the Job Retention Scheme, even though it has received National Insurance contributions on it for years, and many restaurant staff are getting only 40 per cent of their earnings. Restaurants predict a summer slaughter. What will survive?