Restaurants

Ed is a plank. He was always a plank — and now he is in Ibiza being a plank. Plankety--plankety-plank: goodbye to our most recent terrible leader — and who will be the next? I, meanwhile, am in the Gay Hussar, choking on my own grief, hearing ‘Crying in the Rain’, weirdly, in my head, trying to forget the images that flicker mercilessly across my eyes, disrupting my view of a book that says, in capital letters, for emphasis — tony blair (now that’s a leader, eh!) — Clegg, dry-eyed with realisation at the breadth of his failure, Ed Balls hauled down like an -Easter Island statue, Samantha Cameron’s victory dress, which was a bullet-proof vest on the front and a high-vis jacket at the back. Well, it was a long -campaign.

The Portrait Restaurant lives at the top of the National Portrait Gallery, London. It is fiercely modern, but likeable. You ride an escalator into a void, glimpse the raging faces of the Plantagenets and take a lift upwards, away from dead kings and film characters walking the streets. (Downstairs, by the entrance to the National Gallery, two competing Yodas from Star Wars are posing for photographs. One is too tall to be a convincing Yoda. Tourists inhabit a different city.) In this long bright room there is no such anxiety; only clean windows to Trafalgar Square and happy women having lunch in a secret glade of stone and brick.

La Coupole, Montparnasse, is the grandest and most famous of the old pre-war Parisian brasseries; that is, if you have an Esprit Brasserie loyalty card, as I have, you can dine in homage to dead continental intellectuals — plus Ernest Hemingway — whenever you wish, and with 20 per cent off. They sit, dead in black and white on the walls in their spectacles, like the toys Star Wars sold but more rigorous and interesting. Ernest Hemingway is to Parisian brasseries what Mickey is to Disney World; Edith Piaf — or Salvador Dalí — is Daffy Duck. Me, I sat under a playful cartoon of Jewish intellectuals murdered by the Nazis. Happy Easter, Europe. The street is a shrieking boulevard; the exterior is Art Deco at its most inhumane and bulbous; the room is vast.

The Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane, is a cake floating in space. All grand hotels create a parallel universe in which their guests are returned to some great gilded and unnatural womb with mini-bar and floristry, but the Dorchester feels particularly remote; has it overplayed its myth? Or is it a combination of the traffic (Park Lane has eight traffic lanes, three roundabouts, one set of unicorn-themed gates and a monument to the dead animals of war), the net curtains (the decorative equivalent of blindness) and the strange completeness of the building? What does the Dorchester, with its curved beige frontage and yellow awnings, actually look like? Bournemouth. Or any retirement community. Such as Monaco, or Torquay.

I think Rowley’s is the perfect restaurant; but I am really a gay man. Rowley’s is at 113 Jermyn Street (the Tesco end). It was made in homage to the Wall’s sausage and ice-cream fortune, although it opened in 1976, after the Wall’s sausage and ice-cream company (I call it that because it sounds magical) was sold to Unilever (less magical). So it is quite a late homage. The Wall’s sausage and ice-cream fortune, how I love to type the words; did you know that Mr Wall moved into ice-cream so as not to sack staff in the summer months, when no one — except me and George IV — wants to eat sausages? That is worth remembrance.

Rivea (stupid name) is in the bowels of Bulgari in Knightsbridge, a hotel which looks like a vast Virgin Upper Class lounge. It sits opposite One Hyde Park (stupid name), an apartment block which looks like a vast Virgin Upper Class lounge and which I am fairly certain appeared two weeks ago in a very silly television show called Silent Witness, in which a plutocrat was murdered with scented gas after being chased by the FSB. Was he Litvinenko, or Berezovsky, who I think was murdered for suggesting that Vladimir Putin is really Dobby the masochistic elf from Harry Potter? Who knows, but it is always gratifying when the BBC drama department does the government’s work for them. Even so, with the super-rich (when did everything get so super?

Quaglino’s is an ancient subterranean brasserie in St James’s, a district clinging to the 18th century with cadaverous fingers. It was founded in 1929 by -Giovanni Quaglino, who once wrote a book called The Complete Hostess; do not buy a haddock that weighs over 2lbs, he counsels, among other things. Quaglino’s is called a ‘grande dame’ by the sort of critic who confuses ‘grande’ with louche. Quaglino’s initially catered to posh idiots who thought they were ‘edgy’ because they listened to jazz during the abdication crisis. The Queen came once — the first time a reigning monarch had dined at a restaurant — and Princess Margaret repeatedly, but the Queen did not return; louche, then.

 Moscow Here we go again. The rouble slides, then tumbles, and slides again. For those of us who remember the crash of August 1998, the drill is familiar. For Muscovites, the old instincts have surfaced from the 1990s like a sausagey burp. Shoppers besieged Ikea, Auchan and other mega-markets, desperate to spend rapidly devaluing roubles. Cynical expatriates such as myself did much the same with our newly inflated hard currency. I cleared my local posh wine shop of a thousand bucks’ worth of Burgundy, now half-price in dollar terms. A correspondent colleague raided the Moscow Apple store to the tune of two iPhones and a pair of laptops before they shut down to recalculate prices.

Somerset House, a handsome Georgian palace on the Thames, was once the office of the Inland Revenue, and the courtyard was a car park, but that particular hell is over. Instead there is Skate at Somerset House with Fortnum & Mason, which is a purple-lit skating rink next to a ‘pop-up’ shop or ‘Christmas arcade’. This, because all PR copywriters think they write for Jennifer’s Diary in 1952, is apparently ‘the most chic and complete Christmas experience in London this season’. I doubt it. There is, for instance, no sign of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, Father Christmas, or rogue elves, although there is a ‘twinkling 40ft Christmas tree hand-picked from the Kielder Forest’.

Mousehole is a charming name; it is almost a charming place. It is a fishing village on Mount’s Bay, Cornwall, beyond the railway line, which stops at Penzance, in an improbable shed; I love that what begins at Paddington, the most grandiose and insane of London stations, ends in a shed. The Spanish invaded Mousehole in 1595 but Drake’s fleet came from Plymouth and chased them away; nothing so interesting has happened since; just fishing, tourism and decline. Now there are galleries and restaurants and what the Cornish call ‘incomers’ buying cottages, in which they place ornamental fishing nets after painting everything white. (For something more ‘authentic’, you can visit the Old Ship Inn on the harbour.

Atlantico is a vast buffet inside the Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort Spa and Casino in Gran Canaria. The Lopesan Costa Melonoras Resort Spa and Casino — or, as I will henceforth call it, TLCMRSAC — looks like Citizen Kane’s Xanadu without the art, the metaphor or the tragedy. It has towers, chandeliers, vistas, pools, terraces, tennis courts, a swim-up bar, a miniature golf course and palm trees. It is a synthetic paradise for Europeans who want sun in November in their own time zone; it is more unnatural than Las Vegas. Atlantico has roughly one thousand covers, if you include an annexe room styled like an Egyptian tomb with a coffee machine, and an annexe terrace. (Each terrace has its own familiar, or cat.

Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia, I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and somehow a loin of fruitcake sounds appetising, or even a loin of sourdough bread.