Restaurants

Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held up aching over the world’s most charismatic puddle; Harry’s is a transgressive anti-palazzo. It is a world-famous restaurant, the jewel of the Cipriani brand, and it is very conscious of this honour; it sells branded tagliarelli and books about the meals it served 30 years ago to the rich and famous; it is into auto-iconography, like the city it lives in. For this, and so much else, I blame Ernest Hemingway. He ate here after shooting birds in the lagoon and doesn’t the world know it? Some men fought against Hitler. Others ate against him. Outside, people pose for photographs by the signage.

Wong Kei is a mad Chinese restaurant on Wardour Street, Chinatown. Until recently it was considered the rudest restaurant in London and, because human stupidity is without end, it became a tourist attraction in its own right, a destination for masochists too frightened to visit an actual dominatrix who would hit them with a stick. The owner decided this notoriety upset him so he instructed the staff — no more deliberate or casual or accidental rudeness. This was considered so notable that it was reported in national newspapers. I never thought Wong Kei was particularly rude, but then I am Jewish.

It is now two decades since I lived in Oxford. I was then a drunk and lonely puddle of a person, with only a gift for screaming; but no matter how low I sank, to paraphrase Alcoholics Anonymous literature, I never sank quite as low as to consider eating at the ’bab van (kebab van) outside Univ (University College) on the High (High Street); I preferred to dine in Hall (a hall). Oxford, you see, has its own native dialect, a sort of pidgin posh best worn with a depressed carnation and a giant inedible chip made of class terror. Perhaps the roots of my eventual redemption were in that tiny grunt of gastronomic self-esteem; who knows? Or was it just another thing I dreamt and actually I ate ’babs constantly? Maybe I really was a ’bab?

London House is in Battersea, which some people call South Chelsea, but is more East Wandsworth to my mind; or maybe North Clapham, or, even better, West Brixton. This is the self-hatred that the housing bubble has brought to London: we have whole sorrowful postcodes that long to be something else because original posh London, which is SW1 and W1 and SW3, does not really exist any more, or rather it does, but it does not belong to us, so we might as well forget about it. So we have London House. It was obviously a marketing essential to tag this restaurant to London, and also to mention houses, which now are unicorns of brick.

Moro (‘moorish’ or ‘sexist’) is a Spanish restaurant on Exmouth Market, near the bones of the old Guardian and Observer building on Farringdon Road. I don’t mind telling Spectator readers (‘you people’) that I once kissed the bricks of this building, quite seriously, like Jews kiss the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport. (At least that is the story; but I have never seen anyone do it. Kiss some dirty tarmac. What for?) Moro is distinguished as the restaurant in which Guardian journalists first realised Julian Assange is mad. He stood up near an olive and announced he didn’t care if the leaks led informants to be murdered, which is a bad look for a revolutionary, until you really think about it. Then I imagine he ate an olive.

Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in Wiltshire, with gables like teeth and a pond outside, possibly haunted. It is like a smiling wife who bares her fangs and eats the car park and all the Hondas within; a cinematic fiend of a house, in fact, but I am only reading Hilary Mantel these days, and she has the gift of bestowing menace on everything — clingfilm, envelopes, nuts. A country house hotel doesn’t stand a chance. We are here because it is New Year’s Eve. It is my 40th birthday, A has decided that he hates motorways, and Little Baby (LB) is not welcome at ordinary country house hotels, because he is incontinent. (This does not detract from his charm.

A restaurant in a synagogue may be too mad even for this column but we are Jews, so why not? (Column shrugs with the secret frisson of negative stereotyping.) 1701 is adjacent to Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London; it is the oldest, wisest and most camouflaged synagogue in Britain, disguised, presumably for safety, as a Christopher Wren church. This anticipates the joy of confusion — rabbis (I have long stopped calling them rabbits, being above such idiocies, as in Orthodox Rabbit, Progressive Rabbit, Welsh Rabbit) being asked for salad dressing, waiters being asked for blessings, security men (Jews love security men, in a complex way) being asked to wrap a piece of fish for a late snack. Heaven. Or not. Jews don’t really have a heaven; if we did we would hate it.

The coalition said they would tame health and safety, which would be great for those of us in the food -business. But they, like the public, like to blame Brussels, and the problem is not with Europe, or not often. EU law is basically Napoleonic, and sensible. It places the onus on the operators to ensure safety, and to be able to prove that what they do is safe. If it turns out not to be, then they will be prosecuted and likely clapped in jail. Fair enough if you have maimed or poisoned someone. Our law is basically Roman and we like to stipulate every tiny detail in statues.

What to say about the Shard that isn’t said by the fact it is 1,020 feet high and looks like a slightly elongated cheese triangle, and that it is designed as a home and office for those who want nothing more than to live and work in a building that looks like a slightly elongated cheese triangle? I cannot help but think that its architect, who is called Renzo Piano, is a fan of — or possibly secret PR for — Dairylea and was also a very unhappy small boy. (Freud may be over-quoted on the soothing possibilities of size, but he is still right. Small becomes big, and so on, and this baby is so big it is the BIGGEST — I mean tallest — building in the EU. In the EU! Suck on that, Nigel.

STK is a steakhouse at the bottom of the ME Hotel on the Aldwych. (This is a real name for a real hotel. The cult of individualism has finally reached its apogee in the hotel sense, and, if you are curious, it looks like a piece of St Tropez that fell off and hit the Embankment.) The restaurant itself looks like a love ball, or a stupid person’s idea of what is sexy, or Hugh Hefner’s personal imago. It is dark and made of MDF in varying degrees of glisten and smear; if STK were a movie it would be Showgirls, in which the protagonist writhes like a dolphin in a swimming pool, chlorine tumbling off her breasts, because that is sexy if you are stupid, or a chlorine--philiac. (They must be out there.

Exmouth Market is a small collection of paved streets near the Farringdon Travelodge, which specialises in monomaniacal restaurants and has a blue plaque dedicated to the dead clown Joseph Grimaldi. We are near King’s Cross, the least magical of London’s districts, and the early summer air chokes the dying trees. There are restaurants that ‘do’ hummus, restaurants that ‘do’ sausages and now a restaurant that ‘does’ potatoes, opened, I suspect, by some mad -potato fetishists for whom I have developed something like love. It is called Potato Merchant and when I first saw it advertised I thought it was a bag of potatoes with a restaurant loitering somewhere within.