Restaurants

In the global poker game of cultural repatriation – otherwise known as who nicked what from whom – the Greeks seriously upped the ante with the opening of the Acropolis Museum in 2009. This lavish display of archaeological treasures in a light-filled building designed by the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi is, alongside the recently opened Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, an exemplar of such a building’s mission to educate and inspire. In the tradition of polemic buildings, it is also a $200 million plea to return the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum to Greece.

Long Compton is in the Cotswolds, but to the east, where there are no boutique hotels or shops selling artisan candles to tourists. Banburyshire and its surrounds are actual countryside. Fields roll away in the manner Germans call Kulturlandschaft, meaning landscape shaped by centuries of human care. This is the sort of country that makes people write poetry about hedgerows and choral music about sheep: lovely to live in but, by long British tradition, a dismal place to dine out. Discovering a truly great restaurant in Long Compton – population 764 – feels like finding in rural Warwickshire one of those bucolic la France profonde dining experiences that seemed nostalgic fantasies even when M.F.K Fisher described them.

Does your museum feel tired and run down? Is the entrance unwelcoming? The bookshop shabby? The restaurant a mere café? If so, call Annabelle Selldorf, the German-American architect whose talent and sensitivity have made her the go-to person for reviving weary museums. Her recent transformation of the Frick in New York has been widely acclaimed and she will soon start work on the Wallace Collection in London. But the latest masterwork has seen Selldorf sprinkle her fairy dust on the Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery. Those with long architectural memories will recall how in 1984, the then Prince of Wales christened the proposed new wing of the Gallery “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.

On holiday in the Dordogne, I face an annual dilemma. My weekly Any Other Business column ruminates on the financial world with occasional restaurant tips to lighten the tone – and many readers tell me they frankly prefer the menus du jour to the boardroom dramas. My difficulty is that in a single page of The Spectator there’s never space to do justice to both. Last week, I ended up cramming seven restaurants into one short paragraph, a paltry snack where I’d like to have offered a banquet. So here’s my 2025 tour de France, as I called it, at somewhat fuller length, perhaps one of these days to be super-sized into an entire guidebook. This set of recommendations, I should explain, come mostly from British readers and friends in other parts of France.

It has been a disastrous summer for France’s restaurants. On average, visits have dropped by 20 per cent on previous years, but at many coastal resorts they’re down by 35 per cent. ‘Consumption is well below previous years,’ says Laurent Barthélémy, president of a hospitality union. ‘Restaurant owners see customers passing by, but they don't come in to eat.’ Various reasons have been propounded to account for this decline. Barthélémy points to the cost-of-living crisis as a leading factor, as does Thierry Marx, one of France’s top chefs and president of the restaurant owners’ association.

I love dogs. I love lunching. I love seeing dogs in restaurants where I’m lunching. But one thing I don’t love one bit is a dog being brought to a luncheon which I’m participating in – and, most likely, paying for. Luncheons are for humans – not for our furry friends. Let’s face it, it’s not like they’re particularly thrilled to be indoors while their owners indulge in a little light character assassination. They’d be having far more fun running around outside eating vomit and sniffing each other’s bums. They can be big dogs, like the one belonging to my friend K. His gentle nature is swamped by the physical reality of him being the size of a small horse and taking up enough room for two people in a snug bistro.