Restaurants

I see this column as an essay on cultural polarisation: artisanal butter can only take you so far into wisdom. I cower in Covent Garden, mourning Tory romanticism, and stare, cold-eyed in St James’s, at oligarchic mezze. Sometimes I eat by mistake. I couldn’t get into the fashionable noodle place in Soho, whose Instagram-made queue stretched to Cambridge Circus on Saturday night. It reminded me of the crowds at royal weddings: both camp for dreams. So, I went to Wingmans instead.  Wingmans – it lost the apostrophe, it’s a decadent age – calls itself ‘London’s best wings’. They are chicken wings, not angel wings, and this is Pottersville, not Bedford Falls. (Some people think Pottersville is more fun and that may be, but not here. This is not a wonderful life.

Back to the past: it’s safer there. There is a themed restaurant dedicated to George VI of all people, near Berkeley Square – a sort of Rainforest Café for monarchists who won’t sink to the Tiltyard Café at Hampton Court. I was looking for a restaurant my husband might like – Brexit, meat, maps of the Empire at its height in colour – and I found the Guinea Grill in Bruton Place. George VI isn’t a vivid monarch. He lived in the shadow of queens – one Mary, two Elizabeths – and on film he is always crying, or dying. In The Crown (Jared Harris, marvellous) he lost his lung. In The King’s Speech (Colin Firth, good, but handsome) he lost his happiness. I like to think George was tougher and less pitiable than the chronicles suggest.

For British people, America is an idea brought by cinema, and The Dover, the New York Italian bar and restaurant in Mayfair, meets a version of it. It’s not quite the ballroom in Some Like It Hot, not quite Rick’s Café in Casablanca, but it’s as close as you will find near Green Park Underground, and that has a charm to it, because Americans can speak. It’s from Martin Kuczmarski, formerly of the once preening, now ragged Soho House. He has named his company Difficult Name. There’s a message there, and a story, and it made a glorious restaurant with the tagline ‘A good place to be since 2023’.

Home Kitchen is in Primrose Hill, another piece of fantasy London, home to the late Martin Amis and Paddington Bear. It is a measure of the times that Elizabeth II had no literary chronicler – no Amis, no Proust for her – but was, almost against her will, given Paddington Bear instead. When I saw the small bear at her memorials, I thought: is that her genre? Infants’ fiction? Couldn’t she do better? The question that follows is, of course: would they have eaten together at Home Kitchen? The barley is doughty, fragrant and from the earth.

The Ambassadors Clubhouse is on Heddon Street, close to Savile Row and the fictional HQ of Kingsman, which was a kind of privatised MI6. I wonder if the Kingsmen eat here, being clubmen. Heddon Street needs fiction because its reality is one-dimensional. It is an alleyway behind Regent Street, and it used to be interesting. There was an avant-garde café under the Heddon Street Kitchen called The Cave of the Golden Calf. Ziggy Stardust was photographed for his album cover outside No. 23; from Heddon Street you could hear the Beatles play their final concert on the roof of 3 Savile Row in 1969. This is dense, fierce, very sophisticated food and it is all superb But that is over.

Sally Lunn’s is a teashop in Bath. It sits in a lane by the abbey, and the Roman baths. Paganism and Christianity jostle here: Minerva battles Christ, who wins, for now. Sally Lunn’s calls itself ‘the oldest house in Bath’ (c. 1482). It is rough-hewn, with a vast teal window and pumpkins on display. The pumpkins might be plastic. I don’t know. Tourists queue in the hallway behind a large wooden cutout of a woman who might be Sally Lunn. She is a semi-mythical woman: the Huguenot refugee Solange Luyon, who came to Bath in the 1680s with brioche in her hands. No one knows if she really existed.

At Julie’s at the fag end of Saturday lunchtime, Notting Hill beauties are defiantly not eating, and the table is covered with crumbs. Restaurant Ozymandias, I think to myself. This is no longer a district for the perennially wracked, or unrich. The Black Cross – Martin Amis’s ideal pub in London Fields – is now a sushi joint. Of course it is. The omelette is bright yellow and tough, like a hi-viz croissant Julie’s, which is named for its first owner, the interior designer Julie Hodgess, mattered in the 1980s.

Cloth is opposite St Bartholomew the Great on Cloth Fair. People call this place Farringdon, but it isn’t really: it belongs to the teaching hospital and the meat market and William Wallace who died a famous death here and has only a little plaque in turn. Smithfield embraces the dead. Sherlock Holmes met Dr Watson here and, for BBC1, jumped off the roof of the hospital. If Cloth calls itself a ‘neighbourhood wine bar’, which sounds less threatening than ‘restaurant’, its true customers are the dead, and that is no criticism. The chips are marvellous, and this matters. I always judge a restaurant on the chips I am early, so I sit in St Bartholomew the Less – this is how buildings fight!

There is a wonderful cognitive dissonance to Bistro Aix. It thinks it is in Paris but it is really in Crouch End, the flatter twin to Muswell Hill, a district so charismatic it had its own serial killer in Dennis Nilsen. (He killed more people in Willesden, but Willesden doesn’t receive its due: here or anywhere.) We pick our way through the Versailles of north London, past Little Waitrose and the clock tower I have never thrived in Paris. My sister says I always go with the wrong men, which is unfair, because it was a school trip and I had no choice about the (very small) men. I prefer the Paris of my imagination, which is quite a lot like Bistro Aix in Crouch End.

I am working my way around the restaurants of the Old War Office (OWO), now an acronym and Raffles hotel on Whitehall, because the swiftness with which the great institutions of the state have become leisure opportunities for the wrongfully rich is dark, mesmerising and, if you don’t mind too much anarchy, funny. I have reviewed the cold, painted Saison, and the lively Italian Paper Moon, which a kind reader wrote to say he loved and which I do not expect to survive. It is too joyful and well-priced for the wrongfully rich and their internal landscape of nude cashmere and paranoia. It squeaked through. The transience of the exterior is not mirrored within. The opposite is true Here, now, is Café Lapérouse in the courtyard.