Tanya Gold is The Spectator's restaurant critic.
Simpson’s in the Strand is a dream palace, and its fortunes are as tidal as the river. It is on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, destroyed in the Peasants’ Revolt. It began as a cigar divan and chess club, was subsumed into the Savoy Hotel, built with the profits from The Mikado,
Before the cocoon I had never met a hotel I didn’t like. I thought all hotels were interesting. There was the hostel in the walls of old Jerusalem, so dirty I had to sleep in my clothes but riveting; the pale box in Oświęcim, Poland (Auschwitz in German) by the haunted square; the best hotel in Batumi, Georgia, pleased with itself because it was nearly an Ibis; the vampire-themed hotel which felt weirdly normal in the Carpathians; the lovely Narnian winter of Claridge’s. Then I stayed at the Zedwell Hotel
Brasserie Angelica is the – is the word signature? – restaurant inside the Newman, Fitzrovia, a new hotel that has landed in the capital like a spaceship containing aliens who are into menswear. I don’t mind buildings that look like they don’t belong. Fitzrovia is charming because it feels like remnants left by other places.
Burlington Arcade on Piccadilly has a caff down from Charbonnel et Walker, where you can buy a box of chocolates as big as a cow, though I never have. Perhaps the time is now? I am being facetious of course: it is Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud, who oversees the Maison de Haute Pâtisserie at
Bentley’s Continental GT has a name to suit it: four voluptuous syllables then two emergency stops. This is the first car I reviewed, and it is still my favourite. I think this is because I grew up in Esher, and this is the car of the functional aspirant upper-middle class. It is important to remember that the state limousines – the pair of sinuous maroon sharks that transport the monarch from one demonstration of public magic to the next – are Bentleys, based
Mezzogiorno is a very serious, golden Italian restaurant inside the Corinthia London Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. Restaurants are increasingly gold these days, as if for a crocodile of Scrooge McDucks trooping through the wreckage of liberalism looking for money, nuts and guns. It follows the trajectory of my beloved Raffles at the OWO [Old War
Ballroom dancers, suicide cases, charlatans: Blackpool has them all. No place has so much possibility or holds so much of the British soul on one bright, windswept drag. I first came here for Conservative party conference, where the cognitive dissonance of pre-Coalition Tories in funeral suits and the reality of the country they sought to govern – love, loss and candyfloss – felt wild. Did these people even know each other? It
Dover Street Counter is the tiny sister of The Dover, a very good restaurant on – who knew? – Dover Street, Mayfair. This is the site of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones Club, if following Wodehouse’s paths is your way of coping, and there is nothing wrong with that. There are some bad restaurants in Mayfair
Corenucopia by Clare Smyth is in Belgravia, amid a line of interior-design shops, and it is prettier than all of them. It is a female paradise on the ground floor of a mansion block, dedicated to art nouveau and ‘comfort’ food. There are plaster tree branches peeking from the walls and the menu script looks
A Rolls-Royce press trip is like being taken by Mary Poppins – Mary of the novel, not the film, she is more savage and interesting – and shown a thing you would not otherwise know. When you arrive at the destination – it is Provence today, but it could be California or Ibiza tomorrow – you find the cars at the airport, laid out in blue and lilac and grey. Among them stand smiling men, whose job it is to help you drive the car:
The exterior of the Phoenix Palace is cream with golden letters like the napkin and the Laffer curve, and it is squeezed below an Art Deco mansion block in Baker Street. The street is self-effacing, stuck between the Marylebone Road and the Sherlock Holmes museum, which exists because London is, among other things, morbid. The
Sometimes you find it, H.G. Wells’s door in the wall, but to tapas: a restaurant so perfect you hesitate to review it. Each critic kills the thing she loves, because to love it is to change it. But I can’t just review palaces for psychotics containing lamps that should not exist, comforting though the idiocies
Kingsley Amis was obsessed with Scott’s on Mount Street, Mayfair, and he knew a lot about food. He ate himself to death. In his unwise James Bond continuation novel Colonel Sun – Ian Fleming also loved Scott’s – Amis had Bond ponder that ‘every meal taken in those severe but comfortable panelled rooms [is] a
Alcoholics know that hell is denial, and there is plenty at Disneyland Paris in winter. This is a pleasure land risen from a field and everyone has after-party eyes, including the babies. The Disney hotels operate a predictable hierarchy: princesses at the top, Mexicans at the bottom. We, the Squeezed Middle, are at the Sequoia
Robert Langdon is a symbologist, and that is the meta joke – the only joke – of Dan Brown’s series of blockbusters, of which this is the sixth. Langdon, an Everyman – Frodo Baggins but taller, and with a professorship at Harvard – is a monied, moderate intellectual who likes swimming. And he is very
Elizabeth II was a god and a commodity: now she is gone it is time for posthumous exploitation. Lilibet’s is a restaurant named for her childhood nickname at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, on the site of the house where she was born. It was inevitable that Elizabeth II would eventually get a personal restaurant. Princess
21 min listen
A woman that needs no introduction for regular Spectator readers, Tanya Gold has been the Spectator’s restaurant critic since 2011. On the podcast she tells Lara why – while it might be annoying – fellow critic Jay Rayner is never wrong, why the pandemic was ‘disgustingly great’ for food critics and how she has become
People say that Carbone is Jay Gatsby’s restaurant – Gatsby being the metaphor for moneyed doomed youth – but it is something more awful and, because people are asleep, no London restaurant has been this fashionable since the Chiltern Firehouse a decade ago. It lives in the basement of the former American embassy in Grosvenor
People always divine themselves through material goods: hence the obsession with the Aga, recently detailed by my friend Rachel Johnson in these pages. Rachel loves her Aga – well, her Agas, she has two – because it needs to be defended from bourgeois socialists who don’t have Agas: they just want them, because self-deception is
That Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is called Panzer’s – for the instrument of Blitzkrieg – is mad, until you remember that Jews love to eat near catastrophe, and then it is merely funny. I love Panzer’s so much I am reluctant to share it, but we need all the friends we can get.
