Tanya Gold

The Cadogan hotel, Chelsea, is where Oscar Wilde was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, in Room 118, which is now memorialised as the site of the arrest. Institutional homophobia is a weird thing to commemorate in fabrics, but everything is a tourist attraction these days. The hotel is a tall red late-Victorian castle incorporating neighbouring houses, one of which belonged to the actress and mistress of Edward VII, Lillie Langtry. It was, then, a hotel for betrayal on the corner of Pont Street. John Betjeman mentions this in his poem ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’, and offers disaster PR of a timeless kind: ‘More hock, Robbie — where is the seltzer?/ Dear boy, pull again at the bell!

It is a truism that there is never enough schnitzel (‘slice’, German); or, rather, schnitzel does not get the attention it deserves. Restaurants do serve it, of course. Fischer’s does a fine Wiener schnitzel, as part of its riotous pre-war Vienna tribute act, and elderly people, I am told, queue for it while wearing slankets. Brasseries sell it often: the perhaps unconscious desire to re-enact the meals of the Weimar Republic is one of the stranger things of the age. The Coffee Cup in Hampstead serves it with a jaunty side order of spaghetti pomodoro. But the (chicken) schnitzel has never had the stardust of the less interesting but more widely beloved hamburger; perhaps it is because cows are bigger.

The Connaught Hotel’s formal dining room was always, to me, a place of childish myth; more comforting for being mythical. I am certain it is the dining room in Judith Krantz’s novel Princess Daisy, to which a Russian prince takes his daughter in the 1970s. In this tableau you find Robert Maxwell, Margaret Thatcher and people willing to pay for newspapers. I had, in a crowded field, my best ever celebrity encounter here, with the Netanyahus, in what used to be the breakfast room overlooking Carlos Place. ‘Shalom,’ I said, thrilling to the Waspy-ness we were subverting with our very presence. (I meant it. I meant it more than they did. I think that is clear.) ‘Shalom,’ Mrs Netanyahu said back. That was it.

Soho is so gilded nowadays that even drug addicts look down on it. The wasteland without must match the wasteland within. That is harmony. Soho is not a wasteland now: it is no longer that interesting. It is, rather, a shopping district with restaurants and hotels: whimsical, trivial, overpriced. People say it is our youth we lament when we moan about Soho, not the filthy streets we lay in and were fond of, but I am not sure if this is true. Every great city needs a district for wanking and sobs. But this is not it, not anymore. The gateway under the grand hotel by Piccadilly is now an Ugg shop and I have not seen an Orthodox Jew leap into a sex shop with a great, subversive skip — he was vaulting through cultures, after all — for years. Those days are over.

Piccadilly is losing its patina of dirt, its cadaverous character. It is overpriced and over-renovated,a meeting place for luxury goods. Perhaps I cannot forgive it for not actually containing Dracula’s ‘malodorous’ house; but who has a resentment against a street except this column and Hillary Clinton, who set a terrorist attack here in her new novel State of Terror (written with Louise Penny), which describes her resentment towards Donald Trump through the prism of genre fiction? Piccadilly does, though, now have three excellent restaurants: HIDE; the Wolseley; and José Pizarro at the Royal Academy of Arts, which opened this summer. I am used to good art and bad food: one can’t have everything.

NoMad is a new hotel in what used to be Bow Street Magistrates’ Court: a preening piece of mid-Victorian classicism opposite the Royal Opera House that is clearly too fine for the half-hearted criminal classes these days. I was judged in this court once for the very boring crime of cannabis possession (I think I did it), as was Giles Coren for something else (he says: ‘I never done nuffink’), General Pinochet, Dr Crippen (VeryMad) and Oscar Wilde. It heard its last case in 2006: the breaching of an Asbo by a man called Jason. Now it sells cocktails. NoMad has a restaurant named, as if in homage to a public relations panic attack, the NoMad Restaurant. (I thought NoMad was named after a refugee but I checked and I was wrong.

Whitcomb’s is in The Londoner hotel on the south-west corner of Leicester Square. The Londoner calls itself ‘the world’s first super boutique hotel’, which may mean that it is the world’s biggest small hotel. Or its smallest big hotel. I don’t know. Whatever its existential status, the developers destroyed an art deco cinema — the dour and lovely Odeon West End — to make it, and it looks like a piece of bright blue infant Lego with lesions for windows. Heritage organisations objected to the cinema’s destruction. Westminster council replied: who cares? We need Lego with lesions, or anything that looks like Lego: look at the Hotel W round the corner. That looks like a giant Lego fridge!

There is a Batman restaurant in London, or rather there was: Savini at the Criterion on Piccadilly Circus. Savini was a haunted grey Italian restaurant that closed in 2018 and was artistically dependent on salt. It appeared in The Dark Knight, in which Batman, who is Bruce Wayne to everyone but himself (I have a theory that everyone knows Bruce Wayne is Batman, but they pretend not to because he is an orphan), owned this restaurant, in which case he should have fixed the telephone lines. (Savini was plagued by a dispute with BT.) But because you cannot ever have enough of a strange thing, there is a new Batman restaurant to the north on Brewer Street, Soho, under a calm Edwardian wedding cake which was once Marco Pierre White’s Titanic.

Lemonia lives in the old Chalk Farm Tavern in Primrose Hill, which is better known as the set of Paddington. It is not surrounded by fields filled with duellists under a hill of primroses these days, but it is still vast, pale and beautiful: a survivor in the sprawl. There has been a tavern on this site for so long — it was first recorded in 1678 when a corpse was carried to it — that it is possible John Keats drank here. I hope so. It is not a beaker of the warm south – it is slightly too near Camden and its stink of pigeon and bleach for that — but it is close enough. Some restaurants hold memories of pleasure: this is one such place.