Tanya Gold

Simpson’s in the Strand stopped serving breakfast in 2017, after it had been renovated to stop it smelling of cabbage. Fat men wept, but worse things have happened here. Simpson’s is built on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, in which Geoffrey Chaucer, Gaunt’s brother-in-law, wrote part of The Canterbury Tales. The palace was destroyed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; it is all detailed in Anya Seton’s romance novel Katherine. Of the palace’s successor, Henry VII’s Savoy Hospital, only a small chapel remains. It looks deeply oppressed. Instead we have the Savoy hotel, created by Richard D’Oyly Carte.

Locket’s is a new café from the owners of Wiltons in Jermyn Street. Wiltons is the restaurant that dukes visit when they have fallen out with White’s. It has a sign featuring a lobster that looks like Benjamin Disraeli wearing a top hat. When a bomb fell nearby in 1942, its anxious owner immediately sold it to the banker Olaf Hambro, who was sitting at the bar, by adding the price of the restaurant to his bill. It appeared, thinly disguised, in Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals as Walton’s, in which a fictional Tory minister plots the seduction of a woman called Amanda. I like Wiltons, even if the female staff are dressed as Edwardian housemaids, which is the second worst uniform in existence after hessian smocks.

The theme music to Legoland in Berkshire is the theme music to The Exorcist. It appears from speakers hidden in the grass. I hear it as I wander out of some un-enchanted wood filled with Lego: we have lost our ancient woods and need new ones. These ones smell slightly of drains. The Exorcist music is a joke for parents; or perhaps an acknowledgment that there is something demonic at Legoland. You can, from the fake hills — everything is fake here, and that is both bewitching and awful — see Windsor Castle, which probably means that from Windsor Castle you can see Legoland. I wonder if Legoland will outlive the monarchy; if Legoland and the monarchy have a lot in common.

The Roth Bar & Grill exists on an art-farm called Durslade in Bruton, Somerset, which is also the country outpost of the Hauser & Wirth gallery, which is the silliest art gallery in Britain. It specialises in decapitated gnomes. It is only 13 miles from Babington House, Soho House’s monstrous country house with its playrooms for adults and giant fish-finger sandwiches. This is a world of electric Agas, black Range Rovers and pink wellington boots; and it is, almost by itself, the reason why country dwellers despise town dwellers. If people live in homage to what they read in Sunday newspaper supplements, they deserve to be despised. When I visited it three years ago, it was both abuzz and the silliest restaurant I had ever seen.

Bob Bob Cité is a restaurant dangling like testicles from the underside of the Leadenhall Building in the City of London. It is shaped like a series of yellow train carriages, for a voyage no one will ever make; the building above it manages, in the way of the age, to be both absurd and frightening. People call the Leadenhall Building the cheese--grater, but it does not make me think of kitchens. Kitchens are human and intimate; from the atrium, which is guarded by security men, this building looks like the innards of something vast and inhuman. This is the sequel to Bob Bob Ricard, a Soho restaurant for rich men with anxiety disorders, hollow legs, and nervous thumbs.

The sandwich restaurant Pret A Manger is accused of harbouring centrists. Those are words I never thought I would type, but these are mad days. A Corbyn supporter called Aaron Bastani, the author of a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism — or, as wags call it, Luxury Space Robot Communism — has accused Rory Stewart of being unfit to be mayor of London because he likes Pret A Manger. It is, in Bastani’s mind, a sandwich-themed agent of evil, indicating a deeper evil which may or may not have something to do with wizards. I did not know that Pret A Manger’s smoked salmon sandwiches (they are quite good, but I am a bourgeoise, so what do I know?) and mediocre coffee could be so perilous to civilisation, but I can safely be ignored.

If you review restaurants professionally you would not think Britain wanted to leave the EU. You would think she wanted to live happily in the twinkling golden stars of Europe like Emily Thornberry’s neck fat, eating, semi-eternally, at a European-style brasserie. British restaurants are a silent acknowledgement that native food is not very good unless you really like cabbage. Please don’t write to me about fungus from Maidenhead. I don’t care. Our cities reflect it; every-where I see European-style brasseries glinting with the promise of European--style bliss. Where is the courage of our seething psychological imperatives? Why don’t we put our madness where our mouths are? I daydream about a new Brexit-themed restaurant in Britain, but I have yet to see it.

The Camelot Castle Hotel is a pebble-dashed late-Victorian excrescence on a cliff. It overlooks the ruins of Tintagel Castle. A baby-blue Rolls-Royce Wraith and a floral Aston Martin are parked outside. They are the owners’ cars. Everyone else is in a banger. This hotel played the lunatic asylum in the 1979 Dracula starring Frank Langella, and this is more apt than you can know. Inside there is faded Victorian grandeur mashed with Arthurian legend mashed with Kazakh oil baron chic mashed with three-star hotel in fading south coast resort. There is sinister tiling, dark wood, fraying carpets, staff dressed for serving tea at some ghostly parallel Claridge’s and, from every window, the sea.

The Market Hall Victoria is an international food shed opposite the station terminus. I have long hated Victoria, thinking it the most provincial part of central London. It longs for the provinces, it impersonates them, it summons them. It is odd because the station itself is beautiful: a grimy Edwardian fantasy with tall grimy chimneys and a fantastical clock. But the rest of it is painful: the ugly road to parliament; the immense new blocks with their hideous restaurants; the sad and stripy Roman Catholic cathedral, which searches for grandeur but just looks weird; the Queen’s back wall, which I marvel at, because it tells so much. Victoria is a disappointment to itself. It sags and gasps. It is a stage with the scenery removed; a road out of town.