Tanya Gold

Claridge’s is a toff sanctuary and one of the best hotels on earth. It specialises in its own myth, which is easy when Winston Churchill fell into a suite at the end of the war, and missed Dwight Eisenhower running the other way. Eisenhower was not afraid of the Axis, but the soft furnishings at Claridge’s felled him utterly and he fled to Kingston-upon-Thames like my mother did. The kings of Greece, Norway and Yugoslavia also spent the war at Claridge’s, in a sort of unlucky king convention. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Yugoslav earth was laid under the Yugoslav queen’s bed, not because she was a vampire, which was what I thought, but so the heir could be born on Yugoslav soil. Toffs are weird.

The Allis is a restaurant inside the new Soho House at White City — it is called White City House — and it is every bit as ghastly as it sounds. I do not really object to Soho House’s attempt to colonise the entire planet and furnish it with purple velvet armchairs, which are now being replicated in people’s homes, leaving us in a sort of velvet fun palace you cannot escape, while silently crying. It also feels like a poor model for capitalism, even late capitalism. I quite like the one in Dean Street — if you can ignore the people, that is, which you can because they don’t lift their eyes from their MacBooks to your hideous face.

The Petersham is a fading hotel on Richmond Hill. I went to a bar mitzvah there in 1986, which gives you a good idea of how fashionable it is. I grew up near Petersham. I always thought it smelled of eternal summer, but it was the late 1970s. The Petersham is also a new restaurant in Covent Garden, a sequel to Petersham Nurseries, the garden centre café by the Thames, in Petersham, that won a Michelin star in 2011. So, the name is either a deranged lack of imagination or a monument to Petersham. I hope it is a monument. It deserves it. Now there is another Petersham restaurant, in Covent Garden, in a square off Floral Street which used to be interesting but now looks like a Lego city of the future built on the ashes of Charles Dickens.

Hide is a £20 million restaurant at the Green Park end of Piccadilly, on the three lower floors of a brutalist box by Clarges Street. From outside it looks like an illustration from a storybook: people eating while illuminated in glass boxes. It is a restaurant to be looked at from outside, a restaurant with no skin. Hide is the fourth restaurant from Ollie Dabbous, who is the most talented British chef of his generation, even if you think that dowsing food in flowers is very irritating. Dabbous, which opened in 2012, offered fairy food near Tottenham Court Road, which needs it badly: strange decapitated eggs, a carpet of flowers, nuts, hay. It was glintingly metaphorically, instantly famous, then it closed.

Indian Accent is an Indian restaurant in Albermarle Street, deepest Mayfair, on the site of Rohit Khattar’s Chor Bizarre (‘thieves market’). It follows branches in New York and New Delhi, which featured at no. 9 in the 2016 Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants List, sponsored by S. Pellegrino and Acqua Panna. Apparently you have to mention that, or they shut the water off. The chef is Manish Mehrotra, praised in the New York Times, and a man of growing fame. Indian Accent offers ‘progressive’ Indian cuisine, which, translated, means you cannot summon the waiter and ask for a secret chicken balti. I call this the Howard Jacobson Experiment, because he does this with more success than I do.

Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill is on Swallow Street, an alley between Piccadilly and Regent Street, which swallowed most of Swallow Street in the early 19th century. But that did not give it the name. Property developers only memorialise their crimes accidentally and Swallow Street is named for Thomas Swallow, about whom I know nothing else. He does not appear in Ed Glinert’s The London Compendium. Bentley’s is both inside and outside a squat, ugly and very interesting yellow brick house. It preens like an ugly clever man. It has fine large windows with angry brick eyebrows. Outside, diners sit under square black umbrellas and behind a partition, with glass, in a parody of a private members’ club, but in the middle of a street.

Sometimes I fret that Soho House & Co is doing to this column what it does to London. It places its smooth tentacles in my prose and suddenly the column has a pointy beard and is playing table tennis, while doing something monstrous in advertising. But I have no choice. I cannot hide in ghostly seafood bars for ever. (Next time, Bentley’s.) Because now Soho House & Co has invaded Kettner’s, which has duly gone the way of the Odeon West End in Leicester Square, a lovely art deco cinema that these days is only a void. It will become something else — a hotel and maybe a cinema again — but it will remain a void. The transformation of Soho into the kind of advertorial you find in an airport lounge in Dubai goes on.

In 2007 Mikhael Gorbachev starred in a Louis Vuitton advert. He was driven past the Berlin Wall with Louis Vuitton luggage and the photograph was printed in Vanity Fair. It was baffling and reassuring, but nothing lasts forever. A few years ago I went on the Kleptocracy Bus Tour. It is run by a man called Roman Borisovich and it tours London — and sometimes Oxford —identifying kleptocratic crimes, feuds, housing, anxieties and behaviours. During a recent tour, a neighbour of Andrey Guryev, the fertiliser magnate who bought Witanhurst in Highgate, testified that a voice from a security box had asked him to stop strimming his own hedge.

Jilly Cooper’s fictional hero Rupert Campbell-Black has ‘never been to Hammersmith’. I have but I wish I hadn’t. I love the Westway because it takes you away from Hammersmith. Even so, it possesses the River Café — it is not a café — a famous and influential Italian restaurant. It was ten when Tony Blair came to power, but inside it is as if he were still here, playing air guitar while chatting about PPP. It is inaccessible, taunting its clientele to go to Hammersmith. It feels as if it takes more than an hour to get to the River Café from anywhere that is not Hammersmith. How do they get there — by helicopter? There is a heliport at Battersea but what then? The 295 bus, apparently, and then a short walk.

Sophie’s lives in an old pornographic cinema at the south end of Great Windmill Street, Soho. It is opposite McDonald’s and the Windmill International (‘Probably the most exciting mens club in the world [if you don’t mind paying women to expose their breasts when they might do it for nothing if you were charming]’). Is it so exciting that the patrons do not care that they have been given a semi-consensual sexual experience but denied an apostrophe? It is also pleasingly close to the venue of the Second Congress of the Communist League, which took place in 1847, and prompted the commission of the Communist Manifesto, and all on the first floor of the Red Lion pub which is now a cocktail bar called Be At One. Quite so.

Café Hampstead is a new café in — big reveal! — Hampstead, the gaudiest of the old villages on the hills around London. Hampstead was once, mysteriously, home to progressives too many to type; refugees from Belsize Park carrying their most precious back copies of the LRB in plastic sacks. Why did they live in Hampstead? What for? They have moved out now, or died, and the truth died with them. We will never know what it was that they thought they wanted, or saw; whether it was always betrayal, or the wife made them do it. You can mock, and I do, but Hampstead is less interesting without them; there is little to laugh at these days, even if it is usual to see James Corden and Ricky Gervais in the street, looking for things to put in their mouths.

There is a restaurant on the stage at the National Theatre in London. It is called Foodwork, and it is part of the set of Network, an adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 masterpiece about a news anchorman called Howard Beale who goes mad and is given a new show — The Howard Beale Show — to preach the gospel of despair. If you think this sounds dull, imagine Huw Edwards threatening suicide after an item about ducks. Beale is played by Bryan Cranston — Peter Finch in the film — and the restaurant will close when the run ends. Ephemera, then; chase the art, chase the cake. I do not know why they built a restaurant here; some critics have complained that the set, which is Foodwork and a television studio, is too noisy: an oddity, a mistake.