Tanya Gold

Gymkhana is a fashionable Indian restaurant in Albemarle Street. It was, according to its natty website, ‘inspired by Colonial Indian gymkhana clubs, set up by the British Raj, where members of high society came to socialise, dine, drink and play sport’. This is revolting, in the same way that eating in homage to apartheid South Africa or to commemorate the genocide of native Americans is revolting. Not that this is exceptional, of course; these days no crime is so calamitous it cannot be seconded into an entertainment experience or themed meal. There is, after all, a cafeteria at Auschwitz which received the following review online: ‘They have a range of foods, from snacks, drinks, ice cream, hot dogs, burgers and meals. Plenty of seating.’ Ah, plenty of seating.

The Disney Café is a gaudy hell on the fourth floor of Harrods, Knightsbridge. It is adjacent to the Harrods Disney Store, and also the Harrods Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, in which females between the ages of three and 12 can, for fees ranging from £100 to £1,000, be transformed into the tiny, glittering monsters called Disney princesses. They look like the late Queen Mother, but miniaturised. They glide — or are carried, if very small — from boutique to café in hooped plastic gowns in poisonous pink; combustible cloud-dresses, made for arson. Their hair is tight with curls and hairspray, and topped with the essential tiara. They look obliviously class-obsessed and much the same as each other; and this is a wicked trick to play on children.

Rextail is a restaurant for billionaire children, such as Richie Rich. Its owner, Arcady Novikov, has already opened a restaurant for billionaire men and their spindly billionaire wives — the bonkers fusion Asian/Italian barn Novikov, which travels with its own angry cloud of cigar smoke and identity crisis; so a restaurant for children is the next logical step in the redevelopment of London as a playpen for plutocratic families or cults.

Fischer’s is Austria made safe for liberals, gays, Jews and other Untermenschen riffraff, because it is a restaurant, not a concentration camp, and because it is in Marylebone High Street, not Linz. It is the new restaurant from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who opened the Wolseley, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel, and it is more profound and lovely than any of them. There is always a clock in a Corbin and King restaurant, a big old clock from some fairytale train station, poised over the clientele as they stuff and age; for remembrance of mortality, I guess. Or maybe they just like big clocks?

L’Escargot, or the Snail, is a famous restaurant on Greek Street, Soho, opposite the old Establishment club; the oldest French restaurant in London, they say (1927), and who am I to argue? It is the type of restaurant that non-Londoners have heard of and used to visit. They passed photographs of Larry Olivier and Mick Jagger staring glumly at them as they took off their overcoats in the hallway for a pre- or post-theatre supper; despite this, or maybe because of it, the Snail fell into a long and sad decline. Its green and gold rooms embraced silence. The waiters snarled; the snails wilted. They had been there too long. They were big in the 1980s, and who recovers from that?

The Chatsworth estate, Derby-shire. I am overwhelmed by marketing literature. I am prostrate. I am weeping. I am staying in one of the Duke of Devonshire’s barns, renovated into a one-bedroom ‘cottage’ with no interior doors. Maybe it was home to a horse once, maybe not; I do not know. I am a short walk from the Chatsworth Estate Farm Shop and Café, a longer walk from a branch of the Devonshire Arms, and 20 minutes from the Cavendish Restaurant, which is definitely in the stables at Chatsworth. (You probably want me to say something about Chatsworth House. OK. It is almost as ugly as Blenheim Palace.

Occasionally a critic must review a restaurant in which they are prepared to spend their own money. So here is the Dean Street Townhouse. It is a terrible name, because all houses in Dean Street, a fusty artery of Soho, are town houses; they are not Wendy houses or country houses or dolls’ houses. But Dean Street House is worse, too close to Soho House, the private club and near neighbour where no one will meet your eye for wondering where the next useful tosser is. ‘Townhouse’ has a kudos, I suppose, these days. It is almost opposite the Groucho Club, which is Noel Edmonds’s Multi--Coloured Swap Shop for media idiots. It shares a corner with Meard Street, in which my friend the artist Sebastian Horsley killed himself with heroin by mistake.

Fera is in Gordon Ramsay’s old cave at Claridge’s. His red and yellow room, like a ripped-off arm, has been annihilated; here now is ‘restful’ green, and food by Simon Rogan. His cooking apparently ‘never stands still’. (I am quoting a website.) Fera means ‘wild’. In Latin. I am not sure a restaurant can be wild, but it can be needy. I request a table online. Fera says no. I telephone. Fera says yes. I give my credit card details because love is always conditional. I am then invited to confirm, reconfirm, and re-reconfirm, in the manner of a restaurant impersonating a woman requiring reassurance from a green lover. It is like the Daily Mail’s dolphin that fell in love with its trainer, and committed suicide when rebuffed.

Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held up aching over the world’s most charismatic puddle; Harry’s is a transgressive anti-palazzo. It is a world-famous restaurant, the jewel of the Cipriani brand, and it is very conscious of this honour; it sells branded tagliarelli and books about the meals it served 30 years ago to the rich and famous; it is into auto-iconography, like the city it lives in. For this, and so much else, I blame Ernest Hemingway. He ate here after shooting birds in the lagoon and doesn’t the world know it? Some men fought against Hitler. Others ate against him. Outside, people pose for photographs by the signage.

Wong Kei is a mad Chinese restaurant on Wardour Street, Chinatown. Until recently it was considered the rudest restaurant in London and, because human stupidity is without end, it became a tourist attraction in its own right, a destination for masochists too frightened to visit an actual dominatrix who would hit them with a stick. The owner decided this notoriety upset him so he instructed the staff — no more deliberate or casual or accidental rudeness. This was considered so notable that it was reported in national newspapers. I never thought Wong Kei was particularly rude, but then I am Jewish.

It is now two decades since I lived in Oxford. I was then a drunk and lonely puddle of a person, with only a gift for screaming; but no matter how low I sank, to paraphrase Alcoholics Anonymous literature, I never sank quite as low as to consider eating at the ’bab van (kebab van) outside Univ (University College) on the High (High Street); I preferred to dine in Hall (a hall). Oxford, you see, has its own native dialect, a sort of pidgin posh best worn with a depressed carnation and a giant inedible chip made of class terror. Perhaps the roots of my eventual redemption were in that tiny grunt of gastronomic self-esteem; who knows? Or was it just another thing I dreamt and actually I ate ’babs constantly? Maybe I really was a ’bab?

In the ‘Chefs’ Last Supper’ in the National Portrait Gallery, Marcus Wareing is throwing a brie at Gordon Ramsay, who plays Jesus. They both have restaurants in the celebrity-chef triangle in Knightsbridge near Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner, which led Ramsay to fantasise about chefs’ fisticuffs at 4 a.m. in the street, as he does; but what was Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley, which sounds very like a restaurant with in-built directions for the confused, has been rebranded to be less ‘formal’ and more ‘relaxed’. It is now just ‘Marcus at the Berkeley’. It’s gone the way of gay icons with a solitary name in lights: Judy. Barbra. Liza. Marcus.

London House is in Battersea, which some people call South Chelsea, but is more East Wandsworth to my mind; or maybe North Clapham, or, even better, West Brixton. This is the self-hatred that the housing bubble has brought to London: we have whole sorrowful postcodes that long to be something else because original posh London, which is SW1 and W1 and SW3, does not really exist any more, or rather it does, but it does not belong to us, so we might as well forget about it. So we have London House. It was obviously a marketing essential to tag this restaurant to London, and also to mention houses, which now are unicorns of brick.

Highgrove is the country house of the Prince of Wales. I write about Highgrove because, although it is not a restaurant, even of the wackiest kind — which can only make me fantasise that Ludwig of Bavaria opened a gay sauna in Neuschwanstein castle — the prince does admit strangers when he is not there and only when he is not there: on Burns Night for instance, or Mothering Sunday, and now, on St David’s Day: a black tie dinner for £95 per face including service. The dinner is in a custom-built barn in the Hobbit style. It is made for his receptions, so I suppose it is less a barn than a giant all-weather gazebo which they call the Orchard Restaurant.

Moro (‘moorish’ or ‘sexist’) is a Spanish restaurant on Exmouth Market, near the bones of the old Guardian and Observer building on Farringdon Road. I don’t mind telling Spectator readers (‘you people’) that I once kissed the bricks of this building, quite seriously, like Jews kiss the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport. (At least that is the story; but I have never seen anyone do it. Kiss some dirty tarmac. What for?) Moro is distinguished as the restaurant in which Guardian journalists first realised Julian Assange is mad. He stood up near an olive and announced he didn’t care if the leaks led informants to be murdered, which is a bad look for a revolutionary, until you really think about it. Then I imagine he ate an olive.

Lanes of London serves street food to people who hate streets; that is, it exists to soothe the still-curious mouths of lazy, wealthy paranoiacs. This is the character of the dishonest age: you can ride in a gondola in Las Vegas, ski down a mountain in Dubai, visit a wizard’s castle in Watford Junction, and enjoy the Notting Hill Carnival in Mayfair while sitting down. (Other options include staying in a five-star faux shanty-town hotel in South Africa, complete with corrugated iron shacks and authentic ‘poor people’s rubbish’).

Langan’s Brasserie announces its presence with a long, pink neon line of Langanses, tootling prettily along its façade, which is opposite Marks & Spencer on Green Park. (The apostrophes, by the way, are mine; signage can be illiterate.) So this is a restaurant with Alzheimer’s, a restaurant that has forgotten its own name. Could it be hungover? Langan’s was opened in 1976 by Michael Caine, Richard Shepherd and Peter Langan; two thirds of the triumvirate were newsworthy. Langan was the sort of alcoholic who is mistaken for a raconteur: he told Orson Welles he was fat. (He was fat. Do we care about the feelings of Orson’s fat ghost?) His alcoholism became a destination in its own right, because people are cruel.