Tanya Gold

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.

Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in Wiltshire, with gables like teeth and a pond outside, possibly haunted. It is like a smiling wife who bares her fangs and eats the car park and all the Hondas within; a cinematic fiend of a house, in fact, but I am only reading Hilary Mantel these days, and she has the gift of bestowing menace on everything — clingfilm, envelopes, nuts. A country house hotel doesn’t stand a chance. We are here because it is New Year’s Eve. It is my 40th birthday, A has decided that he hates motorways, and Little Baby (LB) is not welcome at ordinary country house hotels, because he is incontinent. (This does not detract from his charm.

Winter Wonderland is a Christmas-themed playground that lands on the sorry part of Hyde Park in November; the part that is munched underfoot, and is sad, and makes money. It sucks up children and spits them out fatter and closer to death, but happy — at least that is what their parents say. The children themselves look drugged, or frightened, because their parents are invariably screaming at them. From the north, Wonderland looks like Coney Island, a cold, bleak fairground from Scooby Doo, with seagulls screaming and circling, far more than is usual for central London. That is when I begin to mistrust Wonderland. We are here for the same thing, these critic gulls and I: the food. There is food in Wonderland; piles of food, most of it fake, or ersatz, or pretend food.

Boulestin is a pretty restaurant on St James’s Street, between the posh fag shop (Davidoff) and the old palace, which the Hanoverians thought so ghastly that they moved out to Kensington Gardens, a fresher hell full of squirrels. This is one of the more fascinating West End streets because it is 300 years old and is, as such, the only street in the West End in which the ancient nobility look safe, or even human; you pass tourists, rats and also dukes wafting towards White’s gentlemen’s club, which is duchess-free and where a grown man can be treated like a baby, and not in a perverted way. So Boulestin, named for the famous French chef and photographer Xavier Marcel Boulestin, who looks, from my swift research, like Major Strasser from Casablanca, but fat.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, a brown cavern in the Mandarin Oriental hotel, Knightsbridge, has won a second Michelin star. These stars are food ‘Oscars’ (Hollywood has eaten everything, despite its tendency to despise food) and ensure that wealthy Americans make a detour to dine beneath the stars. This new elevation means that Blumenthal, at least technically, is Britain’s finest cook; the Meryl Streep of dripping and sweat. Blumenthal is a historian chef, a successor to the celebrity chef; he is an intellectual. I say this not because he wears spectacles but because his website has a dictionary definition of dinner — ‘A formal evening meal, typically one in honour of a person or event — from old French Disner’.

The Union Street Café is in a dismal, dingy part of London; dismal dingy Southwark. Southwark, in fact, is almost charismatically dingy, a land of despairing streets and brick arches and railway tracks heading suicidally for southern suburbs. Even the churches (small, brown, bricked, almost bricked-up) look apologetic, as if they know they have failed. But it is here, on the junction of Union Street and Great Suffolk Street, that Gordon Ramsay, the second most charismatic of the original celebrity chefs — after Marco Pierre White, now selling stock cubes to old ladies with his swiftly receding sexual charisma — has built his new restaurant. It is his tenth in Britain.

The Wild Rabbit is a pub in the Cotswolds, that small corner of Britain full of evil grinning cottages; if the Cotswolds were a small dog it would always be mounting interior decorators and ripping out their throats. It is owned by Carole, Lady Bamford, the wife of the JCB billionaire Sir Anthony ‘Digger’ Bamford, which of course poses the question — does she have a toy one at home? And when she proved she could look after that one she got a real one?

A restaurant in a synagogue may be too mad even for this column but we are Jews, so why not? (Column shrugs with the secret frisson of negative stereotyping.) 1701 is adjacent to Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London; it is the oldest, wisest and most camouflaged synagogue in Britain, disguised, presumably for safety, as a Christopher Wren church. This anticipates the joy of confusion — rabbis (I have long stopped calling them rabbits, being above such idiocies, as in Orthodox Rabbit, Progressive Rabbit, Welsh Rabbit) being asked for salad dressing, waiters being asked for blessings, security men (Jews love security men, in a complex way) being asked to wrap a piece of fish for a late snack. Heaven. Or not. Jews don’t really have a heaven; if we did we would hate it.

One Aldwych, an Edwardian grand hotel near Waterloo Bridge, is serving a Jimmy Savile tribute tea. It is not explicitly called a Jimmy Savile tribute tea; of course it is not. That would be tasteless, and people would not come to One Aldwych to eat it; it might, in fact, be lucky enough to get a picket, a dazzling marketing dream. No, it is called the Scrumdiddlyumptious Afternoon Tea and it is tied, in sugary, monetised chains, to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a musical featuring a man dressed as a Fisher-Price toy (and possible diabetic), child torture and obesity, and explicit abuse of small minority workers, which is playing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane nearby. (Or as the blurb says: ‘Every item reflects the wit and wonder of Roald Dahl’s classic tale.’ Wit?

Shake Shack is a hamburger restaurant in Covent Garden market. It came from New York and it is as needy and angry and angry-needy as America itself; it is, I suspect, quite capable of inventing a bogus reason to invade Burger King while posing as a victim of Burger King’s evil machinations. ‘Good things come to those who wait,’ it says in its promotional material online. ‘See you in the queue!’ (That, if you are English and a man and have never had psychotherapy, is called passive aggression.) Covent Garden market is full of August tourists; that is, wanderers with no destination, staring blindly at the metal Apples and Chanel. Their spiritual home is the queue at Madame Tussauds but, being tourists, they do not know it.

What to say about the Shard that isn’t said by the fact it is 1,020 feet high and looks like a slightly elongated cheese triangle, and that it is designed as a home and office for those who want nothing more than to live and work in a building that looks like a slightly elongated cheese triangle? I cannot help but think that its architect, who is called Renzo Piano, is a fan of — or possibly secret PR for — Dairylea and was also a very unhappy small boy. (Freud may be over-quoted on the soothing possibilities of size, but he is still right. Small becomes big, and so on, and this baby is so big it is the BIGGEST — I mean tallest — building in the EU. In the EU! Suck on that, Nigel.

Scott’s, Mount Street, Mayfair: the scene of the crime or, for those who do not read newspapers, the place where Charles Saatchi throttled his wife Nigella Lawson in the smoking section, and stuck his finger up her nose. (The Spectator food column, or News Kitten as her husband calls her, is rarely first with a story, but she gets there in the end). I suppose I want to know whether, if I throttle A, fellow diners will intervene or simply assume that domestic (or, rather restaurant) violence does not take place in Mayfair, and I am sticking my finger up A’s nose through love, consideration and sexual desire; rather than, as is more probable, jealousy, stupidity and ennui.

Kaspar’s Seafood Bar and Grill is named for superstition, snobbery and avarice. At a dinner at the Savoy in 1898 there were 13 guests at dinner, and the host, a South African mining magnate called Woolf Joel, was shot dead a few weeks later in Johannesburg. This was doubtless sad for his family, but not so sad that the Savoy, which was the first luxury hotel of the modern age, with en-suite bathrooms and an en-suite musical theatre, could not make a story out of it; this story stinks of the biblical beginnings of marketing. The hotel henceforth provided a flunkey to eat with guests when they numbered 13, should they be haunted by triskaidekaphobia; but the guests didn’t like a flunkey, which was too like a chicken that spoke.

The Antica Roma is an ice-cream shop near the Spanish Steps in Rome; recently, it served four English tourists called the Bannisters and Their Wives. Mr Bannister was so surprised to receive a bill for €64 for four ice creams that he, or possibly someone representing him, contacted the Daily Mail, as certain tourists do in times of crisis. It has now rolled out into one of the sillier diplomatic incidents, which usually go like this. A) The crime. €64? That’s mad. Fucking Italians. Do you have a photocopy of the receipt? Can we take your picture? Yes? Look more sad. Fucking Italians. Look more sad. Paul! [Dacre!] We have a story about thieving Italian ice-cream rob dogs. Yes the Bannisters and Their Wives are white. I don’t think they are on benefits.