Tanya Gold

Maxim’s! The very name is drool from Maurice Chevalier’s lips, as he perved around Gigi and sang, ‘Thank heaven for little girls/ And hebephilia generally.’ Myths sprout up around Maxim’s, which was always, in restaurant terms, a kind of Prince Michael of Kent with sex appeal. The female customers were so overdressed in 1913 according to Jean Cocteau that taking their clothes off was ‘like moving house’. Ho Chi Minh was apparently a bus boy, so the food at Maxim’s and the communist revolution in North Vietnam are obviously connected — although exactly how I cannot say. Maxim’s is off the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine stood.

The Churchill Arms in Kensington is a sort of Winston Churchill fetish bar, full of every conceivable piece of Winston Churchill memorabilia, or toy. Relics of his actual corpse may lurk, loitering behind a decorative mug or a Plasticine bust of his head. There is a three-quarter-size cardboard cutout of the Queen, photographs of every other British prime minister looking confused or disappointed, and what I think are the ‘scores’ from the Battle of Britain. I am here because it is seasonal suicide week and who needs to be near Richard Caring’s event napery or log styling in seasonal suicide week?

Goldeneye is the house in Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote James Bond, and spanked his wife; that is why Fleming created Bond I think, even as he ran the Sunday Times foreign desk and (some say) spies — to spank the Russians, who have very big bottoms. Ah, for the days when hacks could afford houses in Jamaica and lived exquisite fantasy lives in which they got loads of sex, and killed people (usually foreigners) to pay the mortgage. (As I never tire of pointing out, James Bond was a civil servant.) Goldeneye is a hotel now, smooth, twinkling and monetised, with a line of wooden villas stretched along a raked beach, dotted with flippers, because tourists love, for some reason, to impersonate fish.

The British Pullman on platform 1 at Victoria station looks mad, because it is 9 a.m. and ugly British commuters are running around, looking wracked and unhappy, like extras from Les Misérables, in slightly uglier clothes. Yet this train, which could have steamed out of Julian Fellowes’s head, sits in a grand puddle of cliché, like a duchess desperately trying not to look as if she is shopping at Lidl: graceful, romantic, a bygone age, the romance of steam, er, Foyle’s War. Its customers, a pile of mother/daughter forgiveness jaunts and happy — or unhappy — couples, are trying to look classy, which isn’t easy at Victoria station on a weekday.

A creation myth: Earl -Cadogan wandered into Oriel, the ancient Sloane Square brasserie on his land, like a lardy dachshund, if slightly more cadaverous. For 25 years Oriel served as a second home for the Chelsea hags and, worse, the brats, who still wear strange coloured cords, work in estate agency or PR, and are called, even now, Caroline; and it was pretty bad, stuffed with idiocy and yapping. (I would say that Chelsea deserves no better, and should be nuked with pies, but that is not my job.) Cadogan, who has taste, hated it, and so, with the neat malice of a guardsman, he decapitated it. He gave it to Chris Corbyn and Jeremy King, who own three of London’s prettiest restaurants — the Wolseley, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel.

Food and fashion are enemies, so congratulations to the Berkeley Hotel for attempting detente with something insane. It has invented a fashion ‘tea’ called Prêt-à--Portea which is, I am told by a press release, ‘designed to add a creative twist to the classic elements of the traditional English afternoon tea with cakes and pastries resembling the latest catwalk designs for the style conscious’. It gets worse, if there is anything worse than ‘style-conscious’ people eating in public.

Bubbledogs is a restaurant from cinema. It is violently 1980s, American and flash. The sign Bubbledogs shines neon pink from the window, a twin to Tom Cruise’s Cocktails & Dreams sign which twinkled at the end of Cocktail (1988) to say his narrative arc was done. He owned his own cocktail bar, even if drunken Doug the Babycham philosopher — ‘I know when the bottle is empty… heh-heh-heh’ — was dead. He was saved by a combination of homespun small-business ethics and populist alcoholism. Here in Fitzrovia, where restaurants gather in piles, the menu is only  hotdogs and champagne, a food and a drink with such complex meaning and agonised marketing history that they surely belong together. Hotdogs have an awful reputation.

Opus has written its name in letters six foot high outside, which is such a screaming act of narcissistic self-doubt, I wish I’d thought of it myself. I put this down to Opus being in Birmingham, a city that is stuck in low to medium self-hatred. Its roads are mad, and think they are in Miami, and wander around pointlessly with eight lanes, looking for malls and gun shows and Charlton Heston but then they realise — still Birmingham. Opus is a ‘smart’ restaurant. I know this because a) it thinks pistachio is a good colour for things other than pistachio nuts, in this case, chairs, and b) Francis Maude is here. He is sitting with Nick Robinson of the BBC, leaning on padded pistachio tubes.

Burger & Lobster is a -restaurant for capitalism in crisis, an existential moan for something simpler and less awful. Either that, or it is restaurant for small boys with jobs, who cannot make up their minds what they want and miss that -restaurant where you could get custard and a beating from a woman who looked like your mum but might conceivably shag you. Because it is simple — you arrive, and you order a burger or a -lobster, or both of them, or none of them. There is nothing to confuse, baffle or upset the small boy with a job living in a crisis of late capitalism, who may also have an Oepidus complex. Burger or Lobster, Oedipus? What’s it to be?

Alan Sugar’s Turkish restaurant, Sheesh, is in Chigwell, a land of soft lawns, hard money and fairies who count it. They come out when footballers beep their horns, so to speak. If it sounds disgusting, it isn’t really — Essex is simply Surrey with a makeover and thinner legs. Sheesh is a huge, white, half--timbered Tudor ex-pub, sitting, or rather screaming, in a photogenic lane begging for folk tales starring shouty TV lords. It is one of the most beautiful restaurants I have ever seen, because I have no taste. It is fantastically fake, Camelot crashing into Monaco; I suddenly imagine Sugar on a horse jousting with a broken Amstrad computer. Yander lies the kebab house of my fadda. Etc.

The Witchery is almost a themed restaurant; it is a weeping medieval tenement, just below Edinburgh Castle, which looks like a blackened tooth. Inside, it has wood panelling, wall paintings, red velvet table clothes and an enormous silvery head of Dionysus, which the waiter says is made of polystyrene. Upstairs are the sort of suites you can imagine Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel bouncing up and down in, dressed as Robespierre and Voltaire, but because it is August and the Fringe is in town, they are all booked up with writhing comedy agents plotting things. It is all very The Ninth Gate. (The Ninth Gate, should you be ignorant of late Polanski, is a film about a demonic book, starring Johnny Depp.

The McDonald’s in the Olympic Park has 1,500 seats and is the biggest McDonald’s on earth. Let us ignore the cognitive dissonance of McDonald’s sponsoring the Olympics because we have screamed about that. Let us forget other complaints about the Olympics because, with many golds won by Team GB (an acronym that comes with its own nationalist resurgence and exclamation mark), there is obviously no better way to spend our GNP than on making people run around in circles very fast. Except this is a very self-hating McDonald’s which seems entirely in denial about being a McDonald’s.

Brasserie Zédel is the pinkest restaurant I have ever seen. It is pig pink, Barbie pink, icing-sugar pink and tongue pink. It is so pink that I photograph the napkin, and look at the napkin many times to remind myself that such a pink restaurant exists where it does, in a district reminiscent of cracked heads and bilious fear and tramps set alight: west Soho. I love west Soho. East Soho upsets me, because you can buy posh ­whisky, smart cheese and a leather dog collar for £300, to prove you went to Soho, saw the tarts and the House of Karl Marx, and came back to Notting Hill without a spot on your conscience or, worse, stayed at the Soho Hotel, a corpse dressed in Cath Kidston chintz.

I thought I would hate Bulgari. (At least they have stopped calling it Bvlgari). Ah, you might say, surely Bulgari, a tentacle of LVMH, the ‘luxury goods giant’ that makes rubbish for women too hot to work, but too bored to stay awake, does not belong in a restaurant column? Has Gold, who avoided being doused in Pol Roger by Charles Moore at the Spectator summer party and found the cognitive dissonance of that assault very frightening, gone mad and decided to review accessories? Will somebody else be swallowing the cartoon chicken (see above)?

Mari Vanna is in Knightsbridge, near those pale loitering houses that would be ripped up if only their owners could pay off the council, to be replaced with giant Barratt Homes, with Homes, or maybe Barratt, wrought in gold. The grotesque Candy & Candy development by Hyde Park, all man-of-steel strut, gazes at Harvey Nichols the way a troll stares at a baby. This is the land of basement swimming pools and female sorrow, Lamborghinis, fat teenagers, domestic slavery, tyrants going shopping, and Louis Vuitton bags for dogs. Saddam Hussein would love it. In the midst of this nightmare, Mari Vanna sits like a dollhouse on the road to Kensington.

Nick Clegg and sex. What doesn’t the dude know about it — he told Piers Morgan he had slept with ‘no more than 30 people’? He recently took his wife, Miriam González Durántez, the best of the political wives (no interviews, no photoshoots and their kid is called something like Zorro) to the ‘sexiest’ restaurant in London, as a reward for letting George Osborne telephone the house. It’s called Clos Maggiore, it is in Covent Garden and it has been open for 11 years. (Not a sexy age, 11, but bear with me). I’m not sure a restaurant can actually be sexy but PRs think everything is sexy — spoons, Utterly Butterly, Nick Clegg. So sexy, says the Times, and gave Clos Maggiore an award for sexiness.

Dabbous is the place where stoned pixies would dine if they were into food. I have a fever and think of fairies and ghost trains to nowhere all day. But it is really Dabbous — Dabbous — that did this to me. Dabbous is a girl with her skirts up at Oxford — she has a reputation. For being wonderful — foodie food for those who aren’t really foodies or won’t identify as such; eating there is like going to the opera, and finding people who can look you in the eye. The critics have all come, and fallen down wormholes made of their own superlatives. Now it is booked up until the apocalypse. The chef is Ollie ­Dabbous, 31, formerly of The Fat Duck and Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.