Tanya Gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bread Street Kitchen is a big restaurant near the Mansion House, brought to you by Gordon Ramsay’s big rage; he is the man who, at one point or another, has owned 13 Michelin stars, millions of TV viewers and a turkey called ­Nigella, which he may or may not have murdered and made into

Fortnum & Mason is a major attraction at the UK heritage theme park, the equivalent of the gorilla at London Zoo; this is corroborated by its two branches in Japan and by the fact that it is always full of Germans holding hands in the truffle department and smiling. It is, or rather was, the

Quo Vadis is the restaurant in the house where Marx wrote Das Kapital, and today it is full of tulips. I always expect Soho restaurants to house crackheads and refugees from Esquire, their bloody hands echoing the streets that smell equally of dirt and soap, like a man who wants to wash but finds he

Poor Hawksmoor. So obviously the genius of English Baroque, and yet he always comes last in the histories, behind flashy Vanbrugh (duh) and dull Wren (meh). It was probably a class thing — what isn’t? — because Hawksmoor was from Nottingham, and a clerk. So it feels good to walk into a chophouse bearing his

Sometimes I think luxury is a joke played on the rich by the not-so rich. In my mind, people on the 20p tax rate have a focus group, and design things to sell to the rich, and laugh. And I think this explains sandals with mink T-bars, most watches and now Hix, a restaurant under

Novikov is an immense two-storey restaurant in deepest Mayfair. It serves Asian on the ground floor and Italian in the vaults. This is not an austerity restaurant, or anything near; it is bigger than a Harvester and full of the glow of fortified money. There are actually people smoking outside in happy clumps. For some

The Grand Hotel, Brighton, is the most beautiful hotel in England. It is bright and shiny like Simon Cowell’s teeth, surrounded by something very ugly, like Simon Cowell’s face. It even managed to look beautiful when the IRA blew a cartoon hole in it, from which Margaret Thatcher emerged covered in dust and more dangerous

The Odeon cinema in Whiteleys, Bayswater, has refurbished; it now has eight ‘Lounges’ where you can watch a film and stuff your face with only 49 others, planted on leather seats like fellow passengers on a spaceship to nowhere. Other London cinemas do food (the Everyman, the Electric) but the food is mostly olives and

Reviewing the Delaunay is like reviewing Nelson Mandela. You cannot be rude. This restaurant, a new sister for the ­Wolseley, is as Teflon-coated as David Cameron’s head. And it is very similar to the Wolseley, which was also slobberingly reviewed because people think of it as foreign, but good foreign, which means pastries, not immigrants,

I came to the Gay Hussar for gags about the Labour party; to find some wreckage of its glory days. Except the Labour party doesn’t have glory days — only tiny breaks in the blue space-time continuum when a) it isn’t eating itself and b) it manages to convince a country of snobs that voting