Tanya Gold

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 can’t. I have hated Soho since I saw a man punch his way out of a brothel and a teenage prostitute buy a cuddly toy that was bigger than she was, in a ghastly montage of the free market. I don’t know why people come to Soho, except in novels. I prefer Kew Gardens but I am old now; my Soho moment has passed.

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 name. It isn’t much, but it’s something. Hawksmoor Guildhall is the third of three restaurants from Will Beckett and Huw Gott. The first is in the shadow of the Christ Church, Spitalfields, and the second is in Seven Dials, Covent Garden. Perhaps a chain beckons — Beefeater, but more joyful, with fewer hostages, I mean day-trippers. Anyway, Hawksmoor is famous for meat. Giles Coren cried here, but he cries everywhere.

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 a hotel in Belgravia. Hix looks like a Travelodge. I do not say that to be mean, or because I can. It occupies a dim half-basement under a hotel. You may not have visited a Travelodge, but I have, and the restaurant is always a half-basement under a hotel, with shouting children and a buffet. So it is exactly like a Travelodge, with the children removed.

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 reason I think of a T’Pau gig. This barn is the baby of the Russian restaurateur Arkady Novikov, ‘the Blini Baron’. He must like pretty girls because there are many of them employed here, in identical pink dresses, tossing their hair all over the place, as if they want to be free of it. And their legs! If I had legs like that I’d run around shouting, ‘Legs! Legs! I have legs!

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 than ever, like ­Grendel’s mother. Maybe it is the memory of all that adultery, but the Grand is a happy place, the hotel that Londoners flee to, have bad sex and look out the ­window at the English Channel, a stretch of water so boring it looks more like paint than water. The English Channel is a disgrace and it knows it; it doesn’t even try to be a sea.

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 the audience won’t talk to you because they are evil. The Electric, particularly, has the vibe of a Notting Hill serial killer convention; when watching a horror film at the Electric, you sense the audience is rooting for the demon/Antichrist/hot slayer of priests. The Lounge does real food, by Rowley Leigh of Le Café Anglais, which is on the same floor at Whiteleys although, the PR assures me, the Lounge has its own kitchen and chef.

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, and the German army, not the French. ‘Alert diners might well catch a glimpse of, among others, the authors Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser,’ wrote the New York Times chillingly, as if that were a good thing. Its ceilings are lower, its draft broader but the lamps and the tablecloths, the cakes and the cutlery are all the same as the Wolseley.

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 Labour doesn’t mean they aren’t posh or mightn’t, at some vague point in the future, become posh. Now it has spat out a leader who makes David Cameron look normal. ‘Beaker from the Muppets,’ says my boyfriend, when Ed appears on TV. ‘Not the face. The expression.’ And the Gay Hussar is Labour’s canteen. The food, I should remind you, is Hungarian.

The Magic Kingdom, Disney World, Florida is such a violent battle between cynicism and innocence that a writer’s head may blow off. There are three Disney parks within screaming distance and beyond that, the wastelands of America. If it feels as though it sprouted out of the swamp fully formed, that is because it did. At the centre is Cinderella’s castle, modelled on Mad Ludwig of Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein, but madder. At the gate, a bag search. Your bag will be searched, even though you cannot fit a Kalashnikov inside a Goofy rucksack. Inside, a sign: ‘Meet the fairies. Wait time — 45 minutes’. Some days 100,000 people come here, and there are queues, fights, deaths.

34 is the new restaurant from Richard Caring, the ‘Lex Luthor of Mayfair’, who owns The Ivy, Le Caprice and Annabel’s. In my research, which I undertake before every review — clams tend not to have a back-story — Caring emerges as a character from a Sidney Sheldon novel, or perhaps Lace: ‘Which of you bitches has my entrée?’ He is unpopular with the WASP establishment because A) he is Jewish and B) he is orange. And so the myths, fuelled by Tatler, float. He survived the 2004 tsunami by sheltering behind an atoll. He has a nuclear silo under the J Sheekey Oyster Bar, which is pointed at Pizza Express. His face is made of diamonds. Etcetera.

The new hotel W looms like a giant fridge over Leicester Square. They demolished the poor old Swiss Centre to build it as part of the regeneration programme because some people don’t know that some things can’t be regenerated. I often pass through Leicester Square on a Saturday night and it is like watching the golden calf incident, but in 1981. You will see a man punching a woman, or some children dressed as wizards waving at a boy (usually Daniel Radcliffe) who looks sorry he ever heard of wizards. It is the holy of holies of Trash Culture (London branch) and it smells terrible. Anyway, W, which has a restaurant I will get to shortly, wasn’t built. It landed. It is immense, white and windowless.

David Starkey is no longer quite as eager to show off his bitchy side, but he can be persuaded …  ‘I don’t think I could have been Dr Fluffy,’ says David Starkey, poised behind a hake. ‘No. Absolutely not Dr Fluffy.’ He takes a sip of wine. He looks like an evil Professor Yaffle. I am here because I have long wanted to interview him, principally because once, when I was working for a newspaper gossip column, he gave me a line about Tories and sado-masochism too revolting to print. And he is always in trouble. On Jamie’s Dream School, a reality TV show where poor teenagers got celebrity teachers, Starkey, who has never been a member of Historians For Censorship, called a fat child ‘fat’.

What to say about Occupy London? I support it, because I always judge a movement by the quality of its enemies, and also because its position at St Paul’s cathedral makes a certain type of writer wander around, pondering, ‘What would Jesus do about Occupy?’ There have been many articles asking ‘What would Jesus do about Occupy?’ The answer, of course, is very simple. Jesus (or rather Joshua) of Nazareth was Jewish. So, when faced with any problem, including the implosion of the global financial system and the erection of lots of tents near St Paul’s cathedral, he’d eat something. He’d eat something anyway. The Bible is full of stories of Jesus stuffing his face.

Wolfgang Puck, who is a globally famous chef, has opened Cut on Park Lane. Beef is Cut’s thing and who doesn’t like beef? Except I am convinced that if cows, like women, discovered their own strength, there would be a cow coup, like in Planet of the Apes. (This is a very personal fantasy.) How I can see them, stampeding down Whitehall and into the Treasury, taking George Osborne hostage. Anyway, I secure a 10.30 p.m. slot on a Monday, which is too late for hunger, but not for celebrities and lighting designed to make everyone look like the Gold Blend couple (‘How was Milan?’). You enter Cut through an art deco, Miami-esque entrance. The restaurant is essentially a corridor except, due to mirrors, it is a very long corridor, with the cars of Park Lane beyond.

The St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, by Marriott, is 14 syllables long, which is too many. The best hotels have two syllables or at most three, but I can’t spend my life looking for two-syllable hotels with restaurants to review because I would go mad and so would you. Even so, the glorious red building, which looks like the backside of Christchurch after a dust storm, is at last restored and it has fine dining by Marcus Wareing in a restaurant called The Gilbert Scott. In we go to the vast curved room, which is at the front of the hotel, with views of the Euston Road, which, as ever, looks like downtown Chernobyl hosting a Chicken Shack convention. And guess what? The walls are mustard-coloured. You know how some stylistic crimes are so complete they destroy everything?

Dorsia is the fictional restaurant in Bret Easton Ellis’s excellent novel American Psycho. The psycho, a banker called Patrick Bateman, longs to secure the 8.30 p.m. slot at Dorsia, but he can never get it; instead he walks through Manhattan killing other bankers, and sometimes prostitutes. Dorsia is like Jay Gatsby, an ever-receding metaphor, except it does breadsticks. And now it has opened in London, on the Cromwell Road, courtesy of a quartet of Swedes, whom a friend who understands clubland calls ‘ocean-going club fucks’. It is a private members’ club, with a nightclub in the basement and a bar above, but the restaurant will take anyone. You cannot telephone for reservations because they have no telephone yet, and so, foolishly, I email the PR.

The Playboy Club on Park Lane was re-opened by Hugh Hefner in June, like an ancient bra he had suddenly remembered was lying under his bed. It has a casino, a bar, a barber’s shop, and a restaurant. My being here is pure masochism, and I should really write the review in the style of Stephen King’s The Shining — Red Rum, Red Rum! But here I am, with my boyfriend. He had to telephone to get a table, because in theory, it is Members Only — Frank Sinatra, James Bond, the King of Bhutan. But they let him in, so it isn’t. We go in. It is clean, expressionless, like a movie actress. ‘Normally a bunny would show you upstairs,’ says the girl behind the desk, ‘but she is on a tour.’ Like a Big Bus Tour of the counter-counter sexual revolution?