Tanya Gold

There is an immaculate brasserie called 74 Duke at 74 Duke Street, Mayfair: this is postcode etymology. Duke Street runs from Selfridges to what used to be the American embassy in Grosvenor Square but is now (I assume) a paranoid hotel: the Chancery Rosewood, which has kept the monstrous eagle on the roof. If Duke Street was ever interesting – I like to imagine Mrs Dalloway having a panic attack in the road – it isn’t now. It sells the eternal detritus of the British rich – watches, capes, meat – who I suspect are into crypto these days. It is all a feint anyway: fake London for fake people, and life is at the edges now. A brasserie for the undead, then, and what to say? It’s very nice, but the last restaurant I reviewed near here was Mister Nice, which wasn’t nice at all.

The Lavery in South Kensington is named for Sir John Lavery, official artist of the Great War and designer of the currency of the Irish Free State, who lived here, though he died in Ireland and is buried in Putney. Lavery, of course, would no longer recognise South Kensington as his home, and his white, monumental mid-Victorian house – it’s too cold to be compared to a wedding cake, it’s a power cake – is now a fashionable restaurant and ‘event space’, which I put in quotation marks so you know I didn’t write the words ‘event space’, I just typed them out. In houses like The Lavery, I wonder how tall the Victorians were in their heads.

I like a picnic weighted with history and class terror, which means Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly, which is historical re-enactment with dreaming. I have written about this for years or tried to: food is never just food, only fools say that. You can learn almost everything about people from the food they want. And here is St Narcissus in the form of a department store that works more powerfully as an idea than a mere shop, though it is a very effective shop. Fortnum’s sells a Great Britain that never was, designed for people who no longer exist, if they ever did. It has much to say to Brexiteers and worse, though in biscuit.

This column sometimes shrieks the death of central London, and this is unfair. (I think this because others are now doing it.) It is not the city we mourn but our younger selves. Even so, the current aesthetic in restaurants is awful and needs to be suppressed: beiges and leathers, fish tanks and stupid lighting, all are nauseating. But I hated Dubai. You say Atlantis, The Palm, I say enslaved maid crying for her dreams. But there is refuge, at least from the aesthetic, and it is as ever the child of imagination and nostalgia. Broadwick Soho, the newish hotel in the street where typhus was chased down to a water pump, is a rebuke to desperate minimalism.

I am mesmerised by the restaurants of Raffles London at the OWO (Old War Office) because war approaches and the Old War Office is now a stage set for food, floristry and linen. If this is civilisation – it isn’t really, but it thinks it is – who will protect it now? Will we even know if war has started – or care? It was a fine building when I first came – I have reviewed its chilly Mediterranean food, its manic Italian and its tepid French – and it still is. Grand hotels exist to suppress time. It is a preening Edwardian palace with crazed plinths, over-pliant staff and ever sillier restaurants, today’s being the Drawing Room. It looks like how people who are not posh imagine posh country houses to be.

I feel for Locatelli, the new Italian restaurant inside the National Gallery, whose opening coincides with the 200th anniversary of the gallery and a rehang which I can’t see the point of because I want to watch Van Eyck in the dark. Locatelli must compete with the Caravaggio chicken, which is really called ‘Supper at Emmaus’ if you are an art historian or an adult. In the publicity photographs the chef Giorgio Locatelli is actually standing in front of the Caravaggio chicken. It looks as if Jesus is waving at Giorgio Locatelli but the chicken is unmoved. It stole all the gravitas.

Town – well-named, it has vitality – is on the ragged part of Drury Lane WC2 near the Majestic Wine Warehouse and Travelodge. Like musical theatre, whose home this district still is, it is so ebullient and desirous of being loved that it is impossible not to love it back, because it seethes with that rare thing in days of ennui: enthusiasm. It is Judy Garland before the drugs won out and Max Bialystock of The Producers before he lost the pearl in his cravat pin and fell to shagging little old ladies to fund bad plays. It is not exactly the fag end of Covent Garden reborn – we need ragged parishes in over-polished London – but it is more interesting than the awful deadness of the piazza, which is now Westfield-near-Thames.

The Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station is George Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece: his Albert Memorial in Hyde Park (a big dead prince under a big gold cross) has just too much sex to it. Late Victorian architecture seethes with erotica. The facetious will say imperialism was really just penetration, and there’s something in that. It is now the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, London – oh, the fretted imaginings of marketing departments – and, on a more conscious level, the closest you will get to the great age of rail, though spliced with plastic now. The modern station is ugly and translucent and sells face cream to tourists, and buns. But it hasn’t lost its drama. This is the gateway to Europe and Derby.

After a week in which Israel triumphed at the Eurovision Song Contest with second place – western Europe is for them, eastern Europe slightly less so (plus ça change) – I review Babbo, the new neighbourhood restaurant in St John’s Wood. Restaurants tend to drift in, settle and drift onwards here. The Victorians knew it as a land of mistresses and smut; now it is a world of private hospitals, bad parking and MCC members, who seem bewildered by it all, as if Lord’s landed like a spaceship in an alien land. Only Oslo Court seems impregnable, because it manifests Jewish solidity – it is disguised as the home of your cousin in a mansion flat – and Jewish subversion. It is a specialist in seafood and cream cakes. Everything else comes and goes.

Delamina Townhouse is on Tavistock Street in Covent Garden. It is an Israeli restaurant, and a very fine and subtle one, though Israeli restaurants are rebranding as ‘eastern Mediterranean’ these days due to growing Jew hate on London’s streets, which fills me with rage. (I am not talking about criticism of Israel. I welcome all criticism. I am a critic. I am talking about demonisation, and the glib urge to annihilation. Plenty of restaurant critics have a line on the war. I have checked.) But not enough rage to stop eating. I ate for Ukraine at Mriya in Hammersmith: now I eat here. If you think I am decadent, well, I am hardly the only one. You are lucky.

Josephine is a Lyonnaise bistro on the Fulham Road from Claude Bosi. It is named for Bosi’s grandmother and is that rare, magical thing: a perfect restaurant. Bosi runs Bibendum (two Michelin stars, and in Michelin House) and Brooklands at the top of the appalling Peninsula hotel (two Michelin stars). He opens a second Josephine this month in Marylebone, which needs it since the Chiltern Firehouse, always a restaurant that felt like Icarus with a kitchen, burnt down to rubble. I haven’t eaten in Brooklands – I wish the Peninsula were an island, so that it could float to Victoria and then away, being an oligarchic monstrosity. But my instinct is: this is the good stuff.

The River Cafe has grown a thrifty annexe, and this passes for democratisation. All restaurants are tribal: if dukes have Wiltons, ancient Blairites have the River Cafe. It is a Richard Rogers remake of Duckhams oil storage, a warehouse of sinister London brick, and a Ruth Rogers restaurant. Opening in 1987, it heralded the gentrification of Hammersmith, which has stalled now that Hammersmith Bridge is closed to traffic and sits dully on the Thames, a bridge of decline. The River Cafe appears, thinly disguised, in a J.K. Rowling Cormoran Strike novel where a literary agent murders her client because he writes Swiftian pastiche, and it is a good place to watch the Boat Race. It is intensely disorientating until sunset.

The immaculate bourgeois socialists of north London – that is not code for Jews – like to eat and drink in the former servants’ quarters of Kenwood House, because this is a mad country.  Kenwood is beautiful. It is Hampstead’s best house, standing at the top of the heath, near the head waters of the River Fleet, the river of the journalists. Further down the hill the immaculate bourgeois socialists gambol in the swimming ponds, which is apparently a fashionable thing to do. I prefer the lido, but I am not afraid of working-class teenagers. Hampstead Heath is an excitable woodland.