Tanya Gold

La Môme is the new ‘Mediterranean’ restaurant at the Berkeley, Knightsbridge’s monumental grand hotel. It has changed, as all London’s grand hotels have changed: it is Little Dubai in the cold and the chintz is on the bonfire. Fairy lights hang from the awning of the entrance, as if in an eternal Christmas. I barely recognise it, though I ate an impersonation of a mandarin in its overwrought Instagram-friendly bakery two years ago, and it was inferior to a real mandarin. I cling to that. Designers must keep busy: this means grand hotels are always getting renovated – it’s life of a kind. The lobby feels gold, though that may only be an impression.

The Audley Public House is on the corner of North Audley Street and Mount Street in Mayfair, opposite the Purdey gun shop where you can buy a gun and a cashmere cape, because the world has changed. The Audley is a vast pale-pink Victorian castle, and it meets Mayfair in grandeur and prettiness. If the Audley looks like it could puncture you with an ornamental pinnacle, it also seems frosted with sugar – but that is money. This is the tourist Mayfair of the affluent American imagination: the pharmacies and grocers have gone, replaced by fashion (Balmain, Simone Rocha) and the spirit of Paddington Bear. Woody Allen shot Match Point in the Audley, and that is the most normal thing about it now.

The Harrods bookshop, which I browse for masochistic reasons, is mesmerising: an homage to the lure of ownership. The first book I find is called, simply, 150 Houses. Is that enough? Then I find Luxury Trains, the Porsche Book, the Lamborghini Book and the Jaguar Book. Then I find a book designed for a lifelong self-guided tour of the world of James Bond, who is a fictional British civil servant. Then I find books called Dior, Balmain, Prada and Gucci. I didn’t know they did words. I want to tell you that the Harrods bookshop is entirely advertorial for the life I can’t afford, but that would be unfair. Because I also find a copy of Mansfield Park in the same colours as a Minion: custard yellow and bright blue.

The Savoy Hotel is a theatre playing Mean Girls with a hotel attached to it, so you can expect it to both dream and fail. That is a polite way of saying that its new restaurant, Gallery, is not a success, but the Savoy will survive it. Though it didn’t survive the Peasants’ Revolt. It burned down, courtesy of medieval far-leftists who I would suspect were less annoying than modern far--leftists. They could hardly be more so, and I’m sure Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote some of the Canterbury Tales on this site, would agree.

I see this column as an essay on cultural polarisation: artisanal butter can only take you so far into wisdom. I cower in Covent Garden, mourning Tory romanticism, and stare, cold-eyed in St James’s, at oligarchic mezze. Sometimes I eat by mistake. I couldn’t get into the fashionable noodle place in Soho, whose Instagram-made queue stretched to Cambridge Circus on Saturday night. It reminded me of the crowds at royal weddings: both camp for dreams. So, I went to Wingmans instead.  Wingmans – it lost the apostrophe, it’s a decadent age – calls itself ‘London’s best wings’. They are chicken wings, not angel wings, and this is Pottersville, not Bedford Falls. (Some people think Pottersville is more fun and that may be, but not here. This is not a wonderful life.

Back to the past: it’s safer there. There is a themed restaurant dedicated to George VI of all people, near Berkeley Square – a sort of Rainforest Café for monarchists who won’t sink to the Tiltyard Café at Hampton Court. I was looking for a restaurant my husband might like – Brexit, meat, maps of the Empire at its height in colour – and I found the Guinea Grill in Bruton Place. George VI isn’t a vivid monarch. He lived in the shadow of queens – one Mary, two Elizabeths – and on film he is always crying, or dying. In The Crown (Jared Harris, marvellous) he lost his lung. In The King’s Speech (Colin Firth, good, but handsome) he lost his happiness. I like to think George was tougher and less pitiable than the chronicles suggest.

For British people, America is an idea brought by cinema, and The Dover, the New York Italian bar and restaurant in Mayfair, meets a version of it. It’s not quite the ballroom in Some Like It Hot, not quite Rick’s Café in Casablanca, but it’s as close as you will find near Green Park Underground, and that has a charm to it, because Americans can speak. It’s from Martin Kuczmarski, formerly of the once preening, now ragged Soho House. He has named his company Difficult Name. There’s a message there, and a story, and it made a glorious restaurant with the tagline ‘A good place to be since 2023’.

Home Kitchen is in Primrose Hill, another piece of fantasy London, home to the late Martin Amis and Paddington Bear. It is a measure of the times that Elizabeth II had no literary chronicler – no Amis, no Proust for her – but was, almost against her will, given Paddington Bear instead. When I saw the small bear at her memorials, I thought: is that her genre? Infants’ fiction? Couldn’t she do better? The question that follows is, of course: would they have eaten together at Home Kitchen? The barley is doughty, fragrant and from the earth.

Bonfire night is more about burning Catholics than haute cuisine and it shows. I’ve always felt for Catholic friends at this time of year, but I am a Jew, and I am told I am oversensitive. It’s also three decades since I made £150 doing ‘Penny for the Guy’ on Hampstead High Street. The last time I went to a bonfire night party it was hosted by a Catholic, and this confused me, until I remembered: she is an English Catholic. If Christmas is for the goose, and Easter for the hot cross bun, bonfire night has the toffee apple. Because this is a desolate festival, it has neither toffee on the apple – we will get to that – nor, too often, a bonfire. I’m not for burning Guido in effigy like those pyromaniac loons in Lewes, about whom I always think: who will they burn next?

Sally Lunn’s is a teashop in Bath. It sits in a lane by the abbey, and the Roman baths. Paganism and Christianity jostle here: Minerva battles Christ, who wins, for now. Sally Lunn’s calls itself ‘the oldest house in Bath’ (c. 1482). It is rough-hewn, with a vast teal window and pumpkins on display. The pumpkins might be plastic. I don’t know. Tourists queue in the hallway behind a large wooden cutout of a woman who might be Sally Lunn. She is a semi-mythical woman: the Huguenot refugee Solange Luyon, who came to Bath in the 1680s with brioche in her hands. No one knows if she really existed.