Tanya Gold

The new Aston Martin Vantage is shorter and hotter than the DB11: a smaller, truer sportscar, though slightly less elegant. 'Gentlemanly' is what the copywriter calls the DB11, but this is a 'hunter' and 'predatory'. Ferraris, meanwhile, are a little too hot for me – though I accept that they are sublime, if Ferraris are your thing – and the Toyota Supra, which I love – even shorter, even hotter, much cheaper – doesn’t make quite the same impression on the A30. People (I mean men over 40) love Aston Martins. They view them as an expression of British pride, and coo over them like babies, by roaring past, overtaking, and slowing down, and then insisting you overtake them in turn. The whole encounter is managed by hand signals and engine snorts, and it is delightful.

Britain makes the world’s best luxury cars: we got there early, as we did with the Industrial Revolution, which is why our infrastructure is fraying, though our cars aren’t. You can argue about Rolls-Royce vs Bentley, and both be right, though the late Queen chose a Bentley for the state limousine and a Jaguar Land Rover for the state hearse in Royal Claret. (It was little discussed, for reasons of taste, but it was a very beautiful hearse. The claret was right.) Perhaps a Rolls-Royce is too elitist though; with minimal specification, it could be made to look like a crown. Here is the Bentley Flying Spur Mulliner: the Bentley saloon, a GT with four doors. You can take a 4.0 litre V8 or a 6.0 litre W12 engine, but electrification is coming: this is the 2.

The Burgh Island Hotel lives on a tidal island in a deserted part of south Devon. The directions for visiting are very detailed. You drive along the deserted country road, and at a certain point – just before you lose mobile telephone reception – you must stop to telephone the hotel, and they tell you where to park your car on the mainland, and they will send the car across the beach and meet you in Bigbury-on-Sea. You drive on and eventually you see a brightly lit Art Deco palace under a cliff. It was built by a filmmaker called Archibald Nettlefold (Human Desires, The Hellcat), the heir to an engineering fortune. I think he was a very odd man. There is very little information about him, but he left this hotel, and there is probably an old monastery underneath it.

Restaurant and dog years are similar, and so the Wolseley, which is 20 this year, seems as if it has always been here. Other restaurants fall so swiftly you have only fragments of impressions. Breakfast on Bond Street in what feels like a one-bedroom flat belonging to Patrick Bateman. Pasta in a cellar with art, and they only care about the art. Salad at an Aslan-style stone table without mice. Nudity and berries. The original Wolseley was so good it spawned a slew of bad impersonators It was opened by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, the best restaurateurs of the age, in the old Wolseley building at 160 Piccadilly, between Caviar House and the Ritz hotel. Wolseley is a forgotten brand of motorcar, and this was its preening showroom.

Scott’s, Richmond, is a fish, champagne and oyster bar, and a new branch of Scott’s, Mayfair. The original Scott’s was part of what became the Trocadero Centre. (Ian Fleming was a regular. He would take captured U-boat officers there to get them drunk and chatty. James Bond visited too.) It moved to Mount Street and was bombed by the IRA in 1975. This Scott’s is on the Thames at Richmond and is part of a development by the King’s favourite architect Quinlan Terry, who managed, in the mid 1980s, to throw up a Domestic Revival village on the water. It looks very weird, but I’ve always liked it because the alternative is worse.

Alex Dilling at the Hotel Café Royal is a minute restaurant above Regent Street, which has the type of British imperial architecture that looks most like a cake: that is, the most preening, deceptive and pale. For someone who did almost no exercise, the Prince Regent built quite a lot of roads and there my interest in him ends, like the road itself. In this hotel, which is very fine, stone cake vies with the tepid luxury of this age, which indicates invisibility, and with it guilt. There’s not much to do in central London nowadays beyond watching wealth aesthetics fight it out. The Hotel Café Royal used to be more interesting. This is the hotel where Oscar Wilde decided to sue the Marquess of Queensberry for libel. I think he was drunk. I hope he was.

Bacchanalia is the new restaurant from Richard Caring – I sense he would like me to call it a ‘landmark’ or ‘super-restaurant’, so I won’t – in the old Porsche showroom on the corner of Mount Street and Berkeley Square, and all nightingales have fled. Caring, who has doused Britain with his metal Ivys, is the Ludwig of Bavaria of Mayfair. If he hasn’t bought the silver swan tap at Neuschwanstein Castle, he should open negotiations. I will review his interpretation when it appears: what will he do with the Bavarian Alps? Marshmallows I suppose. Or mashed potato.

Mriya lives at the end of Old Brompton Road where South Kensington turns into Earl’s Court and, as if by some alchemy, becomes interesting. It is a Ukrainian restaurant, but something more touching too: a memorial and a retreat. It opened in August, in the sixth month of Putin’s war. Twelve of its 15 staff are displaced Ukrainians and their stories are common immigrant stories of renewal and loss. The kitchen porter is a mathematics teacher, the waiter is an English teacher, and the chef, Yurii Kovryzhenko, is one of the most famous in Ukraine. Mriya is the name of the largest cargo aircraft ever built, designed by Ukrainian engineers, which was destroyed by the Russians at the beginning of the war.