Tanya Gold

I have been waiting for the VW Golf GTI, because the boy – it would be a stretch to call him a man – I liked in 1991 had one. He used to drive me round Regent’s Park in his Golf GTI, and although he went to St Paul’s Boys School and was a religious Jew, I thought this made him seem dangerous. I knew nothing. Behind the ambivalent smile his secret was this: he really cared about maths. My sister has a Golf now. The Golf is the bestselling European car of all time. Globally, only the Toyota Corolla (compact) and the Ford F-Series (truck) beat it: 37 million Golfs have been sold since 1974, which is the equivalent of every single person in Poland owning one, including the babies. It’s 52, as I am: the defining car of Generation X’s good fortune and hope.

The Ford Capri is a paradigm of self-deception, but cars are men’s mirrors, and they want to be deceived by them. Thanks to The Professionals (1977-83), in which Bodie and Doyle of Criminal Intelligence drove a silver Capri and a gold Capri, almost two million were sold. Even the police used them, which is absurd. They only had two doors. Even so, I’d like to see a villain stuffed into a fastback coupé, ideally through the window. I like the old Capri because there was something jaded and stubborn about it: a weary postwar British sex appeal. It was our version of the Ford Mustang, produced from 1969 to 1986.

The oddities at the Penzance Rotary Club Classic Car & Bike Show included a golden thing that looked like the affair baby of an Alfa Romeo roadster and a Silver Ghost; a three-wheel Messerschmitt Cabin Scooter with the nerve to call itself a cabriolet and a picnic basket on the back, presumably for your body parts after it kills you. But the most beautiful car was the Aston Martin: a Vantage sports car. It is always an Aston Martin unless an understated Ferrari is lurking. Then it is still, probably, an Aston Martin. The time when a 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta was normal has gone, along with the optimism that made it The Vantage is as gorgeous as the new Aston Martin DB12 S, which I drove in France in May.

The obvious thing to say about themed restaurants is that they are usually bad. The Rainforest Café in London, for instance, was nothing like a rainforest, though it is slightly more like a rainforest now it has gone. But there are exceptions. The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop in Bakewell, Derbyshire, for instance. Perhaps the sort of tourists who go to Bakewell for tarts are more dangerous than the ones who go to Bath for buns. They certainly look as if they read a lot of crime fiction and are capable of murder in their heads. But The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop out-gilds its myth. It’s rare.

Claridge’s grew nine storeys in the last decade: it’s a metaphor. The ornamental 1897 castle on Brook Street has expanded to fit the available space. Though it grew by half, it never closed, and workmen dug out the basement by hand. In one room, Claridge’s was a building site: in another, a dream world. We are trekking through metaphors now. We are up to our necks. The children eating the Nutella, banana and whipped cream crêpes look deranged Hotels are like buses: they have infinite possibilities. That is what they are for. To not be home. Like Alec Guinness, who lived in the Connaught with his share of the profits of Star Wars, which shamed him (the Connaught is the anti-Tatooine), I would like to live in a hotel.

Erev is an Israeli restaurant in Notting Hill, though Israeli restaurants do not call themselves Israeli nowadays. They have rebranded to Eastern Mediterranean and I don’t blame them. These are bad days for Zionists. I tried to buy an almond croissant at the progressive coffee shop in Newlyn last week while wearing an Israeli flag as a cape. My excuse was: it was election day, and Gaza was on the ballot. I didn’t get the almond croissant. They didn’t have any. Erev, though, is the subject of real protests from real people who think that eating is, under certain circumstances, a genocidal act. They stand outside and shout at diners. If you think genocide and restaurants have nothing to do with each other, meet 2026.

Simpson’s in the Strand is a dream palace, and its fortunes are as tidal as the river. It is on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, destroyed in the Peasants’ Revolt. It began as a cigar divan and chess club, was subsumed into the Savoy Hotel, built with the profits from The Mikado, and was beloved by Churchill and Wodehouse, who described it as an Elysium where you were ‘at liberty to eat till you were helpless, if you felt so disposed’. It then decayed. I’ve come here for 30 years and, grand as it was, Simpson’s smelt of beef and the 1922 committee by the end. No restaurant can live on that indefinitely, and it closed in 2020. I did not enjoy my last meal here, but I took part of its myth: when it sold off its crockery in 2023 I bought what I think is a milk jug.

Brasserie Angelica is the – is the word signature? – restaurant inside the Newman, Fitzrovia, a new hotel that has landed in the capital like a spaceship containing aliens who are into menswear. I don’t mind buildings that look like they don’t belong. Fitzrovia is charming because it feels like remnants left by other places. We have too much Edwardiana already: in the Aldwych– formerly the best surviving medieval part of London after the Great Fire – I feel like I am stomping through cakes of stone. The Newman is a wail in glass and brick on a quiet lane near Gower Street. There are pale awnings, brass fittings and uplighting: Manhattan in its last boom. It is attached to a Victorian house renovated to the standards of a grouter with OCD.

Burlington Arcade on Piccadilly has a caff down from Charbonnel et Walker, where you can buy a box of chocolates as big as a cow, though I never have. Perhaps the time is now? I am being facetious of course: it is Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud, who oversees the Maison de Haute Pâtisserie at the Connaught Hotel, and two unfortunate branches in Qatar. I wonder if the Hamas leadership visit and stick their fingers in pistachio gâteaux. The café is a marvellous construct, as the arcade is. It exists so that spoilt Regency women, the Chelsea hags of then, could shop without walking in horseshit. I know how they feel. It isn’t lunch in the common sense of it.

Mezzogiorno is a very serious, golden Italian restaurant inside the Corinthia London Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. Restaurants are increasingly gold these days, as if for a crocodile of Scrooge McDucks trooping through the wreckage of liberalism looking for money, nuts and guns. It follows the trajectory of my beloved Raffles at the OWO [Old War Office] round the corner. What was once a Ministry of Defence building – though formerly a hotel – is now a (quite good) pizza joint. When the time comes, I hope the drones know. Ignore the lie that gold restaurants serve tiny portions for tiny people. These are vast Mezzogiorno is by the gifted Francesco Mazzei, previously of Sartoria in Savile Row. Here, because this is an age in denial about hierarchy– ha!

Dover Street Counter is the tiny sister of The Dover, a very good restaurant on – who knew? – Dover Street, Mayfair. This is the site of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones Club, if following Wodehouse’s paths is your way of coping, and there is nothing wrong with that. There are some bad restaurants in Mayfair now, with slutty Roman gods and monumental Caesar salads; passive-aggressive tributes to Elizabeth II in bad cake, and enslaved fish staring at sex workers with the mute anguish of recognition. This is better. Good restaurants have the gift of suppressing fear, and this is one such The Dover is delivered by professionals for adults – that is, people who do not put intimacy on expenses, and who can recognise neo-Stalinist soft furnishings when they see them.

Corenucopia by Clare Smyth is in Belgravia, amid a line of interior-design shops, and it is prettier than all of them. It is a female paradise on the ground floor of a mansion block, dedicated to art nouveau and ‘comfort’ food. There are plaster tree branches peeking from the walls and the menu script looks elvish. It is rare that whimsy does not make me kick things, and few things are more whimsical than plaster forests, but Smyth, also of the three-Michelin-starred Core, is one of the great cooks working now. From her, whimsy is merely voice; or, rather, I forgive her. We eat malted sourdough with Ampersand butter and wild venison salami. Both are glorious There is a sanity to this restaurant, even if it is gilded for native Belgravia blondes.