Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Notting Hill misanthropy

A serious restaurant for serious times: the Ledbury in Notting Hill. It’s a good time to do it, as the dreams of the Notting Hill set crumple to dust and Jacob Rees-Mogg rides out in his stupid hats.

It has sat in its former pub on Ledbury Road since 2005. It won — and has held for seven years — two Michelin stars. It has featured in the gruesome S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants List, which is, among other things, a rebuke to tap water.

Its most interesting moment was during the riots of 2011, when the nation conspired to make David Cameron return from his summer holidays early.

Annoying David Cameron is always fun, because he takes himself very seriously. I once asked him what his favourite supermarket is, and he said, very slowly: ‘Not Waitrose.’ I think this means it is Waitrose, but he was running for election and I forgave him for pretending to long for Tesco Extra. After all, he had a dream. And he forgave me for my follow-up — ‘Do you believe in aliens?’

Anyway, the Ladbroke Blood gang and the Lisson Green men suspended hostilities and invaded the Ledbury with batons and knives that night, and pulled a woman’s wedding ring from her finger. The kitchen staff, mindful of both jus and justice, fought them off with kitchen implements; and the historian Dan Snow, in a victory for nerds everyone, wrestled a rioter to the ground. I wonder if he replays it in his mind often. The question this column must answer is — was it worth it?

It was a very English counter-revolution, and a paradigm.

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