Mousehole is a charming name; it is almost a charming place. It is a fishing village on Mount’s Bay, Cornwall, beyond the railway line, which stops at Penzance, in an improbable shed; I love that what begins at Paddington, the most grandiose and insane of London stations, ends in a shed. The Spanish invaded Mousehole
Atlantico is a vast buffet inside the Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort Spa and Casino in Gran Canaria. The Lopesan Costa Melonoras Resort Spa and Casino — or, as I will henceforth call it, TLCMRSAC — looks like Citizen Kane’s Xanadu without the art, the metaphor or the tragedy. It has towers, chandeliers, vistas, pools, terraces,
Beast is next to Debenhams on Oxford Street and it is not conventionally beast-like; rather it is monetised and bespoke beastliness, which is not really beastliness at all. It is something worse. The outside is Dead Animal Inc: glassy, corporate, bland. The reception has a 10ft bronze bear covered with swirls which look like paisley
Gymkhana is a fashionable Indian restaurant in Albemarle Street. It was, according to its natty website, ‘inspired by Colonial Indian gymkhana clubs, set up by the British Raj, where members of high society came to socialise, dine, drink and play sport’. This is revolting, in the same way that eating in homage to apartheid South
The Disney Café is a gaudy hell on the fourth floor of Harrods, Knightsbridge. It is adjacent to the Harrods Disney Store, and also the Harrods Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, in which females between the ages of three and 12 can, for fees ranging from £100 to £1,000, be transformed into the tiny, glittering monsters called
Rextail is a restaurant for billionaire children, such as Richie Rich. Its owner, Arcady Novikov, has already opened a restaurant for billionaire men and their spindly billionaire wives — the bonkers fusion Asian/Italian barn Novikov, which travels with its own angry cloud of cigar smoke and identity crisis; so a restaurant for children is the
Fischer’s is Austria made safe for liberals, gays, Jews and other Untermenschen riffraff, because it is a restaurant, not a concentration camp, and because it is in Marylebone High Street, not Linz. It is the new restaurant from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who opened the Wolseley, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel, and it is
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival: the city is full of glassy-eyed narcissists eating haggis pizza off flyers that say Michael Gove: Prick. I saw the Grim Reaper in the Pleasance Courtyard, of all places. Even Death likes an audience these days, has a media strategy, an agent, a gimmick. But this is not a review of
L’Escargot, or the Snail, is a famous restaurant on Greek Street, Soho, opposite the old Establishment club; the oldest French restaurant in London, they say (1927), and who am I to argue? It is the type of restaurant that non-Londoners have heard of and used to visit. They passed photographs of Larry Olivier and Mick
The Chatsworth estate, Derby-shire. I am overwhelmed by marketing literature. I am prostrate. I am weeping. I am staying in one of the Duke of Devonshire’s barns, renovated into a one-bedroom ‘cottage’ with no interior doors. Maybe it was home to a horse once, maybe not; I do not know. I am a short walk
Occasionally a critic must review a restaurant in which they are prepared to spend their own money. So here is the Dean Street Townhouse. It is a terrible name, because all houses in Dean Street, a fusty artery of Soho, are town houses; they are not Wendy houses or country houses or dolls’ houses. But
Here then is Gatsby’s house, after an invasion by the Daily Mail. It is called the Chiltern Firehouse. It is a restaurant in a newly opened hotel in a Victorian Gothic former fire station in Marylebone, a proud and grimy district in total denial about its shocking levels of air pollution. The building has a
Fera is in Gordon Ramsay’s old cave at Claridge’s. His red and yellow room, like a ripped-off arm, has been annihilated; here now is ‘restful’ green, and food by Simon Rogan. His cooking apparently ‘never stands still’. (I am quoting a website.) Fera means ‘wild’. In Latin. I am not sure a restaurant can be
Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held up aching over the world’s most charismatic puddle; Harry’s is a transgressive anti-palazzo. It is a world-famous restaurant, the jewel of the Cipriani brand, and it is very conscious of this honour; it sells branded
Wong Kei is a mad Chinese restaurant on Wardour Street, Chinatown. Until recently it was considered the rudest restaurant in London and, because human stupidity is without end, it became a tourist attraction in its own right, a destination for masochists too frightened to visit an actual dominatrix who would hit them with a stick.
It is now two decades since I lived in Oxford. I was then a drunk and lonely puddle of a person, with only a gift for screaming; but no matter how low I sank, to paraphrase Alcoholics Anonymous literature, I never sank quite as low as to consider eating at the ’bab van (kebab van)
In the ‘Chefs’ Last Supper’ in the National Portrait Gallery, Marcus Wareing is throwing a brie at Gordon Ramsay, who plays Jesus. They both have restaurants in the celebrity-chef triangle in Knightsbridge near Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner, which led Ramsay to fantasise about chefs’ fisticuffs at 4 a.m. in the street, as he does; but what was
London House is in Battersea, which some people call South Chelsea, but is more East Wandsworth to my mind; or maybe North Clapham, or, even better, West Brixton. This is the self-hatred that the housing bubble has brought to London: we have whole sorrowful postcodes that long to be something else because original posh London,
Highgrove is the country house of the Prince of Wales. I write about Highgrove because, although it is not a restaurant, even of the wackiest kind — which can only make me fantasise that Ludwig of Bavaria opened a gay sauna in Neuschwanstein castle — the prince does admit strangers when he is not there
Moro (‘moorish’ or ‘sexist’) is a Spanish restaurant on Exmouth Market, near the bones of the old Guardian and Observer building on Farringdon Road. I don’t mind telling Spectator readers (‘you people’) that I once kissed the bricks of this building, quite seriously, like Jews kiss the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport. (At least that
