Shake Shack is a hamburger restaurant in Covent Garden market. It came from New York and it is as needy and angry and angry-needy as America itself; it is, I suspect, quite capable of inventing a bogus reason to invade Burger King while posing as a victim of Burger King’s evil machinations. ‘Good things come
What to say about the Shard that isn’t said by the fact it is 1,020 feet high and looks like a slightly elongated cheese triangle, and that it is designed as a home and office for those who want nothing more than to live and work in a building that looks like a slightly elongated
I write this column at the point of a pitchfork. A, normally so placid — ‘He’s so placid!’ people like to say as he wanders around placidly — has cracked. He is standing over me with what I can only describe as violent placidity, gesticulating at an email from Le Café Anglais, a very smart
Scott’s, Mount Street, Mayfair: the scene of the crime or, for those who do not read newspapers, the place where Charles Saatchi throttled his wife Nigella Lawson in the smoking section, and stuck his finger up her nose. (The Spectator food column, or News Kitten as her husband calls her, is rarely first with a
Kaspar’s Seafood Bar and Grill is named for superstition, snobbery and avarice. At a dinner at the Savoy in 1898 there were 13 guests at dinner, and the host, a South African mining magnate called Woolf Joel, was shot dead a few weeks later in Johannesburg. This was doubtless sad for his family, but not
The Antica Roma is an ice-cream shop near the Spanish Steps in Rome; recently, it served four English tourists called the Bannisters and Their Wives. Mr Bannister was so surprised to receive a bill for €64 for four ice creams that he, or possibly someone representing him, contacted the Daily Mail, as certain tourists do
STK is a steakhouse at the bottom of the ME Hotel on the Aldwych. (This is a real name for a real hotel. The cult of individualism has finally reached its apogee in the hotel sense, and, if you are curious, it looks like a piece of St Tropez that fell off and hit the
Exmouth Market is a small collection of paved streets near the Farringdon Travelodge, which specialises in monomaniacal restaurants and has a blue plaque dedicated to the dead clown Joseph Grimaldi. We are near King’s Cross, the least magical of London’s districts, and the early summer air chokes the dying trees. There are restaurants that ‘do’
The Ritz Hotel is a cake on Piccadilly made of stone; inside this cake, Lady Thatcher died. Some think it is tragic that she died here in the cake of stone; I do not. It has Italian men in tailcoats, a gifted pastry chef, and views of Green Park; she chose, I suspect, the ultimate
The Ten Room is the -restaurant inside the new Café Royal Hotel, which occupies the curve of Regent Street from Air Street down to Piccadilly Circus and its bundles of mad tourists, who stare like Doctor Who extras at the nothingness in the sky and the greater nothingness beyond; it is neat advertising, neat capitalism.
I love metaphor, and now metaphor has led me to a toilet near Goodge Street, in that thankless patch of London idiots call No-Ho. Because this is not a toilet any more; it’s an espresso bar that used to be a toilet, and it is called Attendant, and it was in the Daily Mail, because
Balthazar is a golden cave in Covent Garden, in the old Theatre (Luvvie) Museum, home to dead pantomime horses and Christopher Biggins’s regrets. It is a copy of a New York restaurant, which was itself a copy of a Parisian brasserie, and it is the first big London opening of the year. This means diary
It’s Oscar time! I know this because the British media, usually so prudent, has transformed itself into naked advertorial for films that usually — not always — tell America the lies about itself it most wants to hear. This is why Argo will win Best Picture. Bad Muslims want to kill us! (If I am
Maxim’s! The very name is drool from Maurice Chevalier’s lips, as he perved around Gigi and sang, ‘Thank heaven for little girls/ And hebephilia generally.’ Myths sprout up around Maxim’s, which was always, in restaurant terms, a kind of Prince Michael of Kent with sex appeal. The female customers were so overdressed in 1913 according
The Churchill Arms in Kensington is a sort of Winston Churchill fetish bar, full of every conceivable piece of Winston Churchill memorabilia, or toy. Relics of his actual corpse may lurk, loitering behind a decorative mug or a Plasticine bust of his head. There is a three-quarter-size cardboard cutout of the Queen, photographs of every
How many restaurants make a chain? If the number is four, then Hawksmoor, the superb chop-house named for the Baroque architect Nicholas Hawskmoor, has collapsed on a pile of cheques, the dirty girl, and is now officially a chain, embracing the inevitable suck of cash. It has added to its venues at Guildhall, Spitalfields and
Goldeneye is the house in Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote James Bond, and spanked his wife; that is why Fleming created Bond I think, even as he ran the Sunday Times foreign desk and (some say) spies — to spank the Russians, who have very big bottoms. Ah, for the days when hacks could afford
The British Pullman on platform 1 at Victoria station looks mad, because it is 9 a.m. and ugly British commuters are running around, looking wracked and unhappy, like extras from Les Misérables, in slightly uglier clothes. Yet this train, which could have steamed out of Julian Fellowes’s head, sits in a grand puddle of cliché, like a
A creation myth: Earl -Cadogan wandered into Oriel, the ancient Sloane Square brasserie on his land, like a lardy dachshund, if slightly more cadaverous. For 25 years Oriel served as a second home for the Chelsea hags and, worse, the brats, who still wear strange coloured cords, work in estate agency or PR, and are
Food and fashion are enemies, so congratulations to the Berkeley Hotel for attempting detente with something insane. It has invented a fashion ‘tea’ called Prêt-à–Portea which is, I am told by a press release, ‘designed to add a creative twist to the classic elements of the traditional English afternoon tea with cakes and pastries resembling