Cakes & Bubbles is an unhappy woman’s restaurant. I thought it was a child’s restaurant, but I took a child there and he hated it and begged for a Double Decker. It is a patisserie and champagne bar inside the Hotel Café Royal on Regent Street. It sells sugar wound and smashed and spun —
The 1930s aesthetic is not quite as fun as it used to be. You can enjoy the detritus of fascism quite happily when you’re living in a secure liberal democracy, but when that liberal democracy begins to look unsafe, it feels more like threats in the form of tableware. Still, the art deco style is
In January, you could go to Bob Bob Ricard in Soho. I do not know why it is called Bob Bob Ricard; and I do not really care. I am currently reviewing cars for another magazine and cars’ names make restaurants’ names sound reasonable. Perhaps Bob Bob Ricard is always slightly drunk and needs to
I admit I had a falling out with Fortnum & Mason a few years ago over its new brasserie on Jermyn Street. It replaced a restaurant that looked like a toilet-roll cover or wedding dress, and although I had never eaten there, I felt protective of it. Why was she blown away and on what
Caffè Concerto is a chain of Italian cafés sprouting, lividly, across London and the world. There is one on Piccadilly, one on Regent Street, and one on the Haymarket. There is one in Birmingham, and one in Westfield. (The precise address is an ungaudy unit 2000a, but presumably it is hidden behind florist-ry). There is
Tish is a new grand café in Belsize Park, north London, but kosher. There are not really enough Jews to fill a kosher restaurant in London, and they tend to fall into dust, like the ten tribes, and the temple. 1701, the unwise and subtle restaurant by Bevis Marks synagogue, has gone; Bloom’s in Golders
The Pig at Combe is a restaurant in a country house hotel in a valley in Devon. I actually went to the Combe when it was only a country house hotel but, unlike Martha Gellhorn looking around a hotel function room in Spain and realising it had been an operating theatre in the Civil War,
I couldn’t find Gazelle. I walked up and down Albermarle Street, in which Oscar Wilde once plotted his own doom in the Albermarle Club, and I couldn’t find it. I had to go to Caffè Nero opposite the Ritz Hotel and email my dining companion — where are you? Are you there? Does Gazelle exist?
Cora Pearl is the new, and second, restaurant from the people who made Kitty Fisher’s in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. Kitty Fisher was a celebrated 18th–century courtesan, as the saying goes, and Cora Pearl, whose shrine is in Covent Garden, was likewise the happy and well-paid whore of myth. (Her real name was Emma Crouch, she
Politicians are having a terrible time of late, along with the rest of us — it’s not much fun watching the remnants of the post-war consensus shatter — and so here is Albert Roux consoling them with a new, glossy restaurant on the door-step of their rotting legislature palace. Food at the Palace of Westminster
Sketch is a restaurant and art gallery in Conduit Street, Mayfair. There is a photograph of the Queen in the lobby. It is a wonderful photograph of her because she is covered in white fur and her eyes are closed, as if she just can’t bear to look at us any more. She looks like
I wouldn’t normally visit Coq d’Argent, which I think means the chicken of money. It is a moderately famous restaurant in a pink and brown tower in the City of London, once owned, as so much has been, by Sir Terence Conran, and now by D&D, specialists in soulless food barns. As restaurants go, it
Temper is a new pizza restaurant in Mercers Walk, Covent Garden, and it is as glib and polished as you could wish. Temper is the third of that name; it follows restaurants in the City of London and Soho, which served BBQ and breads, and did them well enough to merit a sister. (The founding
Nando’s, c. 1987, is a restaurant in the Great North Leisure Park, Finchley, N12, off the North Circular, which is my favourite orbital, solely from familiarity. The Great North Leisure Park includes a cinema, a bowling alley, a Pizza Hut, something called Chimichanga, and Nando’s. But the real draw of the Great North Leisure Park is
Claridge’s is a toff sanctuary and one of the best hotels on earth. It specialises in its own myth, which is easy when Winston Churchill fell into a suite at the end of the war, and missed Dwight Eisenhower running the other way. Eisenhower was not afraid of the Axis, but the soft furnishings at
Sargeant’s Mess (2018) is a tourist catcher’s net in restaurant form by the Tower of London (c. 1078). It has views of the wide, fat Thames — an old man now, like Falstaff — on its slow journey to Southend-on-Sea. The City of London grows like a glass parasite, but it can’t do anything about the
The Allis is a restaurant inside the new Soho House at White City — it is called White City House — and it is every bit as ghastly as it sounds. I do not really object to Soho House’s attempt to colonise the entire planet and furnish it with purple velvet armchairs, which are now
The Petersham is a fading hotel on Richmond Hill. I went to a bar mitzvah there in 1986, which gives you a good idea of how fashionable it is. I grew up near Petersham. I always thought it smelled of eternal summer, but it was the late 1970s. The Petersham is also a new restaurant
Hide is a £20 million restaurant at the Green Park end of Piccadilly, on the three lower floors of a brutalist box by Clarges Street. From outside it looks like an illustration from a storybook: people eating while illuminated in glass boxes. It is a restaurant to be looked at from outside, a restaurant with
Indian Accent is an Indian restaurant in Albermarle Street, deepest Mayfair, on the site of Rohit Khattar’s Chor Bizarre (‘thieves market’). It follows branches in New York and New Delhi, which featured at no. 9 in the 2016 Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants List, sponsored by S. Pellegrino and Acqua Panna. Apparently you have to mention that,
