Food

People say that Carbone is Jay Gatsby’s restaurant – Gatsby being the metaphor for moneyed doomed youth – but it is something more awful and, because people are asleep, no London restaurant has been this fashionable since the Chiltern Firehouse a decade ago. It lives in the basement of the former American embassy in Grosvenor Square, which is now the Chancery Rosewood Hotel. I thought this building would smell of fear, of why-can’t-I-have-a-visa-please? The truth is that it does, but that fear is now a commodity: you can be the person saying no-visa-for-you. (‘Uniquely yours,’ says the advertising copy. It means it.) And now, if you are rich enough, you

That Panzer’s Delicatessen in St John’s Wood is called Panzer’s – for the instrument of Blitzkrieg – is mad, until you remember that Jews love to eat near catastrophe, and then it is merely funny. I love Panzer’s so much I am reluctant to share it, but we need all the friends we can get. I keep telling non-Jewish friends: when we burn, you will burn with us. Though I mean it as consolation, they tend to run. St John’s Wood has always existed on the edge of hysteria. Edwardian psychopaths put their mistresses here, and I once went to a children’s birthday party where Peppa Pig couldn’t park, and

They say not to judge a book by its cover – but what about judging a recipe by its name? Some sound like a disease or worse. Spotted dick, toad in the hole, lady’s fingers, Dutch baby, I’m looking at all of you. Cullen skink is one that has been accused of having an off-putting name. But in its defence, Cullen skink is descriptive. There’s a suggestion that the word ‘skink’ comes from an Old German word for ‘beer’ or ‘essence’, but given that Cullen skink is a creamy, thick soup, with no beer constituent and no obvious German connection, this seems an unlikely origin. More plausible is the explanation

When you are old enough, you can measure your life in restaurants. I remember, for instance, when the Electric Diner on Portobello Road (named for a long ago and far away war) was a place to eat brunch, a meal that shouldn’t exist and doesn’t really, though if it belongs anywhere it belongs here. It was fine but glib – Notting Hill is either a place with no imagination or too much of it, I’m still not sure. How it can tolerate the truth of Grenfell Tower across the way I don’t know either, but I don’t live here. The diner is gone, replaced by a Thai restaurant that is

I am, like a strain of Withnail, in the John Lewis café by mistake. I meant to review the new Jamie Oliver café and cooking school on the third floor of John Lewis Oxford Street, but they have run out of food beyond pink cake. We have no choice but to go upwards to the fifth floor and the electricals. I have always felt safe in John Lewis, a despicable thing to think, let alone type, but that is done now. It is called The Place to Eat, which echoes, though unconsciously, Ecclesiastes 3. It is preeningly ugly. I wonder if this is another strain of common British humble-brag, like

There is an immaculate brasserie called 74 Duke at 74 Duke Street, Mayfair: this is postcode etymology. Duke Street runs from Selfridges to what used to be the American embassy in Grosvenor Square but is now (I assume) a paranoid hotel: the Chancery Rosewood, which has kept the monstrous eagle on the roof. If Duke Street was ever interesting – I like to imagine Mrs Dalloway having a panic attack in the road – it isn’t now. It sells the eternal detritus of the British rich – watches, capes, meat – who I suspect are into crypto these days. It is all a feint anyway: fake London for fake people,

Last weekend, I was in England: among two very diverse aspects of the nation. In recent months, every Saturday, central London has been plagued by demonstrations. I suppose that there must be a right to protest. But what about the right to mosey around Westminster and Whitehall without blocked roads and with any hope of peace and quiet? Last Saturday saw the largest manifestation of all: less of a protest than an English uprising – a flag-waving two-fingered revolt against the liberal intelligentsia. I kept well clear, having no wish to be caught up or kettled, and later there were attacks on the police. This should lead to jail sentences.

The Lavery in South Kensington is named for Sir John Lavery, official artist of the Great War and designer of the currency of the Irish Free State, who lived here, though he died in Ireland and is buried in Putney. Lavery, of course, would no longer recognise South Kensington as his home, and his white, monumental mid-Victorian house – it’s too cold to be compared to a wedding cake, it’s a power cake – is now a fashionable restaurant and ‘event space’, which I put in quotation marks so you know I didn’t write the words ‘event space’, I just typed them out. In houses like The Lavery, I wonder

I like a picnic weighted with history and class terror, which means Fortnum & Mason on Piccadilly, which is historical re-enactment with dreaming. I have written about this for years or tried to: food is never just food, only fools say that. You can learn almost everything about people from the food they want. And here is St Narcissus in the form of a department store that works more powerfully as an idea than a mere shop, though it is a very effective shop. Fortnum’s sells a Great Britain that never was, designed for people who no longer exist, if they ever did. It has much to say to Brexiteers

The double-edged sword of eating with the seasons is the glut. A blunt, un-pretty word, which is a joy in theory and delicious in result, but which can feel daunting when you’re facing down a bench full of berries to be picked over, or countless apples to be processed. My husband and I were once given an apple tree as a present. It’s a multi-graft, meaning each of the three branches produces a different type of apple: russets, for storing, bramleys, for cooking, and tart eating apples. This is the first year that it’s thrown up more than three measly apples. Well, it’s made up for lost time; we are,

This column sometimes shrieks the death of central London, and this is unfair. (I think this because others are now doing it.) It is not the city we mourn but our younger selves. Even so, the current aesthetic in restaurants is awful and needs to be suppressed: beiges and leathers, fish tanks and stupid lighting, all are nauseating. But I hated Dubai. You say Atlantis, The Palm, I say enslaved maid crying for her dreams. But there is refuge, at least from the aesthetic, and it is as ever the child of imagination and nostalgia. Broadwick Soho, the newish hotel in the street where typhus was chased down to a