Food

Fact check: New York Times’s London foodie ‘knowledge’

The New York Times is at it again. It was only back in May that Mr S was forced to call into question the paper’s coverage of Britain, after a curious article on ‘Austerity Britain’ by one Peter S Goodman appeared, complete with a slew of glaring omissions. Well, now it seems that the NYT has staggered off its stool for another bruising round. A food review of London has been published in its Blighty-sceptic pages, and it can’t be said to be very much better than poor Mr Goodman’s. The author, Robert Draper, has written an article about the capital’s food scene, in which he praises the city for having

The best restaurants in Brixton

Brixton offers one of London’s most exciting and eclectic food scenes. The main hub of restaurants is to be found in Brixton Village and Market Row, but there are plenty of other great places to try further afield. Here’s a guide to the best of them… In the Village Mamalan (Getty) Salon Brixton If Salon was my local restaurant, I’d be broke. Not because it’s wildly expensive (in fact it’s very good value) but because it demands repeat visits. There’s one menu – offering either four or seven courses – and it changes monthly, with weekly tweaks. When I visited in spring, octopus with monk’s beard and rhubarb sorbet were

Reach for the Skye

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 in Covent Garden, a sequel to Petersham Nurseries, the garden centre café by the Thames, in Petersham, that won a Michelin star in 2011. So, the name is either a deranged lack of imagination or a monument to Petersham. I hope it is a monument. It deserves it. Now there is another Petersham restaurant, in

Above – and beyond

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 no skin. Hide is the fourth restaurant from Ollie Dabbous, who is the most talented British chef of his generation, even if you think that dowsing food in flowers is very irritating. Dabbous, which opened in 2012, offered fairy food near Tottenham Court Road, which needs it badly: strange decapitated eggs, a carpet of flowers,

Dishes heavy with history

Le Gavroche is named for ‘the urchin’ in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and lives in a basement on Upper Brook Street, Mayfair. It is the most famous French restaurant in London, and the first to win three Michelin stars. It was opened by Albert and Michel Roux in 1967 in Lower Sloane Street, moved in 1981, and was taken over by Michel Roux Jr., Albert’s son, in 1991. It has nurtured — or the opposite — Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay in its kitchens. The website is a garland of awards, self-worship and the minutiae of the dress code. The involvement of lawyers, at some time, is hinted at.

The best restaurants in Chelsea

Chelsea is a rarefied end of town. The old streets behind Cheyne Walk and around the Physic Garden are some of London’s most charming, while the King’s Road has for a long time been known as the place to be seen. When it comes to restaurants, cheap eats are fewer and further between than other parts of London, but with hefty prices often comes quality. There’s a notable focus on organic produce and the countryside – possibly testament to Chelsea’s proximity to the M4 headed west. A few of the UK’s best known chefs have set up shop in the area and Chelsea is home to some of the city’s

Too good for kleptocrats

In 2007 Mikhael Gorbachev starred in a Louis Vuitton advert. He was driven past the Berlin Wall with Louis Vuitton luggage and the photograph was printed in Vanity Fair. It was baffling and reassuring, but nothing lasts forever. A few years ago I went on the Kleptocracy Bus Tour. It is run by a man called Roman Borisovich and it tours London — and sometimes Oxford —identifying kleptocratic crimes, feuds, housing, anxieties and behaviours. During a recent tour, a neighbour of Andrey Guryev, the fertiliser magnate who bought Witanhurst in Highgate, testified that a voice from a security box had asked him to stop strimming his own hedge. Of course,

Join the club

I’m bored.’ ‘Read a book.’ This sequence more or less summarises my childhood (along with ‘I’m hungry.’ ‘Eat some fruit.’) At the time, such instruction was loathsome and it never ceased to amaze me that the grown-ups didn’t seem to grasp the fact that I had obviously considered, and rejected, the idea of picking up a book. They never appeared to be sympathetic to my boredom, in spite of my heartiest attempts to reflect the ennui that was oozing from my every pore. In fact, boredom was positively encouraged by our parents — it was the mother of invention. Those were the days. For many of today’s parents, boredom is

Italian without the heat or drama

Jilly Cooper’s fictional hero Rupert Campbell-Black has ‘never been to Hammersmith’. I have but I wish I hadn’t. I love the Westway because it takes you away from Hammersmith. Even so, it possesses the River Café — it is not a café — a famous and influential Italian restaurant. It was ten when Tony Blair came to power, but inside it is as if he were still here, playing air guitar while chatting about PPP. It is inaccessible, taunting its clientele to go to Hammersmith. It feels as if it takes more than an hour to get to the River Café from anywhere that is not Hammersmith. How do they

Poor cows

Sophie’s lives in an old pornographic cinema at the south end of Great Windmill Street, Soho. It is opposite McDonald’s and the Windmill International (‘Probably the most exciting mens club in the world [if you don’t mind paying women to expose their breasts when they might do it for nothing if you were charming]’). Is it so exciting that the patrons do not care that they have been given a semi-consensual sexual experience but denied an apostrophe? It is also pleasingly close to the venue of the Second Congress of the Communist League, which took place in 1847, and prompted the commission of the Communist Manifesto, and all on the

Jamie Oliver should have stuck to recipes – he’s just no good at restaurants

I am not surprised that Jamie Oliver is closing twelve of his twenty-seven branches of Jamie’s Italian, and his flagship restaurant on Piccadilly, Barbecoa, which I reviewed last year, and damned, because the food was bad and the atmosphere non existent. (Well, it was almost empty; you cannot create joy in a void). I knew Oliver was in trouble before that when I ate – reluctantly, but not everyone is a food critic – at Jamie’s Italian in Victoria in late 2016. It was, like Barbecoa, queasily large, the food was bad, and, again, it was almost empty. The punters may have been buying Oliver’s cookery books but they weren’t

The best restaurants in Islington

Islington sprawls. Strung out along Upper Street and the many streets off it, it boasts the best variety of restaurants outside Zone 1 (I am happy to be challenged on this). To secure a table at a decent Upper Street eatery on a Friday night, will require booking ahead or a willingness to queue. Things can get pretty rowdy as the evening progresses, so for a less frenetic experience head towards Clerkenwell or adventure into the side streets around Canonbury. As ever this list – written with the help of a few epicurean friends – is not an exhaustive one, but it will give you somewhere to start… FANCY FEASTS

Tanya Gold

Tel Aviv it ain’t

Café Hampstead is a new café in — big reveal! — Hampstead, the gaudiest of the old villages on the hills around London. Hampstead was once, mysteriously, home to progressives too many to type; refugees from Belsize Park carrying their most precious back copies of the LRB in plastic sacks. Why did they live in Hampstead? What for? They have moved out now, or died, and the truth died with them. We will never know what it was that they thought they wanted, or saw; whether it was always betrayal, or the wife made them do it. You can mock, and I do, but Hampstead is less interesting without them;

Leigh-on-Sea

I have fallen in love with the c2c, a whisker of a train that is never delayed. It operates between London and Essex; Fenchurch Street and Shoeburyness. Its name stands for ‘anything you want it to’, according to the company’s website — everything from ‘capital to coast’ to ‘commitment to customers’. Over the past year, I have become a complete convert, a cheerful champion of the c2c as it whisks me into Essex and on to the north side of the Thames Estuary, where I like to walk with a man called Malt. Joseph Conrad, who lived in Stanford-le-Hope, a town near Tilbury on the c2c line, wrote: ‘The estuaries

The best whisky distillery tours in Scotland

Speyside Speyside, north of Aberdeen, is the true heartland of whisky. From Cragganmore, with its complex blends and exclusive clubroom (think roaring fire and lots of antlers) for connoisseur whisky tastings, to Glenlivet, which sits in a remote glen and organises a variety of tours, from classic distillery poke-arounds to luxury samplings. Speyside is also home to Strathisla, which is the oldest working whisky distillery in Scotland (established in 1786) and, with its distinctive pagodas, may also be the most beautiful distillery in the country. The recent success story of the region is Copper Dog, a blended-malt created in 2016 at the beautiful 19th century Craigellaiche Hotel. It’s proved a

Steerpike

The economics of fish and chips

When you pay £8 for fish and chips, where does the money go? That’s the question one restaurant has been busy answering after a customer left a two-star review on Facebook. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the food – in fact it was ‘lovely’ and the staff were ‘amazing’. But Debbie Davies still felt the need to complain to Oxton Bar and Kitchen over the price for the meal – £8. Happily, staff at the restaurant were happy to provide clarity: ‘Ok Debbie. Where do I begin? Out of that £8, our nasty government is charging you 20% vat which we collect by law on their behalf, so

Evening service

It was a culinary triumph. My hosts do not spend much time in the UK, and are determined to entertain stylishly during their visits. This Christmas they succeeded, blending tradition and radicalism. The planning began in Pall Mall on the third lunching-day in advent. We addressed the major strategic question: satiation. After bird plus pud, there is barely the energy to fall asleep in front of an old film and the rest of the day can be unsatisfactory. In recent years, I have noticed a tendency to deal with this problem by de-fanging the pudding. There is a new girlie-man breed of Christmas puds which lack the embrandied pomp of

Gorge on syrup pud and be glad

Rules looks as if it voted for Brexit, and now finds itself inside an eternal Christmas Eve, where it is always Christmas, and always Brexit. And what a gay Brexit, with swags and flounces and light bouncing through the windows on to Maiden Lane, like a child’s vision of hope. Or is it illusion? Does a chimney contain Arron Banks as Father Christmas with gifts in his sack marked ‘depression’, ‘delusion’ and ‘starvation’? Will he get stuck and go shouty-crackers on Twitter? Is Nigel Farage sipping a pint of lager, pretending to be a good elf? The sort of elf that politically alienated elves can identify with and follow, until

The worst food in London

Farmacy, which opened last year, is London’s most fashionable ‘clean eating’ restaurant; it is, therefore, a restaurant for people who hate food. This ‘clean eating’ epidemic grows as we fall into decadence and see food, rather than our own mouths, as the source of our calamity — how can we be saved from food? It is Bunyadi, the pop-up naked hobbit restaurant again, but without wit: same food, less fun, and no tree stumps at all except metaphorically, on the tops of people’s necks. It is owned by Camilla Fayed, the daughter of Mohammed Fayed, and there is probably much to divine about that family dynamic here, had I stayed,

The tables turned

Dining rooms have been in the doldrums for decades. Even Mary Berry has given up on hers. ‘Most of us, I think, live in the kitchen,’ she said recently. She’s right. Plenty of us don’t have a dining room to give up on, me included. Plenty more have knocked down what once divided a dining room from a kitchen to create an airy, open-plan ‘living space’ where we do battle with avocados and everything else. We might be obsessed with what we are and aren’t eating but we don’t stand on ceremony. Nigella Lawson admits she slurps noodles ‘hypnotically’ while watching TV on the sofa. ‘If it can be eaten