Food

The Portrait Restaurant lives at the top of the National Portrait Gallery, London. It is fiercely modern, but likeable. You ride an escalator into a void, glimpse the raging faces of the Plantagenets and take a lift upwards, away from dead kings and film characters walking the streets. (Downstairs, by the entrance to the National Gallery, two competing Yodas from Star Wars are posing for photographs. One is too tall to be a convincing Yoda. Tourists inhabit a different city.) In this long bright room there is no such anxiety; only clean windows to Trafalgar Square and happy women having lunch in a secret glade of stone and brick. You

The Ivy Chelsea Garden is a restaurant inside an Edwardian house disguised as a Tudor house on the King’s Road; it was formerly the fetid Henry J. Bean’s American Bar and Grill, which was a sort of magnet and sex market, with cheeseburgers, for Chelsea teenagers. It sits in a row of babywear shops and artisan bakers — why Chelsea needs bakers I know not, because no one here is fat enough to eat bread. Perhaps it bespeaks a psychic insecurity that even the rich of SW3 feel — for the bread is the life? It is the third instalment of Richard Caring’s growing Ivy franchise, because Caring — catering’s

La Coupole, Montparnasse, is the grandest and most famous of the old pre-war Parisian brasseries; that is, if you have an Esprit Brasserie loyalty card, as I have, you can dine in homage to dead continental intellectuals — plus Ernest Hemingway — whenever you wish, and with 20 per cent off. They sit, dead in black and white on the walls in their spectacles, like the toys Star Wars sold but more rigorous and interesting. Ernest Hemingway is to Parisian brasseries what Mickey is to Disney World; Edith Piaf — or Salvador Dalí — is Daffy Duck. Me, I sat under a playful cartoon of Jewish intellectuals murdered by the

The Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane, is a cake floating in space. All grand hotels create a parallel universe in which their guests are returned to some great gilded and unnatural womb with mini-bar and floristry, but the Dorchester feels particularly remote; has it overplayed its myth? Or is it a combination of the traffic (Park Lane has eight traffic lanes, three roundabouts, one set of unicorn-themed gates and a monument to the dead animals of war), the net curtains (the decorative equivalent of blindness) and the strange completeness of the building? What does the Dorchester, with its curved beige frontage and yellow awnings, actually look like? Bournemouth. Or any retirement

I think Rowley’s is the perfect restaurant; but I am really a gay man. Rowley’s is at 113 Jermyn Street (the Tesco end). It was made in homage to the Wall’s sausage and ice-cream fortune, although it opened in 1976, after the Wall’s sausage and ice-cream company (I call it that because it sounds magical) was sold to Unilever (less magical). So it is quite a late homage. The Wall’s sausage and ice-cream fortune, how I love to type the words; did you know that Mr Wall moved into ice-cream so as not to sack staff in the summer months, when no one — except me and George IV —

Rivea (stupid name) is in the bowels of Bulgari in Knightsbridge, a hotel which looks like a vast Virgin Upper Class lounge. It sits opposite One Hyde Park (stupid name), an apartment block which looks like a vast Virgin Upper Class lounge and which I am fairly certain appeared two weeks ago in a very silly television show called Silent Witness, in which a plutocrat was murdered with scented gas after being chased by the FSB. Was he Litvinenko, or Berezovsky, who I think was murdered for suggesting that Vladimir Putin is really Dobby the masochistic elf from Harry Potter? Who knows, but it is always gratifying when the BBC

Hell’s Kitchen My ambition to open a fish and chip shop in Mogadishu has not happened yet, though I remain optimistic. Food, I’ve decided, is the thing to go for on my next entrepreneurial adventure. For a while I dreamed of going into the chicken trade, importing refrigerated containers full of wings and drumsticks from Brazil for sale up the furthest reaches of the Congo. Fortunes have been made in brokering African chicken deals. But so far my forays into the food business have not gone very well. I tried, for example, to sell pots of honey with my friend Tom at various local fêtes. We branded our product rather

The Cereal Killer Café is a temple to cereal on Brick Lane, east London. It serves only cereal — and also Pop-Tarts, which taste like pavements smeared with chocolate — and flavoured milk. It has been open for one month and is already famous for its monomania, its whimsy — look, cereal! — and its co-owner’s on-air fight with a Channel 4 News journalist about the morality of selling £3.50 bowls of cereal in a ‘poor area’. (The Channel 4 reporter did not notice the bespoke chocolatier next door or the boxer-short boutique nearby, in which golden boxer shorts hang on hangers. He did not notice that the East End is

Somerset House, a handsome Georgian palace on the Thames, was once the office of the Inland Revenue, and the courtyard was a car park, but that particular hell is over. Instead there is Skate at Somerset House with Fortnum & Mason, which is a purple-lit skating rink next to a ‘pop-up’ shop or ‘Christmas arcade’. This, because all PR copywriters think they write for Jennifer’s Diary in 1952, is apparently ‘the most chic and complete Christmas experience in London this season’. I doubt it. There is, for instance, no sign of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, Father Christmas, or rogue elves, although there is a ‘twinkling 40ft Christmas tree hand-picked from the

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 in 1595 but Drake’s fleet came from Plymouth and chased them away; nothing so interesting has happened since; just fishing, tourism and decline. Now there are galleries and restaurants and what the Cornish call ‘incomers’ buying cottages, in which they place ornamental fishing nets after painting everything white. (For something more ‘authentic’, you can visit