Restaurants

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

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,

Jean-Georges at the Connaught — formerly the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel, but it was renamed during the first world war, at about the same time the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was deprived of his British peerages, which was one of the funnier events in the war — is the informal restaurant at the Connaught Hotel, and it opened this summer on the curve of Carlos Place, Mayfair. The Connaught is an English hotel with a German heart. It is therefore the hotel equivalent of our Queen, and the best hotel in the world. It is better than its sister Claridge’s, from which Dwight Eisenhower ran away in 1944. He

Foxlow is near Golden Square in west Soho, where drunken hacks used to take long drunken lunches before having stupid drunken ideas. My favourite stupid drunken idea was from a Guardian hack and it involved renting an ice-cream van and asking Nick Cohen and A.A. Gill to drive around in it, selling ice creams, bickering and hopefully breaking down, before writing up the experience for a Silly Season special. But drunken hacks no longer take long drunken lunches in Soho. They get drunk at home, if there is one, or drink in the queue at Eat, if they can afford to eat. The piece was not commissioned, the years passed, and

I am always surprised to remember that Andrew Lloyd Webber has taste; it must be remembrance of Cats. I was surprised, for instance, to learn that he once owned Pablo Picasso’s portrait of d’Angel Fernández de Soto, which I always thought of as my Picasso because it looks like my friend Hadrian Wise, who used to come to Merton College bar in his pyjamas. We once rolled a joint as long as The Spectator because he loved The Spectator. High as I was after the Spectator-length joint in 1994, I never thought I would write for it. Neither did he. Now Lloyd Webber, whose masterpiece is Phantom of the Opera,

To the Ned, as diarists say when they can’t provide a rational reason for their voyage: the colossal banking hall transformed into ten restaurants, or one super-restaurant with ten menus, by the owners of Soho House, who are sucking up all the press coverage the age of churnalism can grant. I cannot yet decide what is more chilling: a Soho House open to all or a Soho House safely hidden behind its semi–weaponised membership criteria. I began to loathe the brand when I saw the table-tennis tables and selfie booths at Shoreditch House. I wouldn’t care if the media class played table tennis and took selfies until their hands and

Cafe Football is in the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, east London, a shopping centre with a faulty name. It isn’t in the west, and it isn’t in a field. (The original Westfield is in Shepherd’s Bush. That is in the west, but not in a field. It is by the A40 and it is like America without the joy.) Westfield Stratford City sits in a puddle of chain cafés and restaurants and shops. It has been on my review list for three years, 2.9999999 of which I have spent cowering in north London. Stratford was — shall we call it renovated? — for the London Olympic Games in 2012,

It is rare for me to write a love letter to a London restaurant, but Joe Allen, which is 40 this year, deserves it; if you have any sense you will throw off misery and go there now for hamburgers. It is not really a London restaurant, which may be why I love it, but a Manhattan restaurant (established on 46th Street in 1965 by a man called Joe Allen) that was transplanted to London in 1977; the idea of Manhattan, anyway, which is more vivid in imagination than in life. I like to imagine the cast of All About Eve in Joe Allen, talking nonsense about ‘the theatre’ as

Ralph’s Coffee & Bar is in the Polo Ralph Lauren flagship store on Regent Street. It is rare that fashion admits food exists and when it does, it usually does something insane with it, like when the Berkeley Hotel celebrated fashion week by inventing a shoe biscuit, so you could eat your shoe. But Ralph Lauren, who dresses Melania Trump because other designers will not — believing that the withholding of couture equals meaningful opposition to tyranny, a position that makes me laugh even as I place my head in the oven — goes beyond couture and into the weird lands of lifestyle. Don’t know who you are, but want

The Waverly Inn is the house restaurant of Vanity Fair magazine in New York City. It is part-owned by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, whose life, at least since Trump rose, is dedicated to the realisation of social justice using his favourite weapon, which is being friends with celebrities. Carter’s political engagement is like a blusher brush’s political engagement. It is unfit for purpose, and it is too late anyway. Even so, Carter has declared war on Donald Trump by slagging off his restaurant in New York City — the Trump Grill in Trump Tower, which I reviewed, or rather crawled out of whimpering, in my last column

Trump Tower sits between Gucci and Tiffany on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It looks like infant Lego, the Duplo brand, but black — porn Duplo, then. It is militarised; by the door are the fattest police officers I have ever seen. They look like they have been dragged out of Overeaters Anonymous and given automatic weapons; and I wonder how much the NYPD really want to keep him alive. He is in the penthouse. The obvious comparison is with Al Pacino’s penthouse in The Devil’s Advocate, in which Pacino played a devil in a penthouse in New York City, but Trump Tower is less subtle than that, and

Margot is an Italian restaurant on Great Queen Street in the still interesting part of Covent Garden. The uninteresting part is the piazza, once the first classical square in London but now a shopping district so devoted to famous brands that it is essentially Westfield in WC2, and WC2 has no need of it, already having a superior culture of its own. Even so, I expect some day to find St Paul’s church a smouldering pile of ash waiting for an Audi concession. Margot used to be Moti Mahal, an unlamented Indian restaurant next to Freemasons’ Hall, which posed as MI5 in Spooks, a BBC drama in which a one-nation

I first ate at the London version of Harry’s Bar in the early 1990s. Back then, Jeffrey Archer and I would give each other dinner about three times a year. It was my turn and he suggested Harry’s, where he was a member but I could pay (on expenses, needless to say). I remember the meal vividly because it was awful. Choosing the same dishes, we started with a risotto, which was just rice plus ingredients. Then there was a leg of lamb for two, grossly over-salted. Had I been the nominal host as well as the real one, it would have gone back to the kitchen with a flea

I have agonised over this Christmas review. I ate the Christmas lunch at Harveys Nichols 5th Floor Restaurant, Knightsbridge, next to a roof garden sponsored by Nutella chocolate spread. (The review of that restaurant is 17 words long: don’t go there, especially if you like Nutella chocolate spread, because it will ruin it for you.) The stunt critic dies hard in any writer, for it is easy work laughing at roof gardens. I considered eating in a plastic igloo — an igloo that is not an igloo, but a tent — by Tower Bridge. I even considered visiting whichever Winter Wonderland (‘Blunderland’) that the Daily Mail — the arbiter of