Restaurants

Wheeler’s is such a dreadful restaurant that I wonder if Marco Pierre White even knows his name is on it. I suppose, for legal reasons, we must assume he does, and was not held hostage in a cellar while they built and fretted and hung inflated photographs of their prisoner all over it, like the bedroom of a starlet in full madness. We must assume that White knows that Wheeler’s of St James’s, which was a famous restaurant, was closed, and reopened inside the Thread-needles hotel in Bank, and it does have his name on it, and this is the worst thing he has ever done; worse than promoting Knorr

Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of Lambeth by the railway arches. This makes it look, inevitably, like the set of The Bill, but with a painting of Damien Hirst on a nearby wall, which would surely confuse the Bill. Pharmacy 1 was, for five years until 2003, in Notting Hill. So we are already doing better. It is said that the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain complained about Pharmacy 1, and worried it would confuse people looking for a real pharmacy, but I do not know if this was true. If it was, they were too stupid

Sartoria is a pale grey restaurant on Savile Row. As evidence that this is London’s destination street — if menswear is your compulsion — Bill Nighy walked past me as I searched for Sartoria; I had walked, obliquely, into his film and I was not dressed for it. But when am I ever? I wore Gap to the Valentino couture show in Paris, out of sheer spite. Sartoria — a preening name which I dislike — wafts on reams of praise. Male critics love it; and it is a masculine restaurant. It is long and wide, with dark woods, expensive lamps and what here are called ‘neutral colours’. There is a

Le Caprice is a monochrome patch of the 1980s behind the Ritz Hotel, in the part of St James’s that looks like Monaco. (There is a car park.) It was, along with Langham’s and the Ivy, the most fashionable restaurant of the Thatcher years, beloved of media slags and wankers; also of Princess Diana (the night after she died, her table was kept empty, which is a unique elegy), Princess Margaret, Mick Jagger and Jeffrey Archer, who ate his first meal here after he left prison, because he too is unique. Even so, Le Caprice, now 35, the age at which the pragmatic woman becomes a feminist, cannot compete with

The Feng Shang Princess is a floating Chinese restaurant on the Regent’s Canal in north London, which flows from Little Venice to the Guardian to Limehouse, and in which they quite often find corpses in shopping trolleys and vice versa. I do not know if the restaurant moves, and could theoretically travel to Paddington. I hope it does. The Regent’s Canal is an ugly stretch of water, which reeks of sexual violence and cheap alcohol and cyclists, and it is desolate; place it near London Zoo and you have a peculiar cognitive dissonance that could only happen in London: a tapir near a canal featuring a floating Chinese restaurant. It

Center Parcs Longleat is a holiday village in a forest in Wiltshire, on Lord Bath’s estate, so you can never be entirely sure that you will not see a man dressed as a wizard having sex up against a tree. I thought it would be a fake forest, like the pines you see wilting from the M25, but it is a proper forest, with shrubs, deer, puddles and lakes. But for the looming presence of Center Parcs, which operates five ‘villages’ in England as emergency respite care for people with young children, it would be paradise. The centrepiece — the altar — is the ‘subtropical swimming paradise’ which floats, like

Sexy Fish is a ludicrous restaurant with a ludicrous name in a ludicrous town. It is the latest venture from Richard Caring, major Tory donor and Asian fusion’s very own Bond villain. The more I insult Caring in these pages, the better I like him. He is certainly vivid, and the swiftness with which he expands his empire demonstrates a truism — the more often you order a £15 million restaurant interior in the service of propping up the Conservative party’s decimation of liberal civilisation, the better you will get at it. So, Sexy Fish. It is, in homage to its stupid name, a tank on Berkeley Square, where no birds

Forty-five Jermyn St lives in the left-hand buttock of Fortnum & Mason (F&M), a shop whose acronym is slightly too close to FGM (female genital mutilation) for this column to be able to relax there for long periods, even though its Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon is excellent. Its name is part of a vogue for naming restaurants after postal addresses, and even street numbers (Richard Caring’s 34 in Mayfair). This is one of the more idiotic, if less gritty, consequences of the London housing crisis: an address — or even a house number — is a brand. The restaurant named after a postcode — and I suggest TW11 0BA in

Penny is an all-day café in the former Pit Bar in the basement of the Old Vic, a famous and charismatic theatre on the road to south London. I love the Old Vic on its pavement peninsula on The Cut by Waterloo. Sirens screech past; after a particularly calamitous accident, you can hear them from the stalls. (Best to see a musical here; A took me to Kiss Me, Kate when we married, to show he understood me.) It feels — although this may be a lie — like theatre for The People, as they might be but almost never are. It is fierce, shabby and rigorous, although during the

Pedro’s Tex-Mex Cantina is a fantastical shack near a ring road in Norwich. It was recently asked to stop handing out sombreros at the University of East Anglia Freshers’ Fair, because anti-racist activists (henceforth known as ‘morons’) at the UEA Freshers’ Fair reckon the sombrero is racist, and gave the staff of Pedro’s Tex-Mex Cantina a lecture about ‘cultural appropriation’, which they took well; that is, they did not set fire to the UEA Freshers’ Fair, which is what I would have done. This is where we are with progressive politics, Spectator reader, although I think you knew that anyway. Anyone who thinks wearing a sombrero is racist — rather

It will seem an ungrateful comment after the lunch which I am about to describe, but Manchester has some way to go. In the Midland Hotel, the principal Tory conference hotel and a grand edifice redolent of civic self-confidence from an earlier era, the northern powerhouse could sometimes be mistaken for a 40-watt light bulb. The business centre had been closed for the duration of the conference. The management person who told me this had enough nous to wilt under my incredulous stare. But it remained closed. At a bar, two girls struggled to do half of one girl’s work. Whenever anyone tried to pay by plastic, inaccuracy and chaos

Mum’s, or to use its full title, Mum’s Great Comfort Food, is a restaurant in Edinburgh designed to soothe itinerant performance artists. For, in the fag days of August, as the Fringe dies — it will be reanimated next year by the blood of Citizen Puppet and Nicholas Parsons — assorted actors and comics and cabaret artists and mime artists and circus artists and ballet dancers and tap dancers and flute players and face painters and sketch performers and one-woman-show specialists (expiating rejection by standing in bins) and the guy who dresses up as Darth Vader are more ulcer than human being; and that is before we get to the

Selfridges is skilled at making things that are not hideous (women) look hideous (women dressed as Bungle from Rainbow or a tree, after shopping at Selfridges). So I was not surprised to discover that it has summoned a ‘pop-up’ restaurant to its roof. It is called Vintage Salt and it is based on a Cornish fishing village. Not a real one, such as Newlyn, but a fake one, such as Padstow, which is based on Selfridges anyway. Selfridges shoppers do not want reality but a half-remembered contortion of something they read in Vogue while having their hair dyed banana yellow in St John’s Wood High Street in the company of

The Gatto Nero — or ‘Black Cat’ — is in Burano, a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. It is close to ‘haunted’ Torcello, with its ancient campanile and its branch of the Cipriani restaurant. (The only equivalent thing I can imagine is a branch of Soho House at Dracula’s castle, or possibly Chernobyl.) I like the name Black Cat; it reminds me of the Blue Parrot in Casablanca. I like that you must leave San Marco, with its tat and wonders combining queasily, to get here; I like the brightly coloured houses like Bratz dolls fighting; it looks, to me, like Notting Hill with fish, lace and a soul.

The Maze Grill is on a sinister street in Chelsea, between a small Tesco — a boutique Tesco? — and a shop selling ugly sculptures of cats. The Chelsea Physic Garden, with its poisoned plants and amazingly posh Sunday walkers, is nearby. I cannot walk in the Physic Garden without hearing the howls of property developers from the skies, longing to destroy it, because what is it for, this garden and its small carnivorous plants, these tiny, dangerous Chelsea-ites? The Maze Grill is the fifth restaurant of that brand from Gordon Ramsay, who operates 25 restaurants globally from Las Vegas to Raqqa, alongside his more important sideline of shouting at

The Ivy is a Playmobil-style faux-medieval restaurant in a triangular building opposite The Mousetrap; of the two, The Ivy is more ancient and threatening. It has mullioned windows, a photogenic lamp post and a parking space for paparazzi to shoot people who want to be shot, as in early Martin Amis novels. It has been refurbished for its 100th birthday, in the manner of an ancient dowager empress seeking new fingers. Of the ‘celebrities’ or ‘notables’ or ‘people who are better than you’ who used to dine here I cannot speak; but apparently it was a live-action re-enactment of a Nigel Dempster diary. Christopher Biggins blah. The pig from Babe blah.

The Beaumont Hotel is a bright white cake in the silent part of Mayfair, where the only sound is Patek Philippe watches, tick-tocking. We are in the eye of the storm, where it should be quiet; of the cacophony of Selfridges, just to the north, we hear nothing. It is the first hotel from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, creators of the Delaunay, the Wolseley, Brasserie Zédel and Fischer’s. The façade is so languid, pristine and self-satisfied that it could — no, should — be Swiss, even if it was once an Avis garage wrought in Art Deco. It reminds me of the Beau-Rivage Palace on Lake Geneva, a hotel