Restaurants

Pandemic has brought many truths, the most minor of which is: I can’t cook steak. I thought I could. I burnt butter and seared meat and — lo! — perfect steak. Then I asked Matt Brown, the executive chef at Hawksmoor, the best steak restaurant in London excepting Beast (and Beast is a charnel house and a metaphor, and it is weird) to help me improve my steak in a Zoom lesson and — lo! — I cannot cook steak. I was kindly disposed to Hawksmoor because of its name. Names are important. I have fallen in love with people because of their names. Hawksmoor is the real hero of

Snaps + Rye is a Nordic-themed restaurant and delicatessen on the Golborne Road, at the shabby and thrilling edges of Notting Hill, just north of the Westway, a road I uncomplicatedly love, probably because it takes me from Notting Hill to places I like better. Notting Hill fell to gentrification long ago — it gasps with boredom — but here London feels like a real city, though only just. ‘This home is not a shop,’ says a sign in a nearby window, with as much feeling as signage can muster. Or should muster. ‘Nothing is for sale.’ It is a bitter time for restaurants and those who love them. Nearby,

Sexy Fish is an Asian fusion barn in Berkeley Square, near the car dealerships and the nightingales, if they are still alive. It used to be a bank — NatWest! — and it still feels like it cares for nothing but money, even as it deals in sticky chicken, which means a good deal more than money to chickens. I wonder whether the blazing vulgarity of such restaurants — it has a large mirrored crocodile crawling up the wall, and that is the subtle part — will survive the terror of Covid-19, or whether it will go the way of the Russian Tea Room in New York City, which is

Brasserie Zédel is a grand salon under Piccadilly Circus and the only place I desired when lockdown (or lock-in) ceased and I was allowed to visit London. It is, for me — and everyone is different in their yearnings — everything a restaurant should be: very beautiful; well run (by Corbin & King of the Wolseley and the Delaunay); not insultingly priced; and, as it is windowless, pleasingly unreal: an enchanted basement, if you will — a depository for dreams. I arrive early on the first night, walking through silent London, resisting the urge to lie down in the road. This used to be the Regent Palace Hotel, the grand

Drive-through restaurants were invented so Americans could spend more time in their cars. I don’t blame them. American cars are wonderful if you like cars with fins; so, in theory, is fast food, which is more accurately called fast death, even if they did not know that in 1947. There is a contradiction to the drive-through method of collecting food, a puzzle: if you drive, you have time to wait. But such things are not designed to be sensible. I wonder what other services could be made drive-through: lawyers and podiatrists, but my preference is for libraries and, possibly, sex. These restaurants have thrived in pandemic, which again contradicts the

What does a critic do when her genre collapses? Mostly I panic. I speak to restaurateurs who believe that without government help into 2022, many British restaurants will close. Most restaurants rent their premises; even if landlords defer collection, the debt will be unpayable. Most restaurants operate on slender margins; they cannot secure finance even in happy times. It is a scandal that the government has excluded monies from the service charge ‘tronc fund’ from the 80 per cent calculations in the Job Retention Scheme, even though it has received National Insurance contributions on it for years, and many restaurant staff are getting only 40 per cent of their earnings.

Q. Further to your advice about how to refuse invitations, I had a friend, who sadly died young, who disliked many social events and conventions. At dinner parties he dreaded hearing the words: ‘Shall we move to somewhere more comfortable?’ He devised a universal response to unspecified invitations. It was: ‘I am taking a suitcase to Highgate that night’. He found this would prompt the host to give more details — for example: ‘Oh, what a shame because the So-and-Sos are coming and we thought we’d take a picnic on the heath.’ If he liked the sound of the event he could say: ‘I’ll be back by then.’ — P.M., Lewes,

The Prada Café is both a cake shop and a historical inevitability. It sits on Mount Street, almost opposite the Connaught hotel, and between what used to be Nicky Clarke’s hairdressing salon and a luggage shop so expensive it has a queue outside. People are queuing up to explore late capitalism through the prism of luggage but, that aside, they seem quite disinterested in the world around them. Perhaps they are marvelling at their own stupidity in yearning for a £1,000 bag with no zip. The Prada Café is a nickname. Its real name is Patisserie Marchesi 1824 and it travelled from Italy to the silliest part of Mayfair to

Decks is a restaurant built on the Sea of Galilee. It is Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu’s favourite restaurant (it is occupying the sea, if you like) and it is huge: two storeys of decking (hence ‘decks’) walking into the sea where Jesus of Nazareth fed his 5,000 Biblical Corbynistas. The view is of young Jewish girls jumping up and down in unison on a disco boat. From a distance it looks like one happy creature with 800 legs. I came from the north where bluffs — once military installations — are tourist attractions with cafés. I stood on the Golan Heights and peered into Syria, and then I went to

Each suburban soul yearns for the Soho of their youth. It isn’t that Soho was better in the 1990s when I invaded the Colony Room, twitching, and took a fag off Sarah Lucas. It is that I was. This was the view of a friend after I last wrote on Soho restaurants. We once ran holding hands through the sprinklers in St James’s Park laughing at Peter Mandelson, who was passing with his dog, and that is my memory of the Blair years. So Soho, which is thick with metaphor anyway — its very name is a hunting call: death for one and ecstasy for another — is a district