Tanya Gold is The Spectator's restaurant critic.
The Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station is George Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece: his Albert Memorial in Hyde Park (a big dead prince under a big gold cross) has just too much sex to it. Late Victorian architecture seethes with erotica. The facetious will say imperialism was really just penetration, and there’s something in that.
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Max Jeffery tracks down the Cambridge bike bandit (1:10); Tanya Gold says that selling bathwater is an easy way to exploit a sad male fetish (5:38); Madeline Grant examines the decline of period dramas (10:16); a visit to Lyon has Matthew Parris pondering what history doesn’t tell us (15:49);
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How Reform plans to win Just a year ago, Nigel Farage ended his self-imposed exile from politics and returned to lead Reform. Since then, Reform have won more MPs than the Green Party, two new mayoralties, a parliamentary by-election, and numerous councils. Now the party leads in every poll and, as our deputy political editor
In the 2004 film Mean Girls Ms Norbury (Tina Fey) cries to her High School students: ‘Girls! You’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores!’ Do we? I ask because Sydney Sweeney, an American actress, is selling her bathwater to men with unfathomable desires. No woman would buy it. We have an infinite
Hawksmoor is the finest steak chain in London, because it lacks pretension and cares about blood. Years ago, at the Guildhall branch in a basement near Old Jewry, I ate the best breakfast of my days: hot bacon chops in a restaurant named in homage to the architect of the English Baroque. This is Dr
After a week in which Israel triumphed at the Eurovision Song Contest with second place – western Europe is for them, eastern Europe slightly less so (plus ça change) – I review Babbo, the new neighbourhood restaurant in St John’s Wood. Restaurants tend to drift in, settle and drift onwards here. The Victorians knew it
Delamina Townhouse is on Tavistock Street in Covent Garden. It is an Israeli restaurant, and a very fine and subtle one, though Israeli restaurants are rebranding as ‘eastern Mediterranean’ these days due to growing Jew hate on London’s streets, which fills me with rage. (I am not talking about criticism of Israel. I welcome all
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This week: the many crises awaiting the next pope ‘Francis was a charismatic pope loved by most of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics’ writes Damian Thompson in the cover article this week. But few of them ‘grasp the scale of the crisis in the Church… The next Vicar of Christ, liberal or conservative’ faces ‘challenges
Claro is at 12 Waterloo Place, St James’s, and, when I tried to find out what it used to be – it has the energy of a bank – I found an advert from the Crown Estate offering the lease for a ‘retail or wellness opportunity’. 12 Waterloo Place was pictured in pen and ink,
Josephine is a Lyonnaise bistro on the Fulham Road from Claude Bosi. It is named for Bosi’s grandmother and is that rare, magical thing: a perfect restaurant. Bosi runs Bibendum (two Michelin stars, and in Michelin House) and Brooklands at the top of the appalling Peninsula hotel (two Michelin stars). He opens a second Josephine
The River Cafe has grown a thrifty annexe, and this passes for democratisation. All restaurants are tribal: if dukes have Wiltons, ancient Blairites have the River Cafe. It is a Richard Rogers remake of Duckhams oil storage, a warehouse of sinister London brick, and a Ruth Rogers restaurant. Opening in 1987, it heralded the gentrification
The immaculate bourgeois socialists of north London – that is not code for Jews – like to eat and drink in the former servants’ quarters of Kenwood House, because this is a mad country. Kenwood is beautiful. It is Hampstead’s best house, standing at the top of the heath, near the head waters of the
La Môme is the new ‘Mediterranean’ restaurant at the Berkeley, Knightsbridge’s monumental grand hotel. It has changed, as all London’s grand hotels have changed: it is Little Dubai in the cold and the chintz is on the bonfire. Fairy lights hang from the awning of the entrance, as if in an eternal Christmas. I barely
The day after the bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas were returned to Israel, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) holds a protest outside Westminster Magistrates Court on the Marylebone Road. I am here for the hearing of Ben Jamal, director of the PSC. He is charged with failing to comply with a police request that
The Audley Public House is on the corner of North Audley Street and Mount Street in Mayfair, opposite the Purdey gun shop where you can buy a gun and a cashmere cape, because the world has changed. The Audley is a vast pale-pink Victorian castle, and it meets Mayfair in grandeur and prettiness. If the
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Loyd Grossman pleads to save Britain’s cathedrals, as he reads his diary for the week (1:31); Unity Mitford is a classic case of aristocratic anti-Semitism says Tanya Gold (7:47); looking ahead to another Strategic Defence Review, Harry Halem warns that Britain is far from prepared for the era of AI
The Harrods bookshop, which I browse for masochistic reasons, is mesmerising: an homage to the lure of ownership. The first book I find is called, simply, 150 Houses. Is that enough? Then I find Luxury Trains, the Porsche Book, the Lamborghini Book and the Jaguar Book. Then I find a book designed for a lifelong
I was touched but not surprised that, despite his illness, the King attended the 80th anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of Auschwitz-Birkenau this week. His paternal grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was a rescuer. She hid the Cohen family in her house in Athens and is honoured as a ‘righteous’ gentile at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem,
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Freddy Gray reads his letter from Washington D.C., and reveals what Liz Truss, Eric Zemmour and Steve Bannon made of Trump’s inauguration (1:22); Tanya Gold writes about the sad truth behind the gypsies facing eviction in Cornwall (7:15); Rose George reviews The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell, by
‘Don’t use our real names,’ says the teenage gypsy. ‘Other gypsies will laugh at us.’ Even in a tracksuit, the girl is crazy beautiful, and strangely remote. She is talking to me because her mother, whom I call Susan, has been ordered to remove her caravans from a council site in the West Country. If
