Tanya Gold

I have been waiting, like a heroine in fiction, for the specialist lasagne restaurant. London has long been heading this way for the benefit of the consumer-simpleton who can only process one piece of information at a time. It is clearly a response to the glut of choice in late capitalism, and so close to

The Keeper’s House sits in the basement of Burlington House, a restaurant in disguise. It is quite different from the grand cafés of St James’s and Mayfair, which are raging exhibitionists with banquettes splayed like limbs. It is secretive and it knows, consciously or not, the tricks of children’s literature: the looking-glass, the wardrobe and

It is summer and the listless metropolitan thinks of grass. It cannot afford to stay at Durslade Farmhouse, Somerset, a branch of the Hauser & Wirth art gallery that serves food and plays cow noises in a former barn as authentic country folk rip their eyeballs out. Locals talk about Durslade Farm as a child

Batman owned the Criterion in The Dark Knight, but could he do anything about British Telecom? Savini at Criterion, an Italian restaurant, waited four months for an internet connection and telephone line as they prepared to launch this year; when it arrived they gave BT what must be the worst review in the history of

Islington is a bellwether, and also a joke: the most unequal borough in London, where social housing leans against £4 million terraces (for now, loyal Conservative voters, only for now), and also the holy font of Blairism as it appears in ‘It’s Grim Up North London’. Here, it is said, they sang the Blairite version

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

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,

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

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

The last time I reviewed a restaurant in Selfridges, a PR man rang up to ask what he could do to change my opinion of Selfridges. Don’t worry, I told him, Spectator readers don’t go to Selfridges to sit in a fake Cornish fishing village, because they are too busy eating the remnants of the

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

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

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