Tanya Gold is The Spectator's restaurant critic.
The Burgh Island Hotel lives on a tidal island in a deserted part of south Devon. The directions for visiting are very detailed. You drive along the deserted country road, and at a certain point – just before you lose mobile telephone reception – you must stop to telephone the hotel, and they tell you
Restaurant and dog years are similar, and so the Wolseley, which is 20 this year, seems as if it has always been here. Other restaurants fall so swiftly you have only fragments of impressions. Breakfast on Bond Street in what feels like a one-bedroom flat belonging to Patrick Bateman. Pasta in a cellar with art,
Scott’s, Richmond, is a fish, champagne and oyster bar, and a new branch of Scott’s, Mayfair. The original Scott’s was part of what became the Trocadero Centre. (Ian Fleming was a regular. He would take captured U-boat officers there to get them drunk and chatty. James Bond visited too.) It moved to Mount Street and
Penwith isn’t an island, but it feels like one. The heathland above the cliffs is filled with mine workings and Iron and Bronze Age relics: menhirs, fogous and quoits. To most visitors Cornwall is as simple as the GWR posters: gaudy pastels, happy children, ice cream. This Cornwall exists for six weeks in the summer
Alex Dilling at the Hotel Café Royal is a minute restaurant above Regent Street, which has the type of British imperial architecture that looks most like a cake: that is, the most preening, deceptive and pale. For someone who did almost no exercise, the Prince Regent built quite a lot of roads and there my
Bacchanalia is the new restaurant from Richard Caring – I sense he would like me to call it a ‘landmark’ or ‘super-restaurant’, so I won’t – in the old Porsche showroom on the corner of Mount Street and Berkeley Square, and all nightingales have fled. Caring, who has doused Britain with his metal Ivys, is
Mriya lives at the end of Old Brompton Road where South Kensington turns into Earl’s Court and, as if by some alchemy, becomes interesting. It is a Ukrainian restaurant, but something more touching too: a memorial and a retreat. It opened in August, in the sixth month of Putin’s war. Twelve of its 15 staff
31 min listen
This week: In his cover piece Douglas Murray writes that museums are turning against their own collections. He is joined by the historian Robert Tombs to discuss whether a culture of self-flagellation is harming British museums (00:56). Also this week: For the magazine The Spectator’s assistant editor Cindy Yu writes that the tune is changing in China.
Of all the European countries that Jews have lived in, none has been so welcoming as Britain. There is a caveat: the first blood libel was in Norwich, of all places, in 1144, and after Edward I expelled us in 1290 we had to wait almost 400 years for Oliver Cromwell to ask us back.
The rude fingers of Battersea are repointed, and barely rude at all. The power station by Giles Gilbert Scott and J. Theo Halliday is no longer a wasteland to contemplate as you sit on the Waterloo to Shepperton night train. It has become a small town with shopping centre, restaurants and a pier on the
19 min listen
This week: Mark Galeotti tells us why Ukraine has become a weapons testing ground (00:53), Katja Hoyer discusses Germany’s extreme monarchists (09:12), and Tanya Gold reads her Notes on … espressos (15:24). Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.
Chessington World of Adventures sits in a bowl near the A3. I went in the 1970s when it was a zoo, home to some unhappy orangutans who lived in a cage which made me scream. Being a lonely sort of child, I hugged concrete dinosaurs in the rain. Now it is owned by Merlin Entertainments
According to excerpts from Out of the Blue, the cursed biography of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and The Spectator’s James Heale, Truss is dependent on two things for comfort: Instagram and espresso. On a trade delegation to New Zealand, she’d ‘had so much coffee and just wasn’t interested in meeting the ambassador’. Coffee is
The Piazza is not a piazza – a realisation which is always irritating – but a restaurant in the eaves of the Royal Opera House, now restyled and open to those without tickets to the opera or ballet. If it were honest, Piazza would name itself Attic or Eaves, but the Garden, as idiotscall it,
Labour is 30 points ahead, and in honour of this I review the Impeccable Pig in Sedgefield (Cedd’s field), a medieval market town and pit village south of Durham. It is Tony Blair’s former constituency and Camelot, but nothing lasts for ever. Blairism had pleasingly flimsy beginnings. Sedgefield had yet to choose a Labour parliamentary
Bardo St James’s Restaurant – a name which reads like a map – is a vast new Italian restaurant in one of the pale imperial palaces off Trafalgar Square, near Pall Mall and The Phantom of the Opera, which goes on because snobbery and sado-masochism are among the many things that never die. You might
Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior design and even its own restaurants. The Ned, its City hotel with ten restaurants, is genuinely insane, like Thorpe Park for people who are scared of roller-coasters; and no restaurant for adults should sell fishfinger
36 min listen
In this week’s episode: We look ahead to Harry and Meghan’s UK tour next week, how will they be received? Freddy Gray and Tanya Gold join the Edition podcast to discuss (01:01). Also this week: In the Spectator magazine, our Economics Editor Kate Andrews sat down with the three economists, or ‘Trussketeers’, that are informing
Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in a haunted mirror in which the only thing that matters is your survival. This duplicity is important to understand, because the road from Cicero to Caesar is so short it may lack potholes. Cake is
The star system is a false hierarchy: the best rarely make it to the top. I thought of this recently when it was announced that David Warner had died. Few outside acting could name him, though you may have seen his head flying off in The Omen, a film in which heads are cheap. Warner
