Tanya Gold is The Spectator's restaurant critic.
The centre could not hold, at least for Piggy’s. The drama of being the only greasy spoon in the West End — in Air Street, of all places — was too much, and it swelled, panicked, and fell apart. Yesterday I ate a mean sliver of almost cold bacon inside hard white supermarket bread. The
As beautiful as Bath is, it is more interesting underground. This is where the ruins, the gods, and the waters are: the steps to the temple of Sulis Minerva near the Pump Room, the Victorian tunnels, and, in the eerie plant room below the Gainsborough Bath Spa Hotel, the water from the ancient springs, waiting
The Cadogan hotel, Chelsea, is where Oscar Wilde was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, in Room 118, which is now memorialised as the site of the arrest. Institutional homophobia is a weird thing to commemorate in fabrics, but everything is a tourist attraction these days. The hotel is a tall red late-Victorian
14 min listen
On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from Nick Moar on Twitter’s decision to suspend Politics for All.Next, Tanya Gold on the importance of chicken soup. And finally, Cindy Yu who has reviewed The Kingdom of Characters, a book on Chinese language.Subscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher:www.spectator.co.uk/voucherUpdate Description
Catherine Chicken is sickly. She has swollen up like a barrage balloon with an evil face and dinosaur feet. She lumbers about. It is peritonitis, the vet says, after I make my husband drive her to the animal hospital in Falmouth. She will not recover without an implant that prevents her ovulating. Chickens are ever
It is a truism that there is never enough schnitzel (‘slice’, German); or, rather, schnitzel does not get the attention it deserves. Restaurants do serve it, of course. Fischer’s does a fine Wiener schnitzel, as part of its riotous pre-war Vienna tribute act, and elderly people, I am told, queue for it while wearing slankets.
2030 is the deadline: the end of petrol cars in Britain. Because nothing lasts forever. ‘This may be the last petrol car that I design,’ said a British marque designer, sketching lines on a napkin wistfully. I threw the napkin in a trunk in the attic for memorial. I have become addicted to petrol cars
‘I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself,’ Mel Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in 1977, in a New Yorker profile entitled, with appalling relish, ‘Detours and Frolics of a Short Hebrew’. ‘I want to go on making the loudest noise to the most people.’ His memoir All About Me! may be
The Connaught Hotel’s formal dining room was always, to me, a place of childish myth; more comforting for being mythical. I am certain it is the dining room in Judith Krantz’s novel Princess Daisy, to which a Russian prince takes his daughter in the 1970s. In this tableau you find Robert Maxwell, Margaret Thatcher and
Soho is so gilded nowadays that even drug addicts look down on it. The wasteland without must match the wasteland within. That is harmony. Soho is not a wasteland now: it is no longer that interesting. It is, rather, a shopping district with restaurants and hotels: whimsical, trivial, overpriced. People say it is our youth
Piccadilly is losing its patina of dirt, its cadaverous character. It is overpriced and over-renovated,a meeting place for luxury goods. Perhaps I cannot forgive it for not actually containing Dracula’s ‘malodorous’ house; but who has a resentment against a street except this column and Hillary Clinton, who set a terrorist attack here in her new
In the latest James Bond movie, which passes for the National soul – though I think Roald Dahl was closer to nailing it – a Toyota Land Cruiser Prado wins a fight with a Land Rover Defender in Norway. Or rather two Land Rover Defenders. Out they bounce from forest to stream and back to
17 min listen
On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from Mary Wakefield about the pattern of misandry in modern media. (00:48) Then Lloyd Evans on the British tradition of the pub theatre. (07:19) And finally, Tanya Gold on getting drunk on tiramisu. (13:55) Produced and presented by Sam Holmes Subscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20
NoMad is a new hotel in what used to be Bow Street Magistrates’ Court: a preening piece of mid-Victorian classicism opposite the Royal Opera House that is clearly too fine for the half-hearted criminal classes these days. I was judged in this court once for the very boring crime of cannabis possession (I think I
You can get drunk on tiramisu. I have done it. It takes two portions at least. You drink (I mean eat) the Marsala wine and the rum — and then must be escorted, tenderly, to the bus stop. I don’t usually drink alcohol. If I did, I would smash up restaurants. But I do eat
Whitcomb’s is in The Londoner hotel on the south-west corner of Leicester Square. The Londoner calls itself ‘the world’s first super boutique hotel’, which may mean that it is the world’s biggest small hotel. Or its smallest big hotel. I don’t know. Whatever its existential status, the developers destroyed an art deco cinema — the
19 min listen
On this week’s episode, we’ll hear Douglas Murray on how the pandemic has made cynics of us all. (00:50) Paul Wood on why after 10 years he and his family are leaving Lebanon. (08:02) And finally Tanya Gold gives her review of a Batman-themed restaurant. (14:32) Produced and presented by Sam Holmes
There is a Batman restaurant in London, or rather there was: Savini at the Criterion on Piccadilly Circus. Savini was a haunted grey Italian restaurant that closed in 2018 and was artistically dependent on salt. It appeared in The Dark Knight, in which Batman, who is Bruce Wayne to everyone but himself (I have a
13 min listen
On this week’s episode, we’ll hear Matthew Lynn’s thoughts on how the gas shortages could lead to a very cold winter. (00:51) Then, Tanya Gold with a critical take on critics. (04:41) And finally, James Innes-Smith bigs up the bungalow. (08:58) Presented by Sam Holmes
The pandemic was bad for criticism with its universal dogma of ‘kindness’. Restaurant, theatre, film and book critics felt compelled to be kind, as if criticism itself was coughing at a death bed. But who does this kindness benefit? Last year I reviewed Michael Rosen’s book about his Covid-19-related coma: Many Different Kinds of Love.
