Restaurant Reviews
Joseph Connolly reviews a London restaurant every week in the Hampstead & Highgate Express (Ham & High) which is published on Thursdays.
This Week's Review
75: Garden Gate August 26 2010
The old British Rail red and white logo still sits proud atop a galvanised post outside the very dilapitated Hampstead Heath station. Nothing seems to change much, down this way – the Magdala Tavern still looks pubby and still is sporting its Ruth Ellis bulletholes, Rumbolds is still comfortingly on the corner, and the winos still are uproarious and ruby-coloured, upending their brown paper-wrapped two litre bottles of paint stripper and adding so very much gaiety to the council’s prettification of South End ‘Green’... [download PDF]
74: Jin Kichi August 19 2010
So very Japanese: when you telephone Jin Kichi to book a table, a recorded message produces a largely incomprehensible response which – if you ring again and listen more attentively – you can just about make out to be a seemingly expert melange of quite scrupulous politeness and the briskest of brush-offs: this is not a good time to call, don’t leave a message – but do try again between 3 and 6pm when all will be fine: thank you! so I did that, and was told that for 7.30 on a Friday evening I could either sit at the bar or have a table downstairs... [download Part 1 of PDF] [download Part 2 of PDF]
73: The Holly Bush August 12 2010
Exactly one year ago, the Ham&High carried my review of the Holly Bush. Some of you might have noticed it: the then proprietors most certainly did – angry accusations of all sorts of distortions in letters to the paper, none of them true: I simply reported what I had found. Ken Pyne, our great cartoonist, had been the other victim of this very dispiriting evening, and he agreed with me that the meal had been dire – dreadful scalding non-pies and various other best forgotten things, compounded by unjustifiably high prices and a remarkably cavalier approach to service: i.e, they declined to provide any... [download PDF]
72: Czechoslovak Restaurant August 5 2010
The last time I was in Prague was not that long after the Czech Republic had cast off the yoke of Communist tyranny and oppression, etc etc, and still was wide-eyed at its hard-won freedom. The very air, said one old woman with tears in her eyes, suddenly was sweet again. A great deal of the greyness lingered on, however – and certainly the air was notable for a distinct lack of sweetness if you happened to be loitering anywhere within sniffing distance of the average restaurant: deep fried dumplings and potato pancakes were the order of the day, though what they were fried in, few cared to wonder... [download PDF]
71: The Providores and Tapa Room and tea at Buckingham Palace July 29 2010
How rich are you…? Sorry to be so forward, but I’m taking it for granted that you like to eat out and appreciate fine cooking and a decent drop of wine – but the candid question I have to ask you today, I’m afraid, is this: how rich are you? Because I’m about to point you in the direction of a very good restaurant indeed, whose chef, the New Zealander Peter Gordon, really does know what he is about… but dear me, for a seemingly modest little restaurant, it has to be said that you do need a fair wodge of readies to be able to appreciate it... [download PDF]
70: Brew House Cafe - Kenwood House July 22 2010
I don't quite remember the very first time I was taken to Kenwood House as a child, but I do know that I was immediately taken with it – so much so that I wanted to live there. I asked my mother why she didn’t buy it – it was so obviously better than our house in every imaginable way, so why on earth couldn’t she just buy it? “I don’t think it’s for sale,” she told me patiently. “And even if it was, it would be very expensive.” I was struggling to understand. “What – you mean... pounds?” She nodded... [download PDF]
69: The Sea Shell July 15 2010
Alfie's Antique emporium – along with Hampstead’s own mini-version in Heath Street – is one of the great survivors. And as is the way with long-term survivors, it does by its very nature of course seem pretty old and fusty, but in a rather glorious, time-warped and almost magisterial sort of a way... [download PDF]
68: Simpson's-In-The-Strand July 8 2010
D'oh! That’s very often the first reaction you’ll receive if you ever come out with the word ‘Simpsons’ – just as if you say ‘Homer’, I don’t imagine many are thinking The Iliad. But once you have established that it is the very venerable restaurant Simpson’s you are talking about, then people are sure to say this: “Oh God yes – Simpson’s-in-the-Strand: lovely old place, marvellous, one of my favourites – haven’t been there for twenty years”. Or 30... [download PDF]
67: Benihana July 1 2010
Who on earth could ever contemplate coming here twice...? That was the question that went on battering me as my son Charles and I stumbled back out on to the Finchley Road from the lowering basement that is Benihana – an ugly corner building hard by the Ham & High’s Swiss Cottage offices, and one of London’s unlikeliest restaurants, which nonetheless has somehow survived since the 1970s... [download PDF]
66: Artigiano June 24 2010
Belsize Village holds all sorts of memories for me, and most of them sweet. While attending St Anthony’s in Fitzjohn’s Avenue as a freshfaced short-trousered innocent (a degree of imagination could well be useful here) I used every day to pass through its centre on my journey to and from the school. It was a fair distance from where we lived in Adelaide Road, and in summer the bright blue woollen blazer, knee-length itchy stockings and de rigueur cap were terribly hot and uncomfortable. In winter though, and in the rain, your two poor bare little pink and chapped knees... [download PDF]
65: Chez Bob June 17 2010
Haverstock Hill’s cup might soon runneth over. We are all well used to the ever changing cluster of eateries the length of this fine broad-pavemented boulevard reaching down from the old Town Hall (now a virtually useless white elephant, it appears to me) and on past Belsize Park tube station…and now there’s a new Chez on the block! Chez Bob has taken over the premises of Black & Blue, a steak joint which I wrote about here a little while ago. There is already Chez Nous, I have yet to visit, while the other Chez, of course, is Chez Gerard, in the base of the Premier Inn. This was the very first restaurant I reviewed for this column, and remains the very worst... [download PDF]
64: Caffe Caldesi June 10 2010
Mine was not a musical childhood. I would love to say that instead I was a bookworm – consumed by literature and burned by an unquenchable impulse to fashion deathless prose … but no. Comics and idleness were more my line: the Bash Street Kids had the drop on Shakespeare any day of the week. Look – my best subject at school was Break. But as to music, well … I dimly recall that I did enjoy bashing the Bejasus out of my Sooty xylophone – and of course I yearned for a guitar, but only to hang around my neck so that I could pout as moodily as Cliff, while dreaming of sideburns... [download PDF]
63: Ravel's Bistro June 3 2010
So Max and I were sitting in the Roebuck in Pond Street and sinking a thoughtful Rioja, prior to toddling down the road to Ravel’s Bistro, a restaurant he swears by. Max lives in Canada, he shivers to remember, but during his frequent hauntings of London, Belsize Park is his stamping ground. “Fine, imaginative food”, is what he’d told me about this Fleet Road favourite. “Bistro,” I said. “French then, is it?” His eyes were narrow as he sipped reflectively. “Not necessarily …”... [download PDF]
62: Bocca Di Lupo May 27 2010
Archer Street is very much one of Soho’s less rhapsodised thoroughfares, lacking as it does the tradition and gastronomy of either Frith or Greek, the cool and booziness of Dean, the bustle and porniness of Brewer. Not to say Old Compton’s outright and purple homosexualism. It is little more than an alleyway, really – and one feels sure that at night-time it must always be redolent of urine, and strewn with shattered glass. For decades it has been known for just this one thing: The Windmill Theatre... [download PDF]
61: The Green Cottage May 20 2010
Somebody tipped me the wink a couple of weeks ago that there was apparently an election going on. Well they kept pretty quiet about that then, didn’t they? Who’d have known? Though I thought in the light of this new information I might as well toddle on down to Finchley Road in order to exercise my democratic right as I have done God alone knows how many times in the past. And the ritual process, I always find it so very appalling and quaintly comforting in equal measure: doing things the old way in a slumped and dingy gymnasium, with no hint at all of technological interference... [download PDF]
60: Spaghetti House May 13 2010
Hampstead is justly proud of the Keats connection, and in the garden of the recently restored house in Keats Grove (so much better now the smell of yuck new paint no longer makes you sick and swoony with the vapours) it still is difficult not to go slack-jawed at the thought that in this very spot, beneath this very tree, the poet wrote Ode ToA Nightingale. But this is not the only house associated with him: in Rome, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, is the Cassina Rossa – and here it was in 1820, during the final stages of consumption and aged only 26, that John Keats came to die... [download PDF]
59: Le Relais de Venise May 6 2010
Election Day, eh? And three major parties to choose between: rather too many, don’t you think? I have come to the conclusion that extensive choice is one of the banes of modern living. During the War, housewives would endlessly queue for whatever was on offer – and although I am not suggesting that here is a Utopian state of affairs, at least such privation must have concentrated the mind. Now though, if you pop down to Waitrose with the simplest shopping list (bread, milk, coffee, biscuits) the variety and array are quite utterly stupefying... [download PDF]
58: L'Autre Pied April 29 2010
Pied à Terre is a rather famous and highly regarded restaurant in Charlotte Street, its rather famous and highly regarded chef, Shane Osborn, having garnered a couple of Michelin stars. I’ve never been there. People keep telling me to go – telling me how marvellous it is, telling me how it’s just my ‘thing’ (though how they can know that, I can only wonder). Anyway – never been. Partly because people keep telling me to do it (it’s the same with books, films and the hottest new TV series – it took me years to catch up with The Sopranos, which I agree is magnificent... [download PDF]
57: Wiltons April 22 2010
Some days I feel so very much more British than others – do you ever get that? One can go through phases of being so terribly disillusioned over all that has become of this green and pleasant land, what with every sort of decline and dilution you can bear to mention, and thinking maybe the time has come to throw in the towel and push off to somewhere balmy and a less expensive. And to sip the good but simple local wine while ambling through one’s olive groves... [download PDF]
56: Rose and Crown April 15 2010
It's extraordinary, really, that the journey from Hampstead to Highgate without a car should always be such a bloody interminable slog. Fine if you are based around Whitestone Pond – squatting in the boarded-up £20million mansion Heath House, say, or gaily cruising around what used to be Jack Straw’s Castle car park – but for those of us who live in the lower reaches of the village, there’s a decent chunk of Fitzjohn’s Avenue and then the entire length of Heath Street to be dealt with: one hell of a gradient and an absolute age before the 210 bus stop looms into sight... [download PDF]
55: Market April 8 2010
I was still at school when Hunter Davies’s seminal book was published – the first proper grown-up hardback about The Beatles, and of course I most desperately wanted it … though at thirty shillings, my mother demurred. It was either the book or the Fab Four’s latest LP: I had to choose. Well sorry, Hunt – the Lads won hands down. Some time after I picked up the paperback though, and thoroughly consumed it. Hunter has revealed in the various updates since that because this biography was authorised, a lot of fascinating detail, insights and uncomfortable truths had to be suppressed, but at the time the book was gospel, and still among the fans it is regarded as totemic... [download PDF]
54: Blitz April 1 2010
[This was run as an April Fool's Day spoof]
I have just been to a really corking new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum called The Ministry Of Food, all about the economies and ingenuity of war on the kitchen front, and highly recommended. Which makes all that follows somewhat serendipitous. During last year’s work on Hampstead Tube station, when it was endlessly obscured by hazy green netting and scaffolding, I heard a whisper that in the upper parts of that oh-so-familiar and bloodtiled building a new bar and restaurant were being created. Then, as is always the way with reasonably exciting rumours, the trail went cold and I heard no more... [download PDF]
53: Odin's March 25 2010
The Last of the Summer Wine. So very poetic and evocative a line, don’t you think? One feels it really ought to be Shakespeare. Keats, conceivably. Or maybe from Wilfred Owen or another of the War Poets: it does have that wistfulness, a touch of Flanders fields about it. But it’s not in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and although a lot of people seem to imagine that they know its source, no-one I have met can quite put a finger on it. Possibly it is just the very familiarity of the phrase that renders it bardic... [download PDF]
52: Portrait Restaurant, National Portrait Gallery March 18 2010
Move It! That's what dear Cliff Richard used to adolescently snarl at us, and damn well too, more than 50 bleeding years ago (Lord above, can you believe it, how time does fly, etc, etc). He was moody and broody back in those days – curled lip, oily quiff and no smiling whatever: every teenage girly’s pin-up dreamboat, yet still managing somehow to look more like a grumpy though amply-nourished woman from the Punjab. Anyway – Move It!... [download PDF]
51: La Cage Imaginaire March 11 2010
Hampstead, Highgate, food, wine and books – I don’t think we talked about anything else (just blissful) and yet we were dining together for more than four-and-a-half hours. But when your guest is Ion Trewin, that has got to be expected – not just a local lad to the soles of his big and sturdy shoes, but preeminent in the literary world for, oh – any number of reasons, really. Tick them off one by one, will we? Yes – best be diligent. Well for ages he was the supremo at Weidenfeld & Nicolson... [download PDF]
50: 10 Manchester Street March 4 2010
This, gosh, is my 50th restaurant review for the Ham&High, so I’d say I deserve a cigar. The very first I ever smoked was with Roald Dahl: I was 15 years old. He was the uncle of a schoolchum of mine, and I sat there with this fine Havana (and vintage port) in his farmhouse in Great Missenden, awed to be in the presence of a writer I so hugely admired – though largely for his offbeat and sadistic adult short stories rather than any of the children’s stuff... [download PDF]
49 : Cecconi's February 25 2010
It's not every day you get to lunch with a Spaz. That’s Downing Street jargon, you may be unaware – the contracted collective term for Special Advisers to the Prime Minister: they could nearly have gone for Spam, or even Spasm, but they didn’t – they went for Spaz. This might very easily be an example of blue sky thinking on their part, or even thinking out of the box, but it needn’t be at all. Anyway, Helen Scott Lidgett has been a very dear friend of mine for … ooh, it could be as long as 25 years, you know. Is that really possible? Good God... [download PDF]
48: Trojka February 18 2010
I went to Russia the other evening. Well all right, then… more the Chalk Farm end of Regent’s Park Road. Da. Where there nestles a restaurant called Trojka, taking its name from a carriage or sleigh pulled by a trilogy of horses – all very romantic, no? Like Dr Zhivago – one of my pitifully few Russian reference points. What else can I think of? Well there’s Uncle Joe Stalin – who, like a lot of avuncular souls, turned out to be a beast, cruelly lurking behind his Iron Curtain. This was Churchill’s phrase – leading me, as a child, to wonder whether it ran to toning aluminium pelmet and maybe copper tiebacks... [download PDF]
47: Fairuz February 11 2010
The Book Bash. Everyone in the inky trade is aware that come December, one of the parties you simply must be invited to is that fabulous effort jointly thrown by the Daily Mail’s books pages and Ephraim Hardcastle’s gossip column: it is known with love as the Book Bash. Held at the summit of Northcliffe House in Kensington, home to the Mail and the Standard, way up high in a leafy, glass domed and titanic birdcage over what used to be Barker’s department store, here is a packing-in of every sort of literary luminary, gorging and sluicing on tip-top and neverending canapes and wine,... [download PDF]
46: Le Cafe Anglais February 4 2010
There are many abiding and quite baffling mysteries in the world of London restaurants, and I add to the list of them daily. A random sample: why do so many very average and overpriced gastropubs continue to prosper, while far finer places roll over and die? Why do greeters so often seem just thoroughly displeased to see you? Why are all banquettes a good two inches lower than than the chairs set opposite them? Why do we still tolerate the ‘cover charge’ when laundry is an overhead that should surely be absorbed? Why is Jamie Oliver?... [download PDF]
45: Galvin Bistrot De Luxe January 28 2010
Boris Johnson was in the back of our cab. Two Boris Johnsons. Well four, actually, if it’s accuracy we’re seeking. Not lookalikes, no, but a pair of pictures of a pair of Boris Johnsons on the underside of the flip-up seats. Here were the familiar little black pebble eyes set into the familiar expression – an expert blend of wisdom and confusion – and crowned by the Worzel Gummidge thatch that the Tory high-ups have done nothing to tame: and all this in stereo... [download PDF]
44: Black & Blue January 21 2010
Black & Blue. Amazing, really, that it should be called that. I have written before of my general bemusement over wacky and meaningless names that some or other PR set-up has foisted at colossal expense and with simulated enthusiasm on to the fearful and ultimately deluded restaurateurs as being certified humdingers guaranteed to capture the public imagination (for all the world as if they truly imagined there existed such a thing)... [download PDF]
43: Le Cellier Du Midi January 14 2010
Wouldn't it be utterly magical if one quite chill and crispy night, the benign slacklipped and livid green Auto Monster – that legendary and gigantic gobbler-up of motor cars of my fevered and recent invention – would work his wonders the length of Church Row? Pick up all the coloured shiny things that are parked nose to tail, and swallow each of them whole? Residents might well demur, I do plainly see that, but for the rest of us... [download PDF]
42: Gilgamesh January 7 2010
Just another night in Camden Town, then. Here it all is: the lit-up Lock, the tottering and glittery Stables, the lit-up louts, the tottering and glittery birds.A waft of crepes and sickly chocolate thickly overladen by the choke of wonky and handdipped candles, the rasp of joss stick, the sweetest whiff of Class B drugs. Here is the magnet for the youth of the world, summoned in their sullen droves to this Mecca of indolence and hand-me-down glamour... [download PDF]
41: Orrery December 17 2009
The Conran Shop in Marylebone High Street is a fairly dangerous place to linger, should you be headily appreciative of colour and design: just about everything in there is instantly and shamingly covetable. And this Christmas, the windows are particularly enticing and spectacular with perfectly arranged and packaged pyramids of alternately vital desirabilia, and gaudily pretty trifles... [download PDF]
40: Franco's and tea at Claridge's December 10 2009
I've always been nuts about hats. When I was growing up, of course, everyone was more or less utterly defined by the hat they wore, and I simply coveted the lot of them. The only dressing up outfits I was ever interested in – in common with the only professions that held for me the remotest intrigue – held at their pivotal centres the hat. Which is why I was never attracted to medicine, the law or clergy: no hats, you see (unless you get to be Pope, of course, in which case they can become quite nifty)... [download PDF]
39: Poem December 3 2009
Poetry is on a roll – it’s all just so-o-o very trendy again. This happens, from time to time, the last occasion being possibly when that W.H. Auden tear-jerker was read out in Four Weddings And A Funeral – and now, just recently, we have T.S. Eliot voted the nation’s favourite poet. Yes, I know: T.S.Eliot. And that’s this nation we’re talking about then, is it? Nonsense, of course... [download PDF]
38: The Square November 26 2009
As a budding boy, before I happened upon the fabulousness of Ursula Andress and Elizabeth Taylor, the pin-ups in my study at school were a motley – an overlapping and glossy selection of E-Types, Aston Martins, Colts and Purdeys. I know, I know – cars and guns: amazing I blossomed into the aesthetic and sensitive flower that I am today. It was the look of the things, really: I didn’t terribly want to drive or shoot – or not to kill, anyway... [download PDF]
37: The Wallace November 19 2009
No Love Lost. That’s the title of Damien Hirst’s predictably quite ludicrously over-publicised hanging of brand new paintings in one of London’s great treasure chests, The Wallace Collection in Marylebone. Yes yes – paintings: the media were held in a collective thrall by this perfectly wondrous revelation that our most famous living artist had himself, apparently unaided, dipped a paintbrush into paint, and then actually applied said pigment to canvases. Lordy... [download PDF]
36: The Criterion November 12 2009
When I was a short-trousered St Anthony’s schoolboy, the words ‘Piccadilly Circus’ were almost as thrilling and packed with the rush of delight as ‘Christmas Eve’. And sometimes on that very day I would be taken there, in order to fulfil the sometime ritual of ‘seeing the lights’. Pleasures were simple in those days (and preferably free) but the sight and sparkle of Regent Street, the silvery glints... [download PDF]
35: The Wells November 5 2009
Links - those things we forge as we plod ever onwards, bonding us with others, making some sort of sense of a life. And although the pearls, of course, are ever the thing, without the stringing all you are left with is a treacherous rolling of so many disparate balls, poised and lurking on the landing to tip you down those stairs with bumps and pain and bewilderment, dizzied by how it all could even have happened. Links: that mark of cohesion, the theme of continuity... [download PDF]
34: Langan's Brasserie October 29 2009
Gluttons, lushes and loafers who have been knocking around London for quite a fair while will sometimes (and usually over the course of a long and boozy lunch) bend the conversation to the bars, the clubs, the restaurants of yore – those which, due to the alchemy of media and the moment, were magically lit up and hot for either years or just a season, then just mystifyingly fading from the collective consciousness... [download PDF]
33: The Bull And Last October 22 2009
Charlie Brown, the melancholic Peanuts philosopher, when told dismissively to ‘go fly a kite’, rather soon and poignantly was to discover that he couldn’t. The malevolent Lucy, fresh from listing his inadequacies and whipping away the football (again) just as his run-up was in unstoppable flow – she could, she could fly a kite. Beethoven aficionado Shroeder – he could... [download PDF]
32: Quo Vadis October 15 2009
Quo Vadis? According to the Bible, this is the question asked of Jesus Christ by St Peter on the Appian Way: Whither goest thou? Odd name for a restaurant then, seeing as how most of them strive so hard to be the destination itself – in this case more towards the Oxford Street end of Soho’s Dean Street,... [download PDF]
31: L'Aventure October 8 2009
The Beatles, I suppose, are the closest I get to any formal religion, and so that fabulous day in 1992 when I actually stood, gasping and amazed, in Number 2 Studio in Abbey Road, where the whole of the canon was actually created...! I was at a press thrash to commemorate the 30th anniversary of their debut single Love Me Do (and in three short years, we shall be celebrating its 50th … but oh, please please me by just not going there)... [download PDF]
30: Paradiso October 1 2009
This week I am lifting a corner of the veil, affording you a very rare glimpse into this honed and well-oiled machine – the intricate planning and meticulous care that make up the militaristic existence that is, perforce, that of the professional restaurant reviewer, brooking no leeway whatever for error... [download PDF]
29: Bertorelli's September 24 2009
Maxwell's in Heath Street, Hampstead – long gone now, but one of the original decent hamburger joints – was where we always used to take the ickle kiddies for a treat. And sometimes for an extra special, joy-packed, all-action, oh-my-God-how-does-our-oh-so-wonderful-Daddy-think-of-such-things sort of a treat, we took them to Maxwell’s in Covent Garden... [download PDF]
28: Fratelli La Bufala September 17 2009
I once met a buffalo socially, whose clear intent was to kill me. St Louis, Missouri, it was, in some sort of a wildlife compound – one of a clutch of idiot diversions laid on by the sponsor Budweiser during a press trip centred around the opening game of the 1994 World Cup in Chicago. I know and care absolutely zero about football, and so the editor of The Times thought it wise for me to brave the 100 degree heat and file for the paper some or other nonsense... [download PDF]
27: Murano September 10 2009
Mayfair. My very first memory concerning this rarefied area, at around the age of 11, is of buying the whole of it for only £400, just prior to swiftly recouping fully half my outlay via the simple and inevitable expedient of passing Go... [download PDF]
26: The Pavilion Restaurant, Kew Gardens September 3 2009
Summer this year occurred on Wednesday August 19 – and due to its singularity and some very strange little quirk and warp of my fevered misunderstanding it now will be etched forever in what little memory is left to me as a brand newly-minted, groovy and gorgeous Summer of Love. So what that it lasted but a day? Never mind the width, my dears: just you feel the quality... [download PDF]
25: The Betjeman Arms August 27 2009
Not at all usual to name a pub in honour of a recent Poet laureate (Hughes’ Booze? Motion’s Potions? I hardly think so) but in The Betjeman Arms we have a noble exception. A rather surprising place, this, and not least for its location – in St Pancras Station on the upper level devoted to the comings and goings of Eurostar... [download PDF]
24: The Freemasons Arms August 20 2009
Steak House. Just been there. So very subtle, with its pastel washes, perfectly set in Old Hampstead tranquility – only the murmur of remembered poetry susurrating as a ghost amidst so pregnant a hush. Oh God no – sorry: got the letters scrambled – Keats House, that’s what I meant to write, yes yes (all this restaurant business, it addles the brain)... [download PDF]
23: Mon Plaisir August 13 2009
There used to be a shag called Parson’s Pleasure. Pipe tobacco, you know. I only mention it because I have been straining to think of any British establishment or product bold enough to directly confront head-on this whole very sticky business of ‘pleasure’, and it’s all I can come up with... [download PDF]
22: Holly Bush August 6 2009
What's his name …? It’s on the tip of my… oh God – what’s he called? You know the chap I mean – that television cook.A combination of David Niven and Prince Charles, he always strikes me. Oh yes yes yes – I’ve got it now: Jamie Oliver, that’s the man... [download PDF]
Cartoon by Ken Pyne ©2009
21: Rex Whistler Restaurant, Tate Britain July 30 2009
School hols – dontcha love ‘em? You might well be contemplating giving this latest vile neologism a whirl – a ‘staycation’: i.e, the recession has left you so utterly battered and broke that any euphemism at all for being thoroughly unable to afford a holiday is, on balance, better than none. All those pullouts and supplements that have fallen from your newspapers lately – ‘Great Days Out’, ‘Fun For The Kids’– and you dropped them into the bin because the relentlessly frolicsome covers chock-a-block with buckets and spades, thatched cottages, idyllic coaching inns and smiling, for God’s sake, left you more than faintly bilious... [download PDF]
20: XO July 23 2009
Smashing Time. It’s a little-known film, now something of a cult – an enjoyable scamper through the Swinging Sixties in London, actually made towards the end of that heady decade, which gives it a life and immediacy that later evocations inevitably lack. I was once marooned in an airport lounge in Nice with Michael York,... [download PDF]
19: Goodman July 16 2009
In those grim and ribless far-off days when Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy was looming large in the doom-laden media, you might have thought twice about opening a restaurant dedicated to the glory of beef in Maddox Street. It is akin, in these Swine Flu ridden times, to setting up an all-you-can-eat hog roast on Pigsneeze Lane (a little-known thoroughfare of my recent invention)... [download PDF]
18: Eriki July 9 2009
Some like it hot – and you’re one of them. Because you do, don’t you, relish Indian food? Yes, I thought so. Most of the country seems to. Chicken tikka masala is officially the nation’s favourite dish, a truth I find impossible to contemplate. Were I given the choice of any cuisine the world has to offer, India would rank fairly low on the list... [download PDF]
17: Canteen July 2 2009
Baker Street – not really a destination, is it? More a street to idly regard from a bus or taxi, noting that the Persian rug shop is now well into its 19th year of closing down. I only ever go there now if I need to consult the Great Detective on some or other pressing concern, which if left unresolved would surely lead to the gravest consequences for the security of the nation... [download PDF]
16: The Coffee Cup June 25 2009
Close your eyes. Now form a mental picture of Hampstead High Street. All very difficult when you’re trying to read, I do realise that, but here is what I’m driving at: how many shops can you put a name to? Yes, but now try it without the chain stores: no Waterstone’s, McDonalds, Starbucks, phone shops or rag trade. Is there anything left?... [download PDF]
15: The Ivy June 18 2009
What does The Ivy – arguably still London’s best known restaurant – have in common with the English novel? The more cynical among you might suggest that they are each of them populated by characters who do not really exist, stranded forever amid a setting of pure invention... [download PDF]
14: Odette's June 11 2009
When I was a lad I lived just minutes away from Primrose Hill, and although we ran to a garden with all the things that gardens just simply had to have in those days – disintegrating greenhouse, rockery devoid of alpines, rusty and deadweight lawnmower that ensured the preservation of daisy and dandelion – still there was always something special about going to “The Hill”... [download PDF]
13: The Gallery Restaurant, Selfridges June 4 2009
One hundred years old. Yes, all right – no more tittering at the back: joke over, thank you. Not me, no (though by God it can feel like it sometimes) – but Selfridges, the venerable Oxford Street store. It is owned by a rather glamorous and incalculably rich Canadian family called the Westons (as, indeed, is the 300-year old Fortnum&Mason)... [download PDF]
12: The Naked Sausage May 28 2009
Homes. You know Homes – the glossy porn pullout in your Ham&High, where a welter of strutting and poutingly gorgeous hussies – sorry, houses – weekly make us hot with lust before we cool and sigh at the stark and crushing admission that these high maintenance babes, oh – they are just so way out of our league... [download PDF]
11: Gaucho May 21 2009
Attentive readers might recall that last week I lunched in the whitest restaurant in town – St John. Soon after I went for dinner to the Hampstead outpost of the Argentinian chain, Gaucho, whose interior is modelled upon that of a coal mine. Walls, floor and ceiling, all black – but unlike St John, they just won’t let the idea lie: there are other factors too, and these are weird ... [download PDF]
10: St John May 14 2009
St John is in his heaven – or hell, dependent upon your taste. Here we have uncompromisingly British, and stripped down to the bone – such defiant unfanciness in accordance with the unassuming Georgian terraced building just around the corner from Smithfield... [download PDF]
9: York & Albany May 7 2009
The chimps’ tea party – when, as a child, I was taken to the zoo, that for me was the main attraction. Most of the other animals I found to be either stinky and repellent, outright scary or else just plain ridiculous (in common, now I think of it, with how many people since?)... [download PDF]
8: The Foyer & Reading Room, Claridges April 30 2009
Have you checked the rating at the end of the piece yet? I expect so – human nature really, when reviews are strewn with asterisks. So, yes – rather startling, isn’t it? A clean sweep. The swagger of five unbroken stars – just like those that glinted on the bullet helmet of a cigar-chomping General Patton, while he was twirling his pearl-handled revolver... [download PDF]
7: The Flask April 23 2009
Flask Walk. Well – I’ve been here before, of course. From 1975 until 1989, to be precise – that’s how long I was the shadowy fixture hovering like doom at the rear of The Flask Bookshop. Readers of a superior vintage will remember it well – I sold modern first editions and art books along with general antiquarian and literature: rather lovely, in its heyday... [download PDF]
6: J Sheekey April 16 2009
Now this is really spooky: I was just a tad too early for lunch with a newspaper features editor in J Sheekey, so I leapt at the excuse and nipped across the road to The Garrick for a sharpener. And don’t ask me why I bounded up the back stairs to thebar instead of taking the grand and newly restored main staircase, but on my way I noticed for the very first time a rather fine portrait of Donald Wolfit... [download PDF]
5: The Bull April 9 2009
And so to Highgate. A mild and sunny day, so the idea was for my wife and myself to take the 210 bus from Jack Straw’s Castle, have a mosey around the village, plump for lunch in the most seductive place on offer and then – full of good and tasty things – wander back across the Heath. I was musing that it was a fair old while since I’d been to Highgate; the bus, I noticed, terminated in Finsbury Park,... [download PDF]
4: Oslo Court April 2 2009
God, I did feel such a fool, though – that very first time I was invited to Oslo Court (the restaurant so famous for being unknown). My host’s instructions had been as specific as they could be, but still too vague for me: “You go into Prince Albert Road, right? And to the left a bit there’s this big block of flats, see? There’s no sign proclaiming ‘Restaurant’– no menu, no doorman, nothing. Persevere... [download PDF]
3: The Wolseley March 26 2009
The “It Factor”. That indefinable thing that just a few restaurants are reputed to have – the usual suspects which litter those newspapers still clinging with fervour to the demented belief that some or other scrawny bint or bloated swaggerer eating a meal is somehow an item of news. And yes, The Wolseley in Piccadilly is one of them... [download PDF]
2: Villa Bianca March 19 2009
Italy, eh? Quite apart from what, as the Pythons had it, the Romans ever did for us, there’s Venice, Vivaldi – and, rather more to the point, vitello, vermicelli and Valpolicella: Italian cuisine, in a nutshell. Oh, also they gave us the Mafia, of course, and in one episode of The Sopranos I recall some big-quiffed slack-mouthed assassin referring to Mr Obama’s recently acquired residence as the “Villa Bianca”... [download PDF]
1: Chez Gerard March 12 2009
Dear God – I think I must have taken leave of my senses. Of all the places to eat in Hampstead and Highgate, why did I have to go to one of the very few restaurants within a hotel? Everyone knows that you never do that – unless it’s Claridge’s, say… but this, believe me, wasn’t. We are talking about the Brasserie Gerard, fronting the Premier Inn on Haverstock Hill – which is, I tremble to tell you, just one of 500 in the kingdom’s largest hotel chain and run by Whitbread, which also owns the Costa coffee chain... [download PDF]
