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
146: Hâché February 2 2012
As I was rather early for my lunch in Inverness Street, I thought I’d wander through the psychedelic souk that long ago used to be plain old Camden Town. I can well understand how all these little shoplets must gladden the eye, if not nostril, of the flocks of largely prepubescent tourists who still and daily swarm there in order to marvel. Apart from “food to go” – the successive conflicting wafts of which rendered me queasy, then practically insensible – the main stuff on sale is clothing: the ubiquitous T- shirt with blurred motif and witless caption, very long and skinny stiff black leather coats (to transform the wearer into a vampire, or else the tube of licorice you used to suck on with a sherbet dip) and a quite extraordinary array of hats. Thousands of them – everything from a Biggles flying helmet to a fuchsia pink topper by way of tartan trilbys, berets, beanies and a very depressing mountain of baseball caps with exaggeratedly curved peaks... [download PDF]
145: The Delaunay January 26 2012
I should love to tell you that it’s both brave and cavalier, the way in which London’s restaurant trade appears to be laughing in the face of the ‘economic climate’ by opening a rash of huge and high-end places simply all over the place ... but of course it’s all just an accident, really – no more than a cruel trick of timing which could very easily backfire. Because all of these glamorous and pricey new restaurants will have been joyously conceived way back in the good old rosy days, when it wasn’t just the fat cats who could only grow fatter. But the division now between those who regularly eat out and those who simply cannot has rarely been wider... [download PDF]
144: Vinoteca January 19 2012
Vinoteca has been repeatedly recommended to me: an honest and casual eatery in Marylebone where the freshly prepared daily menu is true to its ingredients, and – as the name suggests – wine is a major player. Trouble is – it’s not in Marylebone at all. Seymour Place is a turning off Marylebone Road, and that’s where I got out of the taxi: one or two restuarants about, but not Vinoteca. Turns out that it’s right down the other end. Further turns out that Seymour Place is the length of the bloody M1: nearly as far as Marble Arch, this place was – took me ages to get there, and it was drizzling – so don’t you start up with me about this not being a local restaurant, because it was damn well meant to be, and I’m in no mood. Okay?... [download PDF]
143: The Vine January 12 2012
Gluttony. That’s what it said, in brightly coloured overlapping lettering, right the way across the front of the Michael Craig-Martin designed Christmas card I received from the Groucho Club. Ho ho, I thought – how very merrily amusing. And then I got to thinking ... maybe they had cards printed up with each of the Seven Deadly Sins, who knows, and mine just happened to be Gluttony. And then I got to thinking further: what if they did indeed have all seven sins laid out before them, and then they selected with care exactly whom to send what ...? And if so, is that truly my image then, within the nucleus of the places I choose to swill and sluice? Conceivably. Oh well: there are worse sins. Aren’t there? Well actually, at this raw time of year, you could rather wonder. How many times lately have you heard the dread words ‘diet’ and ‘abstinence’ recklessly bandied? It’s a curiously British thing, this: it’s not to do with slimming and sobriety, but everything to do with chastisement... [download PDF]
142: 2011 Restaurant Roundup December 22 2011
As by now you might quite easily have noticed … it’s that time of year again. MasterChef: The Professionals is over and done with, and therefore no longer do we have to suffer hearing the contestants telling us that cooking is their passion, and that they are in it to win, upping their game, giving it 110 per cent, stepping up to the plate (and out of their comfort zone), cooking their hearts out, living the dream … and, eventually, over the moon, or else just gutted. ‘Tis also the time of year when if you see in the papers just one more time a feature bearing the strapline ‘We Have Christmas All Wrapped Up’ (crammed with desirabilia that has been given gratis to the style journalists, and which you can’t afford), you will put into the oven not the goose or turkey, but simply your head... [download PDF]
141: Piccola December 15 2011
Few would argue that two of Hampstead Village's greatest and most enduring institutions are Villa Bianca in Perrin’s Lane, and the mighty Coffee Cup just around the corner in the High Street. They both have been a vibrant and vital part of the Village scene for just about ever: the Coffee Cup has the romance, Villa Bianca the glamour. Wear a duffel coat and desert boots in the Coffee Cup, bring an old Penguin paperback, drone on about Dave Brubeck and Jack Kerouac ... well it could be the 1950s, couldn’t it? Lay out much more dosh at the VB, this time don an open neck white linen shirt and glinting medallion with navy suit ... and if you squint a bit, you might be in Portofino. Well now there’s a new kid on the block which rather cleverly splits the difference between the two: Piccola in Heath Street, on the site of the old Frascati... [download PDF]
140: Phoenix Palace December 8 2011
The phoenix, as well you know, is a mythical bird with a long and lustrous tail of scarlet, gold and purple - and when it is poised upon the cusp of shuffling off its mortal coil (after a thousand years, give or take) it builds itself a nest of twigs and then, rather as you might expect, self-combusts: rather in the manner of the ghastly Krook, in Bleak House. And there rises from the ashes a brand new phoenix, and off we go again: as a party trick, I think you’ll agree, it takes some beating. Though I’m not quite sure why this very fabulous restaurant just off Marylebone Road should ally itself with the phoenix, unless for the suggestion that it’s going to be around forever. Maybe it’s just that very fabulousness and colour that are being referred to here – because certainly the interior lives up to the ‘palace’ part of the restaurant’s name: my Lord, this is indeed a Chinese emperor’s palace, and then some!... [download PDF]
139: Retsina December 1 2011
Greece is the word: it’s got groove, it’s got meaning. Though quite what might be its groove these days, let alone its meaning, is anyone’s guess, quite frankly. Ancient Greece is one thing: the cradle of civilisation. Modern Greece is quite another: famous only as bestower to the world of Demis Roussos, Kojak, Melina Mercouri losing her marbles … help, I’m running out … and oh yes, Zorba, with that maddening bloody tune, and even more maddening bum-wiggling little dance. Not to mention bankruptcy and impending exclusion from the eurozone: for a while there, the country did seem poised upon making a drachma out of a crisis... [download PDF]
138: twotwentytwo November 24 2011
The Landmark Hotel is a vast Victorian pile opposite Marylebone Station – though let’s face it: it’s not, in truth, very much of a landmark at all, because few really know where it is, what it’s called or even what it looks like. Here is one of London’s 5-star hotels – but I’m telling you, matey: you’ve never been in a 5-star hotel that’s remotely like this one. For starters, the main entrance appears to be the side one: no foyer to speak of, but a long marble corridor leading to a loftily grand though still very dim, heavy and intimidatingly lowering seating area, hard by the reception desk. Which, at 8.15 on a weekday evening, was completely unmanned. Maybe because the whole of the space was devoid of all humanity, and they didn’t want to squander personnel... [download PDF]
137: Tandis November 17 2011
On Bonfire Night, I tottered down Haverstock Hill... in the drizzle. The quest was not for Guy Fawkes, but – as usual – simply grub. Though in Hampstead at this time of year, it’s impossible to avoid all the rockets and whizzbangs: in my street, they tend to kick off long before Hallowe’en and peter out with reluctance some time during the second week of January. So there was plenty of fizzing and popping in the night sky on my way down to Tandis – a warm and welcoming looking place at that nebulous point in NW3 that is neither Belsize nor Chalk Farm, this making it some- thing of a deliberate destination rather than an impulse restaurant. Because it is in a kind of a cul-de-sac raised up from the pavement, there is an ample outside space – covered by an awning with tables and chairs, though no sign of any heaters: and therefore, on a November Saturday evening, rather sadly deserted... [download PDF]
Doodle by Ken Pyne 2011
136: Belsize Kitchen November 10 2011
I have always assumed that patronage on my part could extend no further than the realm of restaurants: heaven knows I have been patronising restaurants for as long as I can remember. But now, wholly to my bewilderment, I find that I am in addition a patron of the Royal Free Charity. Perfectly extraordinary – how on earth could that have come about? And what, while we’re at it, is the Royal Free Charity? And why should they require a generally indolent scribbler and restaurant critic when they’ve already got proper patrons, such as Esther Rantzen? I’m sure you share my need to know – and because I haven’t a clue about any of this, I thought I’d ask the CEO of the Charity to lunch, so that he could explain to me face to face how an apparently level-headed and highly capable man such as himself could be guilty of so wild and preposterous an aberration... [download PDF]
135: Manna November 3 2011
Vega is the second brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, twice as large as the Sun, twenty-five light years from Earth – and I had always assumed that this is where vegans come from. But it turns out that I was quite wrong about that: in fact they are actually human beings from this very planet, except that they have decided to eschew (as opposed merely to chew) all manner of meat, poultry and fish, along with every derivative such as fat, milk, cheese, butter, eggs, chocolate … or as cooks and gourmets choose to refer to them: ingredients. And one of the most popular and enduring places in London where they elect to reject the very finest foods the world has to offer and chow down on whatever might remain, is Manna in Primrose Hill... [download PDF]
134: Feng Shang Princess October 27 2011
About a decade ago, Feng Shui had its moment in the West: an inevitable and laughable dilution of an ancient Chinese philosophy was cannily reheated for the benefit of the usual self-obsessed gluten and wheat intolerant Yoga-practising New Age vegans who would not dare to so much as brush their teeth unless the stars were in alignment with Jupiter and Mars, and only then if their expensive medium adjudged it wise. Now they were paying other clever people to ensure that their prospective house – or even sofa – was not facing the wrong way, for otherwise life would forever be blighted, and from within a miasmic cloud of much bad juju, a plague of boils would surely descend... [download PDF]
133: Sofra October 20 2011
Someone said to me the other day “Do you like turkey?” – and I was very pleased that they did, because I have long believed it to be a much maligned and cruelly underrated bird. People are forever maundering on about how very dry it is, rather than acknowledge that simply they have cooked it badly; leftovers too can be wonderful, if you know what you’re doing. So I said all this, and the person just stared at me glazedly – for it turns out, you see, that he didn’t say “Do you like turkey?” – no no: what he had said was “Do you like Turkey?” – and this question, alas, I was at a loss to answer. Because I’ve never been. Despite the fact that for many years I have dabbled as a peripatetic travel writer, it still remains true that generally speaking – you name it, I haven’t been there. I am the least-travelled travel writer on the planet... [download PDF]
132: Princess Of Wales October 13 2011
Although she is almost entirely forgotten now, the Princess of Wales used once to be a fairly well known figure. She was married to Prince Charles, and therefore destined to become Queen; this was not to be, however, because she died very tragically in a car crash in Paris. Do you vaguely remember who I mean, now? Ring any bells? Blonde, name of Diana: self-confessedly thick, hated quite a lot of things: rural pursuits, reading books, classical music, obscurity, Prince Charles... while loving very much clothes, limelight, pop concerts, he-men and other sorts of men too, such as Elton John and Gianni Versace. Some considered her to be Princess Of Our Hearts and close to sainthood, while others were of the opinion that she was a vain, empty-headed and self-serving lunatic... [download PDF]
131: Union Café October 6 2011
I have reviewed restaurants whose names begin with every single letter of the alphabet... bar one. I have actually reviewed twenty that begin with S: that’s the record. But until this day, I had never done a U. The other tricky ones – V, X, Y and Z were taken care of by Verru, X.O, York & Albany and Zeen... but hitherto a U has eluded me. But now we are replete: I’ve got my A-Z. And yes you well might say I ought to get out more... but as you know, I actually get out quite a bit. Union Café is yet another restaurant set into that gem of a little road, Marylebone Lane, which is just jammed with them. And at the risk of appearing to be a list-obsessive, I might say that I’ve reviewed the lot, bar two – an Indian I don’t much like the look of, and the classic 1930s Golden Hind, which I’m saving up for when I just must simply have, and right at this minute, one of the best fish and chips in London (for such is its reputation)... [download PDF]
130: Kentish Canteen September 29 2011
I was clocked. And although you might find this surprising, it doesn’t actually happen often – but as soon as I entered Kentish Canteen, I just felt it to be true: a palpable frisson when I gave my name to the very charming lady and she repeated it with such orotund emphasis and precision. Then she gave the nod to her manager who, quite startled, quickly walked into a table. And so I was rather eager to discover whether the progress of lunch would be any different to usual. It’s a very pleasant space, Kentish Canteen: only one year old, and a credit to the area in its spanking apple green livery – hoi polloi on the pavement kept decently at bay by a thicket of privet hedging, the fascia ringed by a ribbon of little light bulbs as last seen fringing a Hollywood starlet’s dressing table mirror... [download PDF]
129: El Parador September 22 2011
Luncheon. Not a word you really hear bandied about any more. Lunch has become the universal term for this supreme institution – many, perhaps, being unaware that this word is even an abbreviation at all. I do very much like the word lunch – it savours of munch while smacking of crunch – though still its ubiquity is rather peculiar: I mean – no one talks of din, do they? Well I do actually, but then I’m very odd. These days, though, it is hard to say ‘luncheon’ without coming across as Lady Bracknell, or else maybe recalling the glory days of Luncheon Vouchers (not to say ‘pork luncheon meat’) – and when you talk of ‘luncheon for one’, a picture is conjured of a solitary rep in a Terence Rattigan boarding house at his usual corner square table, its cloth laid in diamond fashion, where the cruets and sauce bottles stand sentry eternally... [download PDF]
128: La Collina September 15 2011
Tis the season when I am asked continually if I know of any decent local restaurants with a pretty little garden to the side: the dream is of long and leisurely booze-soaked lunches, the sunshine through branches of willow and vine gently dappling a virgin tablecloth and turning the wine into liquid rubies, this preferably with a view to rival that of Capri or Portofino. In London though it is much more likely to be a couple of tiny tables rammed on to the pavement, the paper cloth coated in grime from the ceaseless traffic and a series of oafs bustling past you and roaring into their mobiles, the outsized It-bags of the women constantly knocking askew your grisini. For smokers, of course, the quest for an outside space is not exclusive to summer, and many places have grown wise to the demand – most good hotels now actively catering to the alfresco diner and smoker alike. I have never puffed cigarettes, but I do enjoy an occasional Havana – and the other week I attended a wonderful ‘cigar garden party’ at The Langham in Portland Place... [download PDF]
127: Cote Brasserie September 8 2011
Just three months ago I reviewed here a rather silly restaurant in Hampstead High Street called Ping Pong (dumplings that bloat you, bum-numbing stools) and now, from the same impressive corner and lightfilled site there arises like an extremely hip and laid back Phoenix a very welcome and overdue outpost of Richard Caring’s Cote empire. Because Côte is a useful concept – classy brasseries that will work for a dinner date, but still you can pop in to for a solitary brunch or else an extensive Sunday lunch with all the family, including pernickety Gran and the bloody noisy kids. Caring, of course, is the owner of such milestone London restaurants as The Ivy, J. Sheekey, Daphne’s, Le Caprice … oh, everything really – and in Côte we have echoes of the trademark décor along with food to rival most of them, with the bonus of a rather less damaging bill... [download PDF]
126: St James September 1 2011
During the course of a recent review, I referred to a pair of female waitresses as being both blonde and beautiful. You will not however have read this, because the features editor snipped out the adjectives on the grounds that their retention might make me sound a bit of a pervert. A logic I hardly understand. Had I made constant and lascivious reference to the sexual allure of a slumbering mongrel, then conceivably the features editor might well have had a point. I do not consider, however, the observation of blondeness and beauty to be in itself so very terribly perverted – and nor do I believe that said two waitresses would have rushed to sue me. I say all this in order to explain why I am not now going to describe the waitress in St James at Crouch End as bright-eyed and attractive because if I do, you see ... well then this entire opening paragraph will be snipped by the features editor, and then you won’t be able to read it... [download PDF]
125: Court Restaurant at The British Museum August 25 2011
Ah yes! Makes you proud to be British ...! I think that the reason the BM strikes us as London’s most imposing museum is in large part down to the expansive generosity of the forecourt. All the other museums and galleries are slap bang on the pavement – and so if you step back the necessary good long way in order to fully absorb and appreciate all of their architectural grandeur, you tend to get hit by a bus. Here, though, the monumental façade shimmers in the distance like the mirage to end them all. To foreign visitors, loafing on the forecourt seems to be something of a tradition: you buy an unspeakable sausage in horrid clothy bread from a van on the kerb, and then take a million pictures of the British Museum...[download PDF]
124: Made In Camden August 18 2011
Ron Arad is a Chalk Farm based and much respected designer – the creator of quite a few classics. You know the Bookworm? Of course you do – that lushly curvaceous strip of bendy metal that you attach to your wall in any manner of sinuous variation, any one of which should pretty much guarantee that your collection of books will warp, be annoyingly inaccessible, or else fall off. And the Rover chair – I really like that one. This is an early and iconic piece – the leather seats from an old Rover car bolted on to arches of scaffolding pole to form both arms and legs: if you haven’t seen it, it’s a lot better than it sounds. I remember when I had a bookshop in Flask Walk, and Linda Bennett had just opened her very first L.K.Bennett shop in Hampstead High Street... [download PDF]
123: Formosa Dining Room August 11 2011
The whole point of meeting the novelist Mavis Cheek in a restaurant in Maida Vale was that it’s two minutes from Paddington, see – and it was at Paddington Station that she was due to arrive at 12.50pm from Hungerford. She used to be a Chiswick girl, Mavis, but decamped to Wiltshire quite a few years ago, where she lives in blissful and bucolic isolation, while being regularly feted as a local celebrity. “Last week I judged the dog show,” she told me. “I hate dogs. Don’t know a damn thing about them – but all I had to do was award prizes to the waggiest tail, the perkiest ears – oh, and the best hat. This was won jointly by two little pups called Eugenie and Beatrice. I am looking forward to next year’s event when they promise I can judge the best bitch.”... [download PDF]
122: Number One and The Kitchin August 4 2011
Enjoy …! It seems mandatory these days for all waiting staff to command you to do this thing. It’s the new ‘have a nice day’, and was particularly in evidence last week in Edinburgh, where I’ve been going up to the Festival for many years – the spirit is infectious and the city, of course, quite wonderful. Locals really do relish playing host to the world’s biggest and best arts festival, and for three weeks every summer the city throbs and swings, day and night. And while I have never been short of food (as if) still I have always been thwarted in my attempts to secure a table at one of the city’s five Michelin starred restaurants – and so this year I went up just a week before, in order to make sure of two of them... [download PDF]
121: Zeen July 28 2011
North London’s closest approach to downtown Delhi has to be Drummond Street, just off the Hampstead Road. I only ever knew it in the past from Lawrence Corner, that dank and cavernous army surplus store of legend that now is a very ugly, bright green and weird-looking pharmacy. I had gone to Lawrence Corner in the late 1960s expecting to be transformed into Sergeant Pepper in exchange for eighteen shillings and ninepence – all the money I had on earth. It turned out that all this would run to was a wormy mosquito net and a battered olivecoloured tin that once had contained anti-malarial tablets. Glamour – then as ever – cost money. So I decided instead to settle for growing a moustache closely modelled upon that sported at the time by Paul McCartney, but after months of strain and willing it to be, my upper lip was stubbornly holding out at just seven hairs on the one side, and only four on the bloody other. It’s filled out since... [download PDF]
120: Lord's Tavern & Oslo Court July 21 2011
At last, I’m going to see India. I am. After so many years of waiting, this abiding ambition is finally realised. Even as you read these words, I will actually already be there …! At Lord’s, I mean – for the first and second days of the Test Match. Well what did you think? That I was going abroad? No no – there are loads of restaurants at home I haven’t eaten in yet, so why go abroad? All you get abroad is overcharged and dysentery – much better to stick with what you know. And in anticipation of this week’s England v India Test Match, I thought I’d investigate a couple of favourite eating places in the area: Lord’s Tavern – so very famous, and I’d never been there, while Oslo Court is a good old friend. I reviewed it here a couple of years ago and have been naggingly conscious ever since that I didn’t do it true justice... [download PDF]
119: Singapore Garden July 14 2011
I once had a thing about the Singapore Sling. That, of course, was back in the days when I had a thing about any sort of experimental drink. The weirder the name and ingredients, the more I was up for it: Moscow Mule – vodka, lime and ginger ale (quite as disgusting as it sounds), Horse’s Neck (bourbon, more ginger ale, equally vile) and, of course, The Earthquake. This is attributed to Toulouse-Lautrec and comprises three parts absinthe to one part cognac: it didn’t stunt his growth so much as his existence – the first hot touch on your lips of this explosive poison is equal to the kiss of death... [download PDF]
118: Le Manoir Au Quat' Saisons July 7 2011
“Fon-toss-teaker …!”is one of legendary chef Raymond Blanc’s much expressed superlatives, whenever he is moved to enthusiasm. Which is often, as anyone who has seen him on television will know. And such is his media omnipresence that if you haven’t seen him on television, I can only assume that you have died. Raymond is a bon viveur in the best sense: hugely affable, and devoted to fine living and dining – more visibly and expressively moved by food than all other TV cooks, but then of course he is, as you may have detected, French. A commitment to the finest fresh produce and unceasing industry – these, to him, are the unwavering requirements of a chef. “Ze best does nert kerm izzy,” he insists. “No good to be lezzy! You must fart, fart, fart all of ze way!” And which among us could argue with that?... [download PDF]
117: The Engineer June 30 2011
The engineer: who is the engineer? Is he Isambard Kingdom Brunel, famed creator of timeless magnificence seamlessly blending the realms of invention, expedience and eternal beauty? Or is he the pimply lout with piercings, a gelled-up Tintin haircut and a fizzing iPod who tells you that the electro-carbon doublecore one-way baffle flange on the conduit filter transformer is totally buggered, yeh, and you can’t get the part no more, son – yeh and basically, at the end of the day, the whole boiler’s well shot. Yes … a tricky word to pin down these days, engineer – but certainly it fails to trail in its wake brightly gaudy pennants and streamers screaming of jollity, imagination and artistic recklessness. Did you hear about the engineer who had a wife and a mistress, and made quite sure that both were thoroughly aware of the situation? [download PDF]
116: Gourmet Burger Kitchen June 23 2011
Wimpy and chips. For more years than is decent, this for me was the single most alluring phrase in the English language. It spoke of poetry and lust in equal measure, of greed and gratification – it conjured up visions of eternal paradise on earth (well in Golders Green, actually). Then there was the dinky little stand-up menu with a red roof on top, just like Snoopy’s kennel, and of course those bright red squeezy plastic tomatoes, brimming with the wateriest ketchup imaginable, which would seep right through the titchy paper napkins at the very first and inevitable drip. Oh yes, my very first Wimpy and chips was truly a magic moment during my formative years – this giving you fair insight into the pitiable rarity of any magic moments, while also hinting very strongly at the paucity of their nature... [download PDF]
115: The Summerhouse June 16 2011
So I was in the Gents at The Wolseley, see – and who should I run slap bang into but Harold Tillman. Harold, who has lived in Highgate for the past thirty years, is the always immaculately turned out Chairman of the Fashion Council who also owns such great British institutions as Jaeger and Aquascutum; last year he was awarded the CBE for services to the industry. A very affable and effortlessly elegant fellow, he is a fixture at London’s very best eating places as well as all the most exclusive launches and opening parties. What I didn’t know about him, however, is that he is also in partnership with his son Mitchell, who owns about ten rather good and well known restaurants in London, among them the first rate Notting Hill Brasserie, the Ebury, Harry Morgan in St John’s Wood and The Running Horse, a fabulous pub in Mayfair... [download PDF]
114: Dinner by Heston Blumenthal June 9 2011
I had lunch at Dinner. It’s a fair old wheeze from the glistening-domed, spookily-spectacled and idiotically famous culinary alchemist whom now we all just call Heston. You name a restaurant Dinner, it’s going to get bags of publicity because of all the whimsy little jokes you can make about it, and bore people into a coma: on the lines of ‘I had lunch at Dinner’, for instance. So terribly amusing, non? Mind you, Heston could have opened a restaurant called Anthrax and still it would have the punters flocking. If you phone them right this minute, you will hear a polite though faintly superior recorded voice informing you that they are fully booked until the end of July. The end of July! Two bleeding months – in a city so utterly jam-packed with good places to eat that we’re all just demented by choice... [download PDF]
113: Ping Pong June 2 2011
Fiona Bruce, she was there. In Ping Pong, when I went. You know – Fiona Bruce: BBC newsreader, Antiques Roadshow object of lust to gentlemen who can be even older than the things that are carted along for assessment. And let us not forget her erstwhile title of ‘Rear of the Year’, as bestowed last year by a committee which annually sits on their backsides about a table while rating both the pertness and pulchritude of famous women’s bottoms. Look – it’s modern life, and who will bat an eyelid? Anyway – she was there, Fiona Bruce. I only mention her, frankly, because I’m not really sure how much there is to say about this restaurant. It’s dim sum... [download PDF]
112: Verru May 26 2011
We go way back, Magsie and me. In the 1990s, Magsie Hamilton Little was my non-fiction publisher – first at Mitchell Beazley, where I did a book called Beside The Seaside (all about, as you may have divined, the British seaside, and packed with terrific photographs, both vintage and modern) and then at Cassell: another picture book entitled All Shook Up, about the 1950s. It was around this time, I recall, that Magsie became really quite fed up with working for conglomerates: she is not the first editorial director to have rebelled at all her time being taken up with meetings, budgeting and office politics, leaving none at all for the very point of creative publishing: the authors and the books. And so she decided to form her own company... [download PDF]
111: Skylon May 19 2011
I don’t know... maybe what all we Londoners need now is a fully fledged festival. It seemed to work for us exactly 60 years ago in May 1951, when there arose on the South Bank from a desolate bombsite the most joyous and colourful array of groundbreaking architecture calculated to showcase the very best of what Great Britain still could produce, while – more importantly – supplying a playground for a pretty hard-pressed nation. Here people could wander about the Dome of Discovery (at the time the largest on earth) enjoy a ride on Rowland Emett’s wonky railway and consume a great many Wall’s ice cream cones while cooling their feet in a colour-changing fountain... [download PDF]
110: Gilbert Scott May 12 2011
Last week, if an alien from outer space – simply because he happened to be passing – had maybe decided to drop into the newly refurbished St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, he might well and easily have assumed that in 1873, when first the place opened as The Midland Grand, human beings in England must all have been fifteen feet tall, minimum. How else to explain the quite staggering and (for once, it’s the right word) awesome scale of this red brick, marble and terracotta London landmark? The interior gothick arches a mile above your head, the massive and gleaming granite columns ... it all makes you gasp, and also rather thrill to the tremendous swagger and confidence of the High Victorians, never in the slightest doubt as to exactly which nation ruled not only the waves, but the world. Sir George Gilbert Scott is the man we have to thank for this exceptional edifice, while we also owe great gratitude to Sir John Betjeman who led the campaign in the 60s to rescue it from demolition... [download PDF]
109: Walnut May 5 2011
West Hampstead is cool! West Hampstead is hot! This is what people have been telling me – and particularly people who live round there. Get yourself down to West Hampstead, they cry as one, and so very evangelically: go there in the evening, Friday preferably – I’m telling you! It’s cool! It’s hot! Well I do rather go for cool, and nor am I an enemy of hot … and so just the other Friday evening, that’s where I was – meeting in a bar in West End Lane called the Alice House (which immediately made me think, oh yeah: “Drink Me”!) with my travel writer pal from the Daily telegraph, Adrian Bridge, who lives just round the corner... [download PDF]
108: The Goring Hotel April 28 2011
And so it is finally come...! The planning, the waiting, all our girlishly sleepless nights are at last at an end - for tomorrow there dawns the most frabjous day of the year. Yes, that one – the one, according to a foaming-mouthed media, you have been longing for and dreaming of, to the exclusion of all else: the nuptials of his Royal Highness Wills the Prince, to Katie-who-no-longer-has-to-waitie, the pretty young thing with the smile, the hair, the legs, and hitherto ‘A Commoner’. Which of course is all about to change: as I write, we don’t yet know what title will be conferred upon the happy couple... [download PDF]
107: Morgan M April 21 2011
'The Liquidator will soon be coming around. You won’t feel safer until you get out of town’. So growled Shirley Bassey nearly 40 years ago – this title track, delivered with lots of gutsy James Bond style, being by far the best bit of a highly forgettable film entitled, quite as you might expect, The Liquidator. Which also just happens to be the jocular nickname of my recent lunch guest, Christopher Morris. Chris, I ought to point out, is not in fact a hit-man – unlike the chap in the film who, Dame Shirley warblingly informs us, is an eraser who’ll rub you out in the night (and for a chaser, he’ll kiss your woman goodnight)... [download PDF]
106: Chateaubriand April 14 2011
About a thousand years ago, Fairfax Road was famous – for here was the place of plunder, the land of loot: the Green Shield Stamp redemption centre! Green Shield Stamps! Anyone out there old enough to remember them? They were such a big thing in the sixties. There were, of course, many big things in the sixties: I was besotted with The Beatles, though my dedication was as nothing when set aside my mother’s devotion at the altar of Green Shield Stamps... [download PDF]
105: La Cocotte April 7 2011
Have you been watching MasterChef? It’s such a laugh really, isn’t it? What with the fact that it’s all become so very formulaic and excruciatingly embarrassing in its forcedly pseudo-dramatic presentation. The sullen impudence of the grubby and drugged-looking John Torode, the cheeky chappy relish and gluttony of Greg Wallace – not just the luckiest man on television, but also in his unparalleled insights and wisdom, the East End’s answer to Buddha. and then there’s the voiceover – some spaced out woman very much on the edge, sounding like a combination of Alice in Wonderland and the Prophet of Doom... [download PDF]
104: Coast Dining March 31 2011
For the purposes of this review, my name is Keats. Next week I’ll be reverting to my real and wholly unpoetic monicker – but for now I must insist upon being the Bard of Hampstead. It is all the fault of the fellow I took to lunch the other day: his name is Dante. This coming so soon after my chat with the Savoy Grill’s maitre d’ (Byron) and the odd professional dealings with the head of Conde Nast (Nick Coleridge) together with the editor of the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary (Sebastian Shakespeare) has proved to be all too much for me: I am left reeling, and feeling positively prosaic. So this week you must think of me as one who brings to you news of not just chicken, guinea fowl, pigeon and partridge … but also the still clear voice of the nightingale... [download PDF]
103: Trullo March 24 2011
So it's 7.30 in the evening, and I’m in a restaurant called Trullo waiting for my blind date to roll up. A trullo is a sweet little conical building largely found in Puglia, southern Italy – so what better name for a black flat fronted tiny restaurant set before metal crash barriers on a hateful stretch of a frightful road in a dismal slice of Highbury? My blind date was the winner of that little competition I invited all of you to enter, way back in January. Do you recall? Anyone was welcome to email me, suggesting why they would like to share a lunch or dinner, and where we might go. An initial rather worrying drought soon became a trickle, and then a veritable tsunami – and what a mixed bunch of letters! I thank you all... [download PDF]
102: Langan's Bistro March 17 2011
It's a rather curious thing: you never any more hear anyone talking about the small but perfectly formed Langan’s chain of restaurants, and it is very rarely you see them reviewed or featured in the press. And yet whenever I visit, at whatever time of year, they are invariably packed to bursting with happy chomping people, all of them clearly having a very merry time. It is rare for once so utterly tooth-hurtingly cool and trendy restuarants to even carry on hanging by a thread, let alone bustle... [download PDF]
101: Sardo Canale March 10 2011
I don't want to go to Sardinia, and for a grossly stupid reason: when a child, I simply loathed sardines. Cold and slimy – what was there to like? Well I’ll tell you what there was to like, actually: opening the tin with the key. I say ‘opening’, though I never actually quite got that far. My mother would say “Here – give it to me. You messed it up last time. You always mess it up”. “No no – I can do it! I’ll do it! Let me do it!”. So I slip the slot in the key over the flangey gizmo, start to twist, and all initially goes well – the horrible fishy pong telling me I have broken the back of the thing... [download PDF]
100: Galvin at Windows March 3 2011
"Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" So screams Cody Jarrett - that deranged and oedipal psychopath – as so memorably played by James Cagney at the climax of Raoul Walsh’s classic 1949 film, White Heat. To the top of the world is where his villainous Ma always said he was destined, though possibly she didn’t intend such exaltation to incur his being blown to smithereens in a billowing ball of sheer white flame at the summit of a distillery, one black night. Well do you know, just the other day – though in a thoroughly different way – I was feeling that’s just where I was too: on top of the world. And why so elated? Because today, dear reader, I have achieved my century... [download PDF]
99: The Horseshoe February 24 2011
'Very good value'. This is a phrase often and approvingly uttered by my lunch companion, the very well known and respected wine writer Malcolm Gluck. For are not both his fame and fortune firmly founded upon the winnowing out on our behalf of so many vinous gems from amid all of the vinegary dross? Scorning ridiculous mark-ups, and pinpointing the bargains? Indeed. So when he says a wine is not just very good, but very good value to boot – don’t mess about, buy the stuff by the cartload... [download PDF]
98: Café Luc February 17 2011
Jesus. Which is the name of a college at Cambridge University, as well you know. The porter there is terribly pleased now that Christmas is long behind us, because at that festive time the phone just never stops jingling. “Is that Jesus?” the caller enquires. “Yes …” sighs the porter – and then he holds the receiver well away from his ear so as not to be deafened by the joyously bawled out rejoinder: “Well Happy Birthday …!!”. I know all this because although I am not myself an alumnus of this very august and ancient college, my chum Pluto is, and recently he invited me to a top table dinner there (and that’s when I got chatting to said porter)... [download PDF]
97: Bradleys February 10 2011
Back in the days when Wyatt Earp was Marshall of Dodge City, I used to ride shotgun on a beautiful red and yellow Wells Fargo stagecoach…! Actually, that’s a lie. But certainly in my 11-year-old imaginings, that’s surely all I wanted to do. The reason was the rifle. Because it wasn’t a shotgun at all that these intrepid defenders used to wield – perilously aloft the rocking coach, huddled in close to the driver who shouted yee-hah and spat out tobacco a good deal as they hurtled joltingly through the dusty rocky deserts... [download PDF]
96: The Almeida Restaurant February 3 2011
I don't much care for online, when it comes to booking restaurants. Oh God let’s face it: I don’t much care for online when it comes to absolutely anything on the planet – but there, that’s just my inviolate techno-hopelessness, hardened by the crust of distrust. Not of the system so much as myself: I cradle a craven dread that although I feel sure I have successfully clicked here, and then a little bit there, in order to book lunch for two at one o’clock, perfectly plain and simple, somehow by way of a rogue and gammy digit or an all too regular breakdown in concentration, what I have in fact commissioned is a wedding reception, say – something quite intimate for around 20 people: champagne and photos, and then the withdrawal to a snug and civilised private room upstairs, this involving cake... [download PDF]
95: L'Absinthe January 27 2011
I really felt quite sorry for the place. I mean to say, it’s one thing to inflict upon an establishment a restaurant critic, but when I booked a table for four at L’Absinthe in Primrose Hill – billed as ‘your local French restaurant’ – I was breathlessly clutching to my bosom the fat and secret knowledge that one of my guests was to be the highly regarded cook and gastronomic writer, Frances Bissell. You all know Frances from, among many other things, the food articles she writes every month for the page opposite this one... [download PDF]
94: Savoy Grill January 20 2011
The Savoy! Oh yes, I remember it well. For was it not here that I took tea with the Queen, got wild with Marilyn, duetted with Sinatra in the American Bar, devoured Peche Melba with Escoffier, glugged down Dom Perignon with Olivier (while still he was with Vivien) and then compared Burberrys with Bogie and Bacall …? Well no, actually – but plenty of people seem to share or imagine memories just such as these, so very strong is the allure, you see – so indomitable the legends surrounding this fabulous London landmark... [download PDF]
93: 2010 Restaurant Roundup January 13 2011
Welcome back, folks! can you still remember whether or not you enjoyed your festive turkey? I did, thanks for asking. For the first time we got it from Allens of Mayfair: the best I have ever eaten – and so was their fillet of beef. Superb. But that’s all over. So – straight down to business: do you fancy a touch of lunch? No seriously – I’m asking you. Inviting you. I really am. Well look: we’re two weeks into a so-called new year, but bloody hell – it’s all so very strikingly and depressingly similar to the fag end of the last one, don’t you think? Grey. Raw. Chilly and colourless, quite frankly, and it’s getting me down. So I thought we could do with a lift – and that’s why I was wondering whether, if you’ve nothing more pressing on your hands, you felt you might care for a bite... [download PDF]
92: Oliver's December 23 2010
God rest ye, merry gentlemen! And ladies, of course. And nor am I forgetting the pinkcheeked little kiddywinks, Lord love them – for ‘tis the season to put your feet up. Not by way of slipping on black ice and coming a rather nasty cropper, no of course not – but in the sense of taking it easy, at the end of another long year. At which point in my narrative said ladies (see above) will be scoffing. Not as in mince pies, but as in buckets of scorn. They will not be going Ho Ho Ho! – it’s Ha Ha Ha! they’ll be going... [download PDF]
91: Kettner's December 16 2010
So Soho. The very rackety glamour. A spillage of jolly happy people in Romilly Street, their parboiled and giggly faces lit up by Kettner’s white and vertical neon sign – so very ridiculously overscaled. It recalls the glory days, that great sign, when Soho was posh as well as twinklingly brash, tawdry and unashamed – and the good news is that on the right night, if you’re in the right mood, this wonderful part of London still can be all of those things... [download PDF]
90: Caponata December 9 2010
Have you ever witnessed a chariot race at full and furious tilt in a genuine Roman amphitheatre on the very tip of Sicily, as the scarlet and kingfisher sunset is scented by not just flowers but the spit-roasting of boars, and the air so warm from the breath of Africa? I have. Just one of the wackily memorable experiences that befall a journo who spends his time forever scribbling ‘lifestyle’ features, as I used to for The Times. This particular no-expense-spared jolly to Sicily was in aid of the launch of a plastic watch, though what the connection with all of the Ben Hur folderol is now quite lost to me; Jesus, it was lost to me even at the time, this very largely due to gallons of the wonderful local Nero d’Avola wine... [download PDF]
89: Shaka Zulu December 2 2010
"Zulus to the South East. Thousands of them …!" So, in the 1964 film, says Lieutenant Bromhead, as enthusiastically played by a blond and youthful Michael Caine employing a highly improbable upper class accent which – unlike his guard – rather tends to slip. I thought it wise, you know, when faced with the task of reviewing a supposedly Zulu restaurant to get the inevitable references to this iconic film safely out of the way at the very beginning. Otherwise it would be looming, wouldn’t it? Forever it would be hovering at the back of your mind: half remembered flickers – black skin and red coat, not to say a drunken Jack Hawkins... [download PDF]
88: Les Deux Salons November 25 2010
When I get to describing the lush and very fabulous new Covent Garden brasserie I lunched at the other day, you might justifiably wonder why the picture accompanying this week’s offering succeeds in portraying precisely none of it. This is because the photo of The Times restaurant critic Giles Coren and myself was not taken in Les Deux Salons, because I forgot. On occasion, the Ham&High sends along a professional to take care of this rather tedious side of things, and at other times I rely upon a dinky little red camera that I habitually have about my person. Normally, I place it quite prominently upon the table expressly in order to remind me about the picture, and I didn’t. So I forgot... [download PDF]
87: Chez Nous November 18 2010
There was a time, eons ago, when the area around Belsize Park tube station was not wholly made up of places to eat and drink. There used to be things like a chemist, a travel agent and the sort of very posh chocolate shop where all the yummy violet creams and raspberry fondants were piled up artistically into pyramids on white paper doilies, these in turn gracing a series of crystal footed stands in glass-fronted cabinets. We schoolboys would stare into the window – very velvety and swagged – marvelling at the upholstered chocolate boxes with immense silk bows and taffeta roses…marvelling too at the fact that Belsize Park could support so very many millionaires who actually had the nerve to cross the threshold, and also the loot to buy this stuff... [download PDF]
86: Clos Maggiore November 11 2010
"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him”. No less true today than when Bernard Shaw bunged it down, nearly 100 years ago. Although these days we don’t always go so far as to hate or despise – merely we will get bloody annoyed or, worse, completely fail to comprehend. Not the nuance, the subtle undercurrent or the general thrust of the thing, you understand, so much as the actual articulation. In London, the daily tsunami of alien accents and regional dialects allied to the grunts, repetitive expletives and ‘txt-speak’ of the younger crowd all combine to make it very hard indeed to decipher a sausage... [download PDF]
85: Café Med November 4 2010
Some people don’t drink wine, you know. Now if you are anything like me, you will surely find this rather hard to believe, but I have it on authority that it’s true. Somewhere, beyond my ken, tucked away into hinterlands unknown to me, there are lurking folk who will smugly prefer a nice good strong cup of tea any day of the week – or else they’re into real ale, v.large G&Ts, vodka and Red Bull, technicolour cocktails, Charlie, crack, Ecstasy or Evo-Stik. Not me, though – wine remains my drug of choice: almost always red and usually from Italy or France (largely because I’m Old School and idle)... [download PDF]
84: The Buttery Café, Burgh House October 28 2010
'Appy 'Ampstead! If you want a Beano – it’s a fair old treat! So runs the exuberant caption to one of the delightful old Underground posters currently on display in a charming upper room in Burgh house (pronounced as in ‘brrr, it’s cold’ – whatever you might have heard to the contrary). Pretty and light, the original panelling in duck egg blue, and as neat and approachable a little exhibition as ever you could wish for. The accompanying very busy cartoon on this poster depicts all sorts of revellers at the funfair – some old girls having a right good knees-up, a family being fleeced at the hoop-la stall, and a very elegantly turned out military officer tickling the nape of a lissome young lady with what would appear to be an ostrich plume: she seems to be responding well to his flirtation... [download PDF]
83: Comida October 21 2010
Have you ever talked food, with foodies? Real foodies, I mean – not people such as us, who merely welcome a damn good lunch or dinner made up with care of fresh ingredients, well and simply cooked. No no – I’m talking about people who view the business of consumption both as a competitive sport and a trial of strength. They will tell you they are committed, you see (and many of them should be). They will vie to outdo one another on an ever-escalating scale of exaggeration and unlikelihood: you will be smothered by their memories, real or imagined, of having eaten the most outlandish things in perfectly unspeakable locations... [download PDF]
82: 108 Marylebone Lane October 14 2010
Fade up. Longshot of woman passing through large glass doors of a swish and cutting-edge restaurant in fashionable Marylebone. Close-up. Uncertainty flickers. Smile. Her eyes light up in recognition. Cut to hairy old hack seated at a table at the very far end, scribbling in a notebook. Cut to woman. Camera pulls back to track her confident progress. Cut to two-shot of same very attractive woman – a ringer for Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music – while hairy old hack rises to greet her... [download PDF]
81: The Old White Bear October 7 2010
Stewed worst end of mutton, cabbage boiled to lank and reeking colourless exhaustion – and then, lying with malevolence just beneath the surface, a spirited undertone of Dettol. Though no, here is not a description of the dinner I had the other evening at the Old White Bear, but the pungent memory of an odour that assailed me on the journey down there. They say you can’t remember smells or be wafted back in time by them unless they again are storming your nostrils, but that doesn’t seem to be true for me – because as I walked past the ritzily refurbished block of luxury flats that once was the New End Hospital, I’d swear this wretched aroma was seeping through the very brickwork and snaking its way right into me... [download PDF]
80: Côte Brasserie September 30 2010
"Cot?!" I said. "Cot?! You can’t call a chain of bistros ‘Cot’. A cot is what a baby goes to sleep in. Whatever can have possessed the man?" The man, of course, would be Richard Caring (as it so often is) who not too long ago hit upon the wheeze of bringing the Ivy to the masses. Not quite maybe how he himself might have put it, but nonetheless here is the root of the concept. And it’s not a bad concept at all. Then I learned that we were in fact talking about Côte. With an ‘e’ and a circumflex. The Côte has got his hat on, hip hip hip hip hooray. Yes well – still don’t like it... [download PDF]
79: The Camden Brasserie September 23 2010
Forty years ago, Camden Town was not famous for the Roundhouse, the Lock or Stables Market, and nor for the colourful and exhaustingly energetic explosion of touristy shops leading away from the station. Here was not a young and trendy, sought-after and media-savvy area, oh my God no. Forty years ago, Camden Town was famous only for being a dump – North London’s most notorious don’t-go-unless-you-have-to area jammed full of dosshouses and drunks – and where, as a consequence, beautiful if very run-down period terrace houses could be had for the proverbial song... [download PDF]
78: Marine Ices September 16 2010
So there I was, strolling down Jermyn Street quite in the manner of Burlington Bertie, as I frequently do – though not this time salivating over Hilditch & Key’s exquisite shirts and ties, nor even Bates’ fine titfers. No, for some odd reason, this warm and sunny afternoon my mind was on ice cream. Now, apart from the warm and sunny bit why should this be? I have, it’s true, always been rather fond of the stuff since, oh – way way back, when it largely came down to a Wall’s Neapolitan Family Brick, or else a Lyons Maid choc ice in the Odeon. A whirling Mr Whippy 99 at Hampstead funfair or on Brighton beach, yes okay – but in Jermyn Street…?... [download PDF]
77: Dean Street Townhouse September 9 2010
Mine was a rather small boarding school where nearly all of the boys were far more interested in rugger and cricket than they were in anything stupid, like the arts. I, of course, was one of the weirdies – a select and motley crew (as was constantly brought home to us) who could easily be recognised by our tweaks to the uniform and a jocular disdain for the illiterate hearties. And although a scorned and endangered species, whenever the annual House Play Competition was looming, suddenly we were hotly in demand: no sudden enthusiasm for the dramatic arts, no of course not – but a silver trophy was at stake, you see, and this, I am afraid, is the only language the establishment understood... [download PDF]
76: Sir Richard Steele September 2 2010
Who'd be a restaurant critic, eh …? “I would!”, I hear you shout – and of course I do know exactly what you mean: there is a considerable upside, no denying it. But at base, you know, it’s very much all brickbats and no bouquets, believe me. If you give a glowing review, or if someone enjoys reading it, you never hear a dicky bird. But blimey, should you ever offend a reader by criticising his favourite hangout, said reader will soon let you know about it. If you dare to offend the restaurant itself, letters will be written. Ah well... [download PDF]
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]
