All muted
The Piazza is not a piazza – a realisation which is always irritating – but a restaurant in the eaves…
Pig heaven
Labour is 30 points ahead, and in honour of this I review the Impeccable Pig in Sedgefield (Cedd’s field), a…
Italian underworld
Bardo St James’s Restaurant – a name which reads like a map – is a vast new Italian restaurant in…
Fine diner
Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior…
Hot cakes
Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in…
Falling stars
If you want real acting in films, forget the leads – it’s in the supporting roles that you’ll find true talent, says Tanya Gold
A personal best
In 2014, Nuno Mendes, a chef from Lisbon by way of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchens and his own Viajante in Bethnal…
My lunch with Liz
Sometimes this column has a guest reviewer: a dining companion. It was Liz Truss in late summer 2011, for the…
Civilisation in a sausage
When the Tory party set itself on fire last week a restaurateur told me: ‘Don’t worry, Tanya, we’ll still be…
Gorgeous George
The George, Fitzrovia, was Saki’s local, and a pub for men talking about cars when Great Portland Street was called…
Child’s play
Ave Mario looks like Clown Town, a soft-play centre in Finchley with a ball pit so large you could drown…
A tea fit for a Queen
I went to a garden party at Buckingham Palace once. It is coloured in my memory like childhood. There are…
Et in Arcade ego
I should know better than to visit restaurants assembled as if from disparate bricks, like thrift-shop Duplo: but the ever-credulous…
Let us eat cake
Amid the bronze cladding of Soho, with its pop-up, suck-down restaurants – the Cadbury’s Creme Egg Café was a nadir…
Into the labyrinth
I am never bored with Harrods, only disgusted, and it is disgust of the most animated and exciting kind. It…
Maine offender
Last week Chris Corbin and Jeremy King lost controlof the restaurant group they founded: Corbin & King, which made theWolseley,…
For the chop
Blacklock is the fourth restaurant of that name – there are others in Soho, Shoreditch and the City of London.…
The waste land
I was going to be jolly this week, for variety and denial, but I changed my mind. Instead, I wonder…
Convertibles
The earliest cars were technically convertibles because the technology to fit a roof did not exist. Now the dedicated retractable…
A victim of its own mythology
Langan’s, a brasserie off Piccadilly with curling orange neon signage calling its name, is under new management after it fell…
The hunt for breakfast
The centre could not hold, at least for Piggy’s. The drama of being the only greasy spoon in the West…
Lillie’s pad
The Cadogan hotel, Chelsea, is where Oscar Wilde was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, in Room 118,…
Chicken soup
Catherine Chicken is sickly. She has swollen up like a barrage balloon with an evil face and dinosaur feet. She…
A slice above
It is a truism that there is never enough schnitzel (‘slice’, German); or, rather, schnitzel does not get the attention…
Anything for a laugh
‘I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself,’ Mel Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in 1977, in…
