Food
Pharmacy 2 makes me like Damien Hirst
Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of…
The 5 per cent of people who decide everything (and how to be one of them)
What happens when 95 per cent of people like something, but 5 per cent of people prefer something else? You might think…
Sartoria: the home of Savile Row’s men who lunch
Sartoria is a pale grey restaurant on Savile Row. As evidence that this is London’s destination street — if menswear…
The perfect wines to toast the end of the hunting season
A few years ago, a distinguished cove in the diplomatic service was made High Commissioner to Australia. To prepare himself…
Le Caprice is trying to bring back the 1980s (unsuccessfully)
Le Caprice is a monochrome patch of the 1980s behind the Ritz Hotel, in the part of St James’s that…
Is EU referendum rebellion career suicide? Ask Harold Wilson’s cabinet...
The outsiders Did the seven members of Harold Wilson’s cabinet who campaigned to leave the Common Market in the 1975…
Meet Feng Shang Princess, the (lousy) Chinese restaurant in a boat
The Feng Shang Princess is a floating Chinese restaurant on the Regent’s Canal in north London, which flows from Little…
A whale of a time in the Faroes
The Faroes are a wonderful place to visit, discovers Camilla Swift
Center Parcs Longleat – a stealth socialist utopia on Lord Bath’s estate
Center Parcs Longleat is a holiday village in a forest in Wiltshire, on Lord Bath’s estate, so you can never…
Redecorate the restaurant, but you can’t redecorate the clientele
Forty-five Jermyn St lives in the left-hand buttock of Fortnum & Mason (F&M), a shop whose acronym is slightly too…
The Old Vic’s Pit Bar has fallen to the hipsters – Penny reviewed
Penny is an all-day café in the former Pit Bar in the basement of the Old Vic, a famous and…
The young entrepreneurs making the best of Spain’s crisis
Lara Prendergast finds delicacies amid the dilapidation in Andalucía
I went to Pedro’s Tex Mex Cantina to claim my racist sombrero
Pedro’s Tex-Mex Cantina is a fantastical shack near a ring road in Norwich. It was recently asked to stop handing…
Smith & Wollensky doesn’t even serve the best steaks in Covent Garden
Smith & Wollensky is a restaurant from The Shining: a terrifying American steak joint by the Thames, four months old,…
Having a ball in La Baule
The reaction of the chap on the door at Le Bidule told me that they weren’t used to seeing English…
Finally, a foodie restaurant that isn’t pretentious, overpriced or insulting to the intelligence
I cannot review the Gay Hussar every time the Labour party behaves like a self-harming teenager (‘I don’t want to…
Where comics find their Edinburgh comfort food
Mum’s, or to use its full title, Mum’s Great Comfort Food, is a restaurant in Edinburgh designed to soothe itinerant…
Not just a fad: the dangerous reality of 'clean eating'
The ‘clean eating’ revolution is more likely to make you ill than healthy
Boastful, narcissistic, overpriced: welcome to Jamie’s Italian
Jamie’s Italian is squeezed into the Devonshire Arms on Denman Street, Soho, borne on the duplicitous winds of TV shows…
The missing ingredient for a perfect gazpacho
We were eating tapas and talking about Spain. Leaving caviar on one side, when jamón ibérico is at its best,…
Prue Leith’s diary: When did weddings stop being for parents?
My Cambodian daughter and her husband have just got married again. Wedding One was a Buddhist affair in our drawing…
Tripe, pale tawny port and LSD: the delicious flavours of Oporto
‘When he’s away, the thing he misses about Porto is the tripe.’ I was talking to Eduarda Sandeman, wife of…
A fake fishing village, and the nastiest thing I’ve eaten as a restaurant critic
Selfridges is skilled at making things that are not hideous (women) look hideous (women dressed as Bungle from Rainbow or…
Venetian restaurants know I’m English from the back
The Gatto Nero — or ‘Black Cat’ — is in Burano, a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. It is…
Susan Hill’s French notebook: My struggle to avoid local cuisine
An overnight stop on the Ile de Ré taken between the St Malo ferry and the Quercy, where we always…
