Restaurants
Dear Mary: How can I make my shy friend’s generosity plain?
Q. I have a friend who can be shy and inhibited. Recently, he was invited to stay on a Caribbean…
There’s only one place to mourn another Labour loss
Ed is a plank. He was always a plank — and now he is in Ibiza being a plank. Plankety–plankety-plank:…
The Portrait restaurant: a secret glade of stone and brick, suspended above Trafalgar Square
The Portrait Restaurant lives at the top of the National Portrait Gallery, London. It is fiercely modern, but likeable. You…
Dear Mary: How can I stop friends calling without warning?
Q. I have moved from London to the centre of a historic market town, now becoming famous as a foodie…
The Ivy Chelsea Garden: Richard Caring has finally built a restaurant I admire
The Ivy Chelsea Garden is a restaurant inside an Edwardian house disguised as a Tudor house on the King’s Road;…
A cemetery with cocktails: La Coupole and the spirit of the brasserie
La Coupole, Montparnasse, is the grandest and most famous of the old pre-war Parisian brasseries; that is, if you have…
Dear Mary: What can I do to make couples split the bill fairly?
Q. I’m a single bloke now and for various reasons don’t foresee any change to that status. I have moved…
Kitty Fisher’s: proof that the PM has good taste in restaurants, if not in friends
David Cameron is too cowardly, or too cynical, to debate with Ed ‘Two or Possibly Three Kitchens’ Miliband — which…
Is the Dorchester the designated grand hotel for fat people? The portions at its new grill say so
The Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane, is a cake floating in space. All grand hotels create a parallel universe in which…
Rowleys is Did Mummy Love Me Really? food – and it’s perfect
I think Rowley’s is the perfect restaurant; but I am really a gay man. Rowley’s is at 113 Jermyn Street…
Rivea: a London annexe to the world’s maddest expensive restaurant
Rivea (stupid name) is in the bowels of Bulgari in Knightsbridge, a hotel which looks like a vast Virgin Upper…
Quaglino’s, the vampire brasserie
Quaglino’s is an ancient subterranean brasserie in St James’s, a district clinging to the 18th century with cadaverous fingers. It…
Panic, profiteering and a mysterious girl in a Mini: notes from Moscow
Moscow Here we go again. The rouble slides, then tumbles, and slides again. For those of us who remember the…
Dear Mary: How will Joan Collins introduce herself now she’s a dame?
Q. We enjoyed the Christmas University Challenge series featuring mature graduates, some of whom were more in the public eye than…
The real reason there’s a queue outside the Cereal Killer Café
The Cereal Killer Café is a temple to cereal on Brick Lane, east London. It serves only cereal — and also…
The most preposterous restaurant to have opened in London this year
Somerset House, a handsome Georgian palace on the Thames, was once the office of the Inland Revenue, and the courtyard was…
Dear Mary: Do I really have to take my shoes off indoors?
Q. There has been a marked increase in the number of people who have pristine flooring and are so keen…
The hotels trying to turn Cornwall into Kensington
Mousehole is a charming name; it is almost a charming place. It is a fishing village on Mount’s Bay, Cornwall,…
The real French embassy is a restaurant
Semper eadem. There is some basement in a Mayfair street that is forever France. It is not far from the…
A buffet in an Egyptian tomb
Atlantico is a vast buffet inside the Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort Spa and Casino in Gran Canaria. The Lopesan Costa…
Barry Humphries’s diary: The bookshop ruined by Harry Potter
Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just…
Want to shake hands with your dinner? Beast is your kind of restaurant
Beast is next to Debenhams on Oxford Street and it is not conventionally beast-like; rather it is monetised and bespoke…
Gymkhana is morally disgusting – and fortunately the food’s disgusting too
Gymkhana is a fashionable Indian restaurant in Albemarle Street. It was, according to its natty website, ‘inspired by Colonial Indian…
Dear Mary: Can I run out on an apprenticeship for my dream interview?
Q. I have been trying to get an apprenticeship in fashion for over a year without success. I just had…
Today’s Disney princesses look like Russian mafia wives. This is their café
The Disney Café is a gaudy hell on the fourth floor of Harrods, Knightsbridge. It is adjacent to the Harrods…
