AA Gill reviews

Sunday, November 16, 2008 - Depending on the delicacy of your own social digestion, the River Caff either fills you with syrupy feelings of excitement, warmth and nameless intellectual superiority, or it makes you want to join a nihilist terror cell and buy a length of rope. It represents everything you hate: peasant food made absurdly chic and expensive, served to smug, parasitic liberals. Well, I know where I stand. I know where I belong. I’m on the inside, smirking out.

Sunday, October 26, 2008 - Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley is a patrician’s dining room, a hushed, heavy, ponderous place where the light is eked out like the housemaster’s sherry, the waiters walk on eggshells and talk in thick, frothy accents, the customers are groups of wet-lipped and dry-eyed men, bottom-sniffing. It has the meaty atmosphere of an expensive food brothel, catering to the sated. Wareing is a man I’ve always considered as being among the best cooks in the country.

Sunday, October 12, 2008 - Although this is Hartnett’s restaurant, the head chef is credited as being Diego Cardoso. Everything else on the menu is very good. We started with a pressed rabbit terrine with a merlot vinaigrette. This was the best bunny pâté I’ve had, encompassing all that’s finest in Thumper: subtle timing, a lovable softness, tenderness, a great sense of humour and jelly. But having none of his flaws: toughness, dryness and buck teeth.

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - It was with a heavy bowel, and empty expectations, that I went to Andaman at the St James's Hotel, over-cheffed by a German with a troika of astral projections...

Sunday, August 31, 2008 - I’ve left very little space for this week’s restaurant, because it’s Oliver Peyton, and I like Oliver, and it isn’t very good. Peyton’s restaurants are an almanac of life in London over the past couple of decades...The Lawn, the latest, is the cafe inside (and outside) Bishop’s Palace in Bishop’s Park, Fulham. If you can walk there pushing a pram, then you might think it’s a local amenity, though if you are pushing a pram, you might think it pricey for a public building in a park.

Sunday, August 17, 2008 - The food is far better than they deserve, or notice. It’s good value, the room smells of deep-fried Basque, and there’s weird piped music. But then, Spanish music all sounds like someone stamping on seagulls. The service was Spanish in the Fawlty Towers sense, and the waiter at the door asked for the name we booked in. The Blonde gave hers. He frowned. “You have another name?” he asked. Which is a particularly asinine question, even for a Spaniard. “How about Timbo?” I said. “Ah, yes, Mr Timbo. This way.” The old Sloane-cloned name.

Sunday, August 03, 2008 - So, what's a restaurant like this for? I couldn't say. I don't know anyone who wants to eat like this, who would put up with the stress and the interruptions and the business and the fawning and the constant attention; the information, the formality and the rictus politeness. This was a 50-thank-yous dinner. It's grand, nostalgic, arrogant, laughable, laudable and impossibly awkward. Dinner that has lost its way. Grand hotels are the refugee camps for French haute cuisine. If you were thinking of giving to Oxfam, perhaps you might consider eating at the Connaught instead.

Sunday, July 27, 2008 - Ambassade de l’Ile is the oddest restaurant I’ve reviewed all year. I truly believed I would never see this sort of place again outside of France, or the kitscher Gulf hotels. This site was famously Chanterelle, an airy, light room, beloved of cultured and passive gay men. Then it was the friendly and worthy Danish restaurant Lundum’s, and now it’s this, what can only be described as a French theme restaurant.

Sunday, June 29, 2008 - This is a very good restaurant. Relaxed about everything, except the cooking, and the service was attentive, but then it would be. The Style desk had booked me in as Mr Relief, so-ho-ho. They didn’t even look at the book when I walked in. “You’ll be dining with Mr Clarkson then.” The big nipple, yes.

Sunday, February 10, 2008 - It is a Japanese restaurant. Japanese food is the infinity pool of eating out. The name means something opaquely obvious and random in the Japanese way, like “sake’s good for you”. They make you take off your shoes, which I can’t bear. It’s a sort of striptease dress code. And, instead of sitting on the floor, which I hate even more, they’ve compromised and lowered the floor under the table. The effect is neither squatting nor sitting, more like trying to eat fish with sticks at an infant school. It’s arse torture.

Sunday, January 13, 2008 - As I looked round, I realised that nobody in this room was actually paying for their food: it was all on expenses. And, ultimately, all expense accounts are paid for by people who use goods and services. I hope it’s scant joy for you to know that, although you will never eat, nor be able to afford to eat, at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, you are still able to pay for those who do.