The Social World

Category: Food

A trip to Fortnum’s turned me into an expert gift-giver

I had only been to Fortnum & Mason once before. The first time I went, I wasn’t sure what I was getting in to. I remember that the distinct, pale eau-de-nil (mint green) exterior – its signature color – was framed by cream trim and Georgian sash windows stacked neatly across several stories. It was charming and slightly whimsical, like a confectioner’s box scaled up to building size.

My maiden voyage was with the British skateboarder and artist Blondey McCoy, who excitedly led my wife around the hallowed halls as an unofficial tour guide during the bustling Christmas season last year, sporting an infectious Cheshire-cat grin. I was jetlagged and generally not festive, but the energy was palpable. I began to turn from a Scrooge into a believer.

I had never heard of the famous hamper, a sturdy, honey-colored wicker basket with leather straps and brass hardware with the F&M monogram stenciled across the front in bold black lettering. I learned that you fill them with biscuits, chutney, crackers, thick-cut marmalade and loose-leaf tea. It lands like a curated picnic from the royal household, equal parts tradition and light performance art, with just enough snobby appeal to make it fun. I left with a small selection of sweets and didn’t think I would ever be back.

That changed when I got invited to return to Fortnum’s by my beloved pal Plum Sykes, a successful author, longtime Vogue contributor, and expert present-giver. Everything about her is effortless, but there’s a sharpness under the surface; she has a reporter’s instinct dressed up with social ease and genuine curiosity. She is an expert at cataloging the rituals and anxieties of upper-crust London and, for some reason, has taken pity on a tattooed American podcaster. She moved her diary around to take me shopping.

America has no equivalent to Fortnum’s; the best we have in New York City is Dean & DeLuca (RIP) and Zabar’s, but neither has the gravity, footprint, or upper-crust excess. Fortnum’s was kind enough to open the doors early for us. Plum and I grabbed our baskets and began to stroll around the store, and I realized our shopping styles were different. I am not a browser; typically, I go into any retail store with an objective in mind. If it is merely to kick the tires and sniff around, I still move swiftly; if it is for a specific purpose, then I go in like a SWAT team: efficient and quick.

Plum was going to leave no stone unturned, stopping at the tea counter and peppering the knowledgeable sales girl with questions before loading up on her favorite blends. We kept it moving, and I was struck by how many things in the store I was unfamiliar with. In all my years I had never heard of a tayberry, much less seen one in preserve form. Did I need pickled walnuts, Stilton in a ceramic crock or gentleman’s relish? Thank God I was with an expert.

With Plum as my translator and tour guide, I began to build a hamper for my parents, who live in Atlanta, Georgia. I wouldn’t call them adventurous eaters. I chose to focus on things they would like: branded tea towels, chocolate pearl biscuits, and cacao-dusted almonds. While Plum was ogling the Christmas ornament selection and trying to resist the tea sets that looked like they belonged in a costume drama, I was focused on finding a high-end, Lorna Doone-style shortbread cookie for my father.

After checking out honey varietals and several different fragrances, we made it upstairs to formally assemble the hamper, with the assistance of a young woman named Dare. She was striking and, if lucky, will be cast and photographed by the fashion photographer Angela Hill before she leaves for university in Dublin. The three of us made small talk until it was time to discuss shipping. My heart sank as my American Express card was returned to me; shipping to the US is only available from the Fortnum & Mason website. A combination of logistics issues and tariffs thwarted our wonderful morning of shopping.

I couldn’t leave empty-handed, so I bought a few tins of biscuits as a consolation prize. Plum made her purchases, and we took the elevator downstairs. The store was busy now, not quite in full swing, but the energy had changed. I love an institution, and Fortnum’s is just that, a special place with a fantastic history that means a lot to people. I will buy two hampers online when I am back in New York City: one for my family and one for Plum. It is Christmas, after all.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.

December 15, 2025
How I won over a Scrooge-like New Yorker

Like all men, my dear friend Chris Black is an absolutely terrible person to shop with. He behaves only marginally better than a boy toddler. As we stood on the street outside Fortnum’s, this New Yorker’s greeting to me was, “I’m not really a Christmassy kind of person.”

How anyone could say this when they are about to enter the Father Christmas of department stores is beyond me. Fortnum & Mason, with its crimson carpets and twirling mahogany doors, counters groaning with marzipan and chocolate and its gracious staircases and red-coated butlers transport even the most jaded shopper to a gentler time when Christmas shopping was an “outing,” one that you dressed up for, before people had even imagined scroll-and-click retail.

It’s the kind of place where the salespeople are terribly helpful, gray-haired women with the demeanor of kindly hospital matrons. They do things like give you a joss stick to take home to try before you buy it so you don’t waste money. And a quick shout-out to Pamela in the perfume section who did this, leading me to later buy four boxes of Montroi Oud Monsoon incense sticks, which should be part of every Christmas hamper.

It is the kind of place where you can sit on a pale pink leatherette banquette at a Formica-topped table in the ice cream parlor, and order tea and toasted crumpets mid-morning, while gazing out of the (original, Georgian) sash windows at the bustle of Piccadilly below while a Union Jack flutters in the wind beyond. It’s the kind of place where you can’t help but be cheered by the Britishness of the other clientele – men wearing Husky jackets and holding silver-tipped walking canes, women with lived-in faces as rumpled as their cable-knit sweaters, ladies in fur headbands and velvety capes, provincial types “just up for the day.” It’s not the kind of place for people who “aren’t Christmassy.”

(Jono White)

Still, Chris, who is a brilliant podcaster (co-host of How Long Gone) and fashion consultant, had at least leaned into the trad aesthetic for our shopping expedition. He was dressed as a pseudo-Englishman in a striped button-down, pink silk tie, jeans, navy sports jacket and a Barbour. “Wow,” I said as we walked inside, “you look like an unreconstructed 1980s Sloane.” He took this as a compliment and replied, “Yeah, in New York all the finance bros wear Barbours.”

We both grabbed gold shopping baskets with pale blue handles. “Let’s go to the hamper section,” Chris suggested, as he wanted to send one to his mom in Atlanta. I was hamper-focused too but, like most women, I could hardly bypass the other delights of Fortnum’s. “Let’s go to the tea section,” I countered, gesturing at the rows of timeless mahogany shelves with their huge tins, overseen by uniformed staff.

“I don’t drink tea.”

“Well, you should experience the tea counter,” I said. “There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.”

“Americans don’t drink tea,” he declared.

Against Chris’s will I made him go to the counter where I spent ages sniffing all the different teas, settling on two large bags of Victoria Grey, and took my time perusing the amazing array of silver strainers. When I put a Fortnum’s portable tea infuser in my basket for my daughter’s main Christmas present, Chris seemed surprised.

“That’s all you’re getting her?” he asked.

“Christmas is not about expensive presents in England,” I explained.

Chris emitted a sigh. “I have to go to the Phoebe Philo store for my wife’s gift.”

Since we were passing the chocolates section, I grabbed a box of the famous Rose and Violet Creams and suggested he get some chocolates for his mother. “She won’t eat them,” he said. “Let’s go to biscuits.”

Chris seemed more comfortable among the ginger nuts and fruitcakes, and chose a tartan-clad tin of shortbread for mom, while I took pots of cognac butter and lemon curd, which he thought was a pudding. When I told him we put it on bread and butter, he looked as though he might gag. “OK, hamper section?” he said hopefully, as I started investigating the honeys.

“Sure, and the Christmas decorations and wrapping paper?” I replied. “And cards?”

Chris looked anguished. “But they’re on the way,” I said, walking ahead.

A little later, as I put a small labrador dog bauble in my basket and added some tartan napkins and cards with bows on them, and showed him the adorable Winnie the Pooh porcelain that I think is an ideal gift for children (“I don’t have any children,” was Chris’s Scrooge-like response), and suggested we nip back downstairs for a jar of the famous Stilton, and perhaps grab a ham too, and why didn’t we pick up the long matches while we were at it, Chris fixed me with a weary gaze and said, “God, Plum, you really do this… properly.”

I was flattered, and before he could say “let’s go to the hamper section” one more time, suggested we stop by the perfumes. There was bound to be something for mom there. “Perfume departments make me feel like I’m in duty free at an airport.”

“This one isn’t like that,” I said. Chris dutifully followed me as I smelled every single candle and scent. He was soon entranced by the L.T. Piver perfumes and when I said, “Right, it’s late, let’s go get our hampers,” I could barely tear the man away.

Up on the fourth floor, Chris took mere seconds to choose a medium-sized square hamper with the famous black F&M monogram printed across the side. “My mom’s gonna love it,” he said excitedly. “Oh, and you know why this is a really good present?” I said. “Once your mom’s eaten everything, she can use it as a picnic basket. I’ve had mine 20 years.”

“Is that something people do here? Go on picnics?” asked Chris. I nodded. “I have never been on a picnic as an adult,” he said. Alas, poor Chris. My Christmas wish for this deprived podcaster is that he may one day go on a picnic in the English countryside, and that, eventually, he may one day become a person who is Christmassy.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.

December 15, 2025
How to make an unforgettable Christmas dinner

In the early 1970s, celebrity chef Jacques Pépin and his wife bought a dilapidated house in the Catskills so they could go skiing on the weekends. It was a real fixer-upper. Groups of friends would come up from New York City and pitch in on the renovation effort, and Pépin would serve dinner at the end of the day. These weekends were so much fun Pépin decided to memorialize them by hand-lettering and painting special menus.

How Pépin convinced his friends to let him sit in the kitchen sketching petits poissons and heads of broccoli while they slaved away at framing and drywalling his winter getaway is, admittedly, mysterious. Settling in to hand-paint a menu before getting down the pots and cooking a five-star meal doesn’t square well with the image of the DIY weekend warrior leading the charge on home renovations. Clearly, the man was both a culinary genius and a master of persuasion.

And his menus were utterly charming. They grew into a family tradition, where the menu for every special occasion was illustrated, lettered in Pépin’s elegant, curly script and preserved for posterity in the family archives. (They were, eventually, published in book form.) In addition to the list of courses, some had space for les invités, where the guests could sign and leave comments. Sometimes labels from the wine they’d enjoyed would be stuck on as well.

He made menus for outside events too, for instance a Christmas menu for a dinner cooked at Stone Acres Farm in Stonington, Connecticut, in 2016, with the courses listed in black ink and the wines in green. What a feast it was. They began with gougères, goose liver pâté and Stonington scallops. Then they followed soup and grilled Noank oysters with crémant from Savoie and Guy Larmandier Champagne. The pièce de résistance was roast goose with gravy and potatoes in goose fat, accompanied by Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Dessert was an apple tarte tatin paired with Sauternes. Not too shabby.

You might be tempted to dismiss Pépin’s handmade menus as a charming but irrelevant hobby, a sort of chef’s journal. But this would be to overlook the man’s genius. His menus are infused with perhaps the most important ingredient of all, something without which Christmas dinner is doomed: a sense of occasion. Like a wedding, Christmas is a milestone of sorts. Like a wedding, the very concept of Christmas dinner is burdened with expectations, fears and emotions. It demands ceremony and tradition, but also liveliness and warmth. How can this occasion, this time in history, this particular guest list, this family and this place be woven into one unforgettable evening – hopefully without burning down the house?

Handmade menus alone won’t do it, though they’ll help. It takes a master strategy, and the one I propose is straight from the wedding handbook: your outfit (or in this case your dinner), should include something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.

Something old – that’s easy. Christmas is all about time-honored culinary traditions: stuffed birds, roast boar (as I had once at a beautiful Christmas in Germany), tourtière in Québec, oysters on the half shell gulped down by the French, figgy pudding served up à l’Escoffier in a blaze of brandified glory. Something old puts you in touch with all ages past through the shadowy line-up of ancestors and ever-so-greats, all celebrating Christmas after Christmas, handing it on all the way to us.

But Christmas isn’t only about generations past. It’s also about the future: a fresh start, the birth of the baby Jesus, here to take on the world, live, die and reign forever. So the second element of a good Christmas menu is something new, adventurous and exciting. Time for crown roast of lamb, a terrifying cheese that looks like a brain, roasted brussels sprouts on a giant stalk which you can stand up on a platter in the likeness of a Christmas tree (or piece of medieval weaponry), trays of rich little sea urchins, the foie gras of the ocean.

Thirdly, something borrowed. When it comes to weddings, you borrow your grandmother’s necklace, your best friend’s hair clip or your sister’s shoes (if your sister lets you borrow her shoes, she doesn’t actually want them back, does she? Asking for a friend). It’s the same at Christmas: serve your grandmother’s shortbread, your best friend’s Caesar salad and shamelessly steal your sister’s recipe for mistletoe martinis.

Last but not least: something blue. It needn’t be food (though Stilton is always an option); it can be in the decor, a trick of light, a mood. Christmas isn’t all red and gold and green. Just ask Elvis: “I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.” Poignancy is part of the day, so they knew in medieval times; their carols were happy, but sometimes startlingly sad: “In sorrow endeth every love but thine, at the last.” Like salt, a pinch of Christmas sadness rounds and deepens the flavors of the day, counteracting the bitter and elevating the sweet.

Blue doesn’t only stand for sorrow. It also represents the precious and the good. When a bride wears “something blue,” it is supposed to mean purity and love. In medieval times, blue pigment from the lapis lazuli stone was the rarest and most expensive color – which is why it was used for depictions of the Mother of God.

So when you settle down this festive season in a corner of your hectic, wrapping-paper-strewn home, like Pépin mid-construction, to paint little watercolor fish and garlands on to your festive dinner menu, don’t forget to work some blue into the pattern. Without the lady in blue, there is no Christmas; without Christmas, there is no Christianity – and without Christianity, it’s a cold, lonely night, with nothing between you and the wolves.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

December 2, 2025
Why winter is the best time for a barbecue

Summer is usually associated with outdoor cooking which is a perfectly reasonable association. But standing over a hot grill or smoker when the mercury is rising is not the most pleasant of activities. Whatever you are cooking becomes seasoned with droplets of sweat.

Another oft-overlooked issue, particularly when it comes to smoking meats, is that temperature regulation of the cooking apparatus can be difficult when the ambient heat surrounding it is working in synergy with the heat inside it. While I have a friend who does competition cooking and isn’t a stranger to winning (he pushes his smoker up to 300°F) most of us lack the requisite skill for smoking a pork shoulder or brisket at that heat and pulling out a tender product at the end. Summer is absolutely the wrong time to get out the smoker. Winter is absolutely the right one.

It is true that the ambient temperature works in the opposite direction in winter, sometimes making it slightly more difficult to bring the smoker up to the desirable temperature of 225°F. But simply add some extra fuel and, voilà, problem solved. There is also very little likelihood of you adding sweat to the seasoning blend.

When it comes to what you smoke and how you season it, that’s a matter of personal preference. While debates over regional styles are fun, the beauty of smoked meat is its versatility. Season it with just salt and pepper. Season with salt, pepper and garlic. Go for a rub with sugar, cumin, chili powder and various other candidates from the spice cabinet. Use a mustard binder. Try a sriracha one. Don’t use a binder at all. Whatever route you choose, you will find people willing to engage in friendly dialogue about your technique.

These are great guidelines, but they are not written in stone. The US government tells us to cook our chicken to 165, but more experienced pitmasters know that 175-185 is better for dark cuts as it gives things more time to soften and render into the meat, making it succulent and tender. For shoulders and briskets, 204 degrees or so is the magic number, but what you’re really looking for is probe tender. This is not something that words can describe: it can only be learned from experience. In short, though, it’s not exactly what the screen on the digital thermometer reads, it’s how much resistance you feel while inserting it.

This result is also much easier to achieve when your smoker and the sun aren’t working in sinister harmony. In cooler weather, the heat from the smoker even gives the chef a bit of warmth during the process – useful when the cooking can stretch on for many hours, especially if you hit “the stall.” For those unfamiliar with the stall, it’s the point at which moisture evaporating from the meat begins to counteract the smoker’s heat, causing the internal temperature to hover stubbornly around 175 degrees. And sometimes it stays there for hours.

Of course, you can combat this with the Texas Crutch – wrapping your meat in butcher paper or foil when it hits 175 and then getting it up to probe tender. That does sometimes over-moisten the crust that forms, known as the bark. So while the Texas Crutch is not as controversial as spice rubs and binders, using one will create more opportunity to engage in friendly debate with fellow enthusiasts. But the point is that it works. And since it’s your meat, you do you. Just make sure to let the meat rest before serving.

A final point to make is that when smoking during the summer, you will need a hot shower afterwards to get the smell of the smoke bath off you. A hot shower during the summer just doesn’t hit the way it does when it’s cold outside, baby. Summer is not your friend, not your primetime, not the season in which you can totally shine.

So my advice is this: do not be afraid to reserve summer for steaks seared in a cast iron pan in the comfort of your air-conditioned kitchen. Save the serious outdoor sessions for a time when you need a coat – and the condensation of your breath in the air matches the gentle whisps wafting from the smoker.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

December 2, 2025
When it comes to bourbon, provenance matters

My wife Amber and I returned home, to the heart of where it all began for me – the Bluegrass. A day at the races at Keeneland felt like stepping into a painting: the autumn sun catching the coats of the Thoroughbreds, the crowd humming with excitement. The next night, we watched on as the Kentucky Wildcats nearly toppled Texas under the lights at Kroger Field, the air electric with hope.

But it was afterward, on the backroads, that Kentucky spoke loudest. Horses grazed behind old stone fences; the sweet, yeasty scent of mash rolled out of the distilleries that dot the countryside. In those quiet miles, I remembered how deeply I love this place and how fiercely I’ll defend her bounty, both her people and her goods.

I was moved to write a kind of manifesto: my brief guide to enjoying bourbon and to honoring the hands and heritage that make it worthy of its name.

The distillers and distributors must be Kentucky-based and preferably family-owned and operated. The true keepers of bourbon’s soul are Heaven Hill, Willett Distillery, Buffalo Trace and Brown-Forman.

Heaven Hill deserves special distinction. Founded in 1935 by the Shapira family, it remains the largest independent, family-owned distillery in Kentucky, a rarity in an industry now dominated by global corporations. Heaven Hill’s portfolio stands as proof that family stewardship still produces greatness: Elijah Craig, Henry McKenna, Evan Williams, Old Fitzgerald and their old-line cousins J.T.S. Brown, J.W. Dant and T.W. Samuels. These are bourbons tied not to marketing departments, but to lineage, craftsmanship and the families who built Kentucky’s bourbon tradition.

Willett Distillery, another Bardstown treasure, continues to bottle authenticity through generations of the Willett family and its labels such as Johnny Drum, Willett Reserve, Noah’s Mill and Rowan Creek testify to an unbroken commitment to small-batch excellence.

Buffalo Trace, owned by the New Orleans-based Sazerac Company, bridges Kentucky’s bluegrass roots with Louisiana’s river heritage – it was Kentucky bourbon’s first export market after all. Its masterpieces are Colonel E.H. Taylor, Eagle Rare, Blanton’s, Weller and the revered Pappy Van Winkle line.

They remind us of the deep cultural kinship between Kentucky and New Orleans: two regions bound by history, hospitality and whiskey. Few partnerships capture that spirit better than Buffalo Trace and the Van Winkle family, whose shared devotion to time, patience and provenance makes their bourbon nearly mythic.

Brown-Forman, though publicly traded, remains a family-controlled Kentucky institution. Through Woodford Reserve, Old Forester and their variants, the Brown family continues to guard a century-old tradition that still bears their name.

And finally, a note of caution. Never drink from Beam Suntory. Though some of its labels may once have been personal favorites, its Japanese ownership and Chicago headquarters place it far from the hills, people and heritage that define true bourbon.

However hard the sacrifice, one must forgo Basil Hayden, Maker’s Mark, Baker’s, Booker’s and Knob Creek in favor of the families and distilleries who remain faithful to Kentucky’s soil, culture and craft.

In bourbon, as in life, provenance matters. Drink from those who still make it, not those who merely market it.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

December 2, 2025
Anne of Green Gables perfected the kitchen mishap

There’s something wickedly entertaining in reading about other people’s kitchen debacles, whether actual or fictional. They’re just so relatable. The jelly that won’t jell in Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives is cruelly hilarious, but the best culinary catastrophe in classic fiction, for my money, is in Anne of Green Gables.

Stylish guests, including the upper-crust Mrs. Chester Ross, are dining at Green Gables and our ebullient Anne is on her very best behavior. All goes well until Marilla arrives with the pudding and a pitcher of pudding sauce.

On spotting the pudding sauce, our heroine’s eyes grow wide and terrified. In awful technicolor, recent events replay before her: how days ago, instructed to cover the sauce in the pantry, she forgot; how the next morning, remembering, she came back, only to find floating in it a mouse which had raided its last larder. How, horrified, she fished out the deceased with a spoon, disposed of the corpse and gave the spoon a thorough scrubbing, but forgot all about the contaminated sauce – until the fateful moment when Marilla carries it in, warmed up, to serve their ritzy guests with the dessert.

Throwing caution to the wind, Anne rises in her place and shrieks before the assembled company, “Marilla, you mustn’t use that pudding sauce. There was a mouse drowned in it. I forgot to tell you before.”

The silence that descends is punctuated only by the look Mrs. Chester Ross gives Anne and the fiery complexion of Marilla, whisking away the pudding sauce.

The joy of this vignette is that it goes beyond a simple food flop into the realm of social irony. We don’t just have a mishap; we get to be onlookers as several different kinds of mishap occur in quick succession, under the horrified and ritzy nose of Mrs. Chester Ross. Why this situation, doubtless excruciating for its main actors, should be so entertaining for everyone else, remains one of the little mysteries of human nature.

In late-Victorian Prince Edward Island, creatures in the food are a decided solecism. “Are you sure there ain’t a spider in that cream jug, Kate?” inquires the catty Cousin Ernestine in Anne of Windy Poplars. “I’m afraid I saw one when you poured my cup.” “We never have spiders in our cream jugs,” is the ominous response, and the kitchen door slams. How different from the social setting aboard ship with Patrick O’Brien in the Georgian era, where the lesser of two weevils, emerging from the crumbs of the captain’s meal, is appreciated and praised.

Better-known in Anne of Green Gables is the disaster of the liniment cake. Anne, eager to impress the new minister’s wife who’s coming to tea, bakes a vanilla layer cake that is, to all external appearances, a showstopper.

Unseen in the background, however, Fate is quietly slipping lead into the boxing gloves (not my own expression; P.G. Wodehouse’s). The vanilla jar from which Anne poured the cake’s flavoring had been refilled with anodyne liniment, a vile-tasting herbal remedy. Anyone who’s been convinced to try Buckley’s Syrups (advertised as “the taste people love to hate”) will probably sympathize with the feelings of the poor minister’s wife, adjured to try a slice as Anne had made it especially for her. She can’t keep a poker face and the truth comes out, to Anne’s extreme embarrassment.

Despite these scarring incidents, people generally eat like kings in the Anne series. It’s all such comfort food, too. They’re constantly roasting chickens, fetching strawberry pies out of the pantry, and coming home of a winter’s evening to the smell of roasting ham and buttered toast.

Anne’s first taste of ice cream comes at the Sunday School picnic. They make the dessert right there and then in the old-fashioned, pre-electricity way, with the sweetened cream in a tin liner, placed in a bucket of salted ice and churned by hand until frozen. “Sublime,” is Anne’s review.

Though nowhere in Prince Edward Island can be called far from the sea, the delight of freshly caught fish only comes up in Book 5, after she marries Gilbert, now a doctor, and moves to a fishing town. The highlight of their first meal is the sea trout given to them by Captain Jim. “They’re fresh as trout can be, Mistress Blythe. Two hours ago they were swimming in the Glen Pond.”

Anne outgrows her trials with baking; her chocolate cake recipe is to become the envy of her best friend Diana, who guiltily sneaks slice after slice as they picnic together, slimming regime notwithstanding.

Anne is also fortunate in securing the culinary services of her loyal housekeeper Susan Baker, who knows her way around a mixing bowl, feathering “an orange-frosted cake with coconut” without a second thought and who fills the pages of the later Anne books with monkeyface cookies, gold-and-silver cake, jam roly-poly, stuffed leg of lamb and apple crunch pie.

In L.M. Montgomery’s world, the good eat well and like it; the bad do neither. Aunt Mary Maria, the nightmare guest who comes to visit and never leaves in Anne of Ingleside, is entirely unappreciative of the culinary delights proffered for her enjoyment and does her best to ruin everyone else’s enjoyment as well.

At Christmas dinner, her running commentary is as follows: “White meat only, please. (James, eat your soup quietly.) Ah, you are not the carver your father was, Gilbert. He could give everyone the bit she liked best. (Twins, older people would like a chance now and then to get a word in edgewise. I was brought up by the rule that children should be seen and not heard.) No, thank you, Gilbert, no salad for me. I don’t eat raw food. Yes, Annie, I’ll take a little pudding. Mince pies are entirely too indigestible.”

This frightful relative stays on for months and months, appreciating nothing yet dropping dark hints about selling her home and moving in with them forever. Politeness prevents Anne and Gilbert from showing a blood relation the door.

In the end, it’s a birthday cake that finally drives out their unbidden guest. Enraged by the 55 candles revealing her age to the party guests, Aunt Mary Maria packs up and stalks out, “forgiving everybody with her last breath.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
The tragedy of France’s palm oil croissants

Occasionally, a French person reveals – without any malice or superciliousness – that they run on an alternative operating system from us Brits. And on an entirely different motherboard from our American cousins.

Over the years of gathering supporting anecdotes, a surprising theme has emerged: butter. Take my first visit to Paris, more than 30 years ago. I innocently asked for butter with my croissant. Simple answer: “Non.” Naturally, I remonstrated. The waiter retorted: “A croissant eeez butter!”

And, in fairness, he had a point. Upon biting into said viennoiserie, I had to concede: it was nothing like the dry grocery store versions I was used to. Moments later, a small pot of raspberry confiture was graciously placed on my table. (To this day, it remains the best service I’ve ever received in Paris.)

Fast-forward 20 years. I’m in rural Brittany, ordering a ham and cheese baguette. This time, the young woman behind the counter asked if I’d like butter. “Mais bien sûr!” Clearly irritated by my overconfidence, she spread it thinly, added the fillings, and was about to wrap when I piped up with a final request. Mayonnaise? “But you already ’av butter!” Her revulsion was palpable.

Still smarting from my Paris humiliation decades earlier, I instinctively dug in. After all, I knew what I wanted. Butter and mayonnaise are hardly strangers in a sandwich – and I happen to be an expert in my own taste. She resentfully slopped some on, gratis. I asked for mayo on my wife’s sandwich too, if only to normalize it.

When we moved to France permanently, we rented a tiny house in the center of a small Catalan town. Our British landlord drew our attention to the croissantière just around the corner. Assuming this was a veritable French term for “croissant specialist” (it isn’t), I investigated the next morning. The croissants did not disappoint – still warm, they transported me back to that Parisian revelation. So naturally, I returned the next day. And the next…

“You’ll get fat,” the croissant-maker’s wife warned, deadpan, as she handed over the bag. I looked up, expecting a smile. There was none. I tried to hide my offense, but her comment bounced around my head for days. It wasn’t just the bluntness – it was the complete lack of commercial instinct. In the UK or US, such patronage would earn you loyalty points and a branded tote bag. In France, you receive an aesthetic warning.

Ashamed but still addicted, I tried to ration myself. Mercifully, a few years later, we moved to a nearby village with its own boulangerie. A fresh start. The next morning, brimming with anticipation, I bit into my new dealer’s wares. Gone was the delicate shatter of buttery lamination. Absent was the fragrant plume of warm dairy. What I tasted was more like… wax. Hydrogenated, seed-oil-infused wax. It stopped me mid-bite.

I soon learned the truth. Many bakeries, faced with high butter prices and early mornings, have outsourced croissant production to industrial suppliers. These “croissants in waiting” arrive frozen and full of margarine. A croissant pur beurre can contain up to 30 percent real butter by weight. The industrial kind? Next to nothing. But thanks to the slippery language of au beurre versus pur beurre, no one’s technically lying. Roquefort has a charter. Camembert has a lawyer. The croissant? No such protection.

I now conduct covert pastry runs to our neighboring town. I smuggle them home in unmarked bags, slipping them past my own boulangerie like a man hiding dinner receipts from his wife – except the mistress is covered in egg wash.

It’s tragic, considering the way the French can deify food, to witness them quietly debase it. The croissant, that most sacred of breakfast icons, is now often a margarine-infused counterfeit.

Frédéric Roy, a Nice-based baker, has tried to sound the alarm. His campaign to label industrial pastries has gained traction, but little legal weight. Meanwhile, “butter blend” croissants made with palm oil and diacetyl are increasingly sold as au beurre – just without the taste or conscience.

Healthwise, it’s a grim spectrum. On one end, the artisanal croissant – a golden coronary wrapped in charm. On the other, the industrial version: trans fat-free, yes, but with all the digestibility of a scented candle.

If you want to evaluate the prosperity of any French neighborhood, buy the most expensive croissant you can find. It will tell you the real story.

And perhaps that’s the truest measure of where France now finds itself: a country still wrapped in the golden flake of tradition, but filled more and more with something else entirely. The croissant was once a luxury. Then it became a daily pleasure. Now it’s a performance – ersatz, over-rehearsed and mostly margarine.

A rich pastry for a country that can no longer afford the substance, but insists on maintaining the form.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

November 18, 2025
Go to Cicoria for the food, stay for the opera

Smart Italian restaurants in cultural destinations are like buses: you wait ages for one and suddenly two come along at once. I recently praised Locatelli at London’s National Gallery. Returning to the city, it is the turn of Cicoria at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden; a joint under the aegis of Angela Hartnett, well-known for her upscale restaurant Murano in Mayfair, her casual chain Cafe Murano and her frequent appearances on the box.

Surprisingly few of the world’s great opera houses have given much thought to catering, although things are improving. I ate very well recently at Madrid’s Teatro Real and you can push the boat out with caviar at the Met in New York. What makes this new caff at Covent Garden of note is the intention that it should be a destination, whether or not Tristan und Isolde whets your appetite. Traditionally, eating at the Royal Opera House meant booking a table in the Crush Room, a comforting essay in red plush, gilt and chandeliered glory, with two decent courses before curtain-up, and then a dessert (the spiced apple cheesecake is delicious) in the interval.

‘Terry is a great believer in the freedom of hate speech’

Now the Royal Opera has three other restaurants. Cicoria doesn’t offer an interval service but as it’s open continuously from midday till reasonably late, the option for opera and ballet goers is an early pre-performance supper. Unlike the Crush Room, which is for ticket holders only, there’s a clear intention to attract a wider public. It is, I assume, part of a smart strategy to open up the Opera House as a destination, particularly to travelers from abroad. Please note that I struggled with that last sentence to avoid using “reaching out” (my current pick of the most meaningless phrases du jour).

The Opera House team and their caterers have worked hard to make Cicoria’s rooms beautiful and the right side of luxurious. The slightly too low ceiling has been gilded, there is impressive woodwork and the upholstery is pretty and ethnic-y. The lighting from shaded table lamps and hanging art glass fixtures is excellent. There’s an expansive heated terrace with views of the Covent Garden Piazza.

The menu has few of the expected classics, but more than enough come-hither dishes. I could have happily ordered any of the offerings with the possible exception of the cuttlefish, with whom I have a warm relationship thanks to years of scuba diving.

Lady G kicked off with a beautifully presented Castelfranco salad with hazelnuts and a rich robiola cheese dressing. For lettuce novices, Castelfranco is the pale green one with pink spots hailing from Giorgione’s hometown in the Veneto. My gnocchi with porcini and fried breadcrumbs was sublime.

Main courses delivered as well. Despite it being the wrong time of year for a cold dish, I ordered vitello tonnato. The veal was pink, very thinly sliced, dressed with a robust and not overly viscous tuna mayonnaise and garnished with anchovies and capers. It was without a doubt as good a vitello tonnato as I have had anywhere, including in Turin, its alleged birthplace. Lady G had a perfectly cooked, crisp-skinned seabass fillet lounging on a king-sized bed of lentils. We did not need side dishes, including the creamiest, cheesiest, most indulgent soft polenta, but were thrilled we ordered them anyway.

That said, it may have been a tactical error. When the dessert list arrived, we had to admit defeat despite really wanting to try the roasted figs with zabaione, the caramelized Amalfi lemon tart, the Manjari chocolate mousse… enough already. The wine list is reasonably concise, not just Italian, with plenty on offer by the glass. I drank some “Angela Hartnett cuvée” Tuscan red which was more than decent and no more foolishly priced than most restaurant wines. If you like that sort of thing, there’s a good range of non-alcoholic drinks. Prices here are now what I would call “London standard” for a place of this class: say £100 a head.

A few bravos are in order. First to the chef, Angela Hartnett, for consistently providing some of the best Italian cooking around. Second to the Royal Ballet and Opera for investing thought and money around the proposition that what’s not on stage needs to reflect and respect the quality of what is. And maybe, just maybe, some hitherto non ballet or opera-going diners at Cicoria may think that it’s worth checking out what goes on in the auditorium, too.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

November 5, 2025
Zohran Mamdani’s policies will make restaurants bland and expensive

There’s no shortage of catastrophic predictions for New York City under Zohran Mamdani’s leadership. While we probably won’t see breadlines, the wildly expensive, exhaustingly derivative restaurants that dominate the New York food scene are likely to become more dominant.

Mamdani’s big pledge on food is to “make halal eight bucks again.” But it’s a “false promise” of street-food affordability according to Heritage Foundation economist Nicole Huyer. She says Mamdani’s economic program, which includes higher taxes, steeper leasing regulations and a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, will effectively make restaurants even more expensive.

“All of these great socialist policies that [Zohran’s] planning to implement – he’s saying that it’s going to bring affordability back and that he’s pro-small business,” Huyer told The Spectator, but “it’s very burdensome for small businesses and it makes it difficult for those that are just starting out. Whereas the more corporate chain restaurants might be better equipped to absorb those costs, high taxes and tight regulations make it difficult to start and grow a business, and when restaurants have those high start-up costs, they pass those on to the consumer.”

Walk down any street in New York and you will notice lots of similar-looking places: from casual to ritzy hotspots, the multilocation restaurant group model reigns supreme. Despite Mamdani’s claim that he will champion the little guy, chain restaurants are likely to become even more dominant on his watch. Take a New York restaurant company such as Major Food Group, which owns trendy hotspots like Carbone, Sadelle’s and Torrisi. It wouldn’t like to be considered a “chain,” but the business model is effectively the same: combining capital and condensing costs to expand and dominate. It results in similarities in menus, aesthetics and culture. And while such groups can more easily absorb the new costs under Mamdani, riskier models and mom-and-pop restaurants will probably no longer be able to.

That’s assuming they open at all. There is already much uncertainty about what Mamdani’s reforms will mean for the restaurant world. If landlords are prevented from evicting tenants, as is promised, it will “create serious uncertainty in the market,” one New York-based commercial realtor told The Spectator. “It will just make it harder to sign a lease on a restaurant, because there will be fewer landlords willing to take the risk of leasing their property. There are smart ways to structure a lease: build in a sales kick, sign for five years instead of ten, negotiate terms that actually set you up to be profitable. But you can’t legislate your way out of the basic risk-reward of running a restaurant in New York City.”

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Trying to do so is likely to result in disaster. There are about 300,000 New Yorkers employed by the restaurant subsector, according to the state comptroller, and the average salary is around $17 an hour – before tips. That’s a far cry from the $30 minimum wage pushed by Mamdani.

“The first push will most likely be restaurant workers’ wage increase, possibly even an elimination of the tipped wage element which allows tipped workers to get a lower minimum,” says chef and restaurateur Andrew Gruel. “Restaurants will have to cut [costs] to make any profit at all, decreasing quality and service, which will then lead to lower sales and a downward spiral.”

However, not all the big players in New York’s restaurant scene are on the same page. Keith McNally – the force behind institutions such as Balthazar, Minetta Tavern and the Odeon – has called Mamdani “fantastic” and “the future,” while dinging his own “affluent, paranoid friends.”

One such friend is fellow restaurateur Dave Rabin, who told the New York Post he would “do anything to try to stop [Mamdani]” from becoming mayor. “I sent [McNally] some of my posts on Mamdani, and instead of responding to me, he took one of them and posted it and called me a racist.”

Predictably, New York’s food service unions are on board with Mamdani’s promises. UNITE HERE! Local 100, the city’s primary restaurant workers’ union, offered an early and “proud” endorsement of Mamdani back in April. Workers United, which represents several industries including food services, came out strong for Mamdani as well. Neither union responded to a request for comment.

It remains to be seen how they will respond if a tightening industry reduces their membership overall. Restaurant groups, while better situated to weather the storm, aren’t fully immune and, whether through closures or layoffs, staff at all levels of the industry will eventually feel the pain as well.

“Oddly, they’re supportive [of Mamdani],” restaurateur Joe Germanotta said of his staff during an interview on Fox News. “But if this guy gets in you better start looking for a job,” he said in response to the higher costs restaurants like his will face.

Mamdani may end up having a similar effect on New York’s restaurant industry to Covid. While pandemic-era inflation and regulations severely hurt the restaurant industry overall, the large restaurant groups that dominate New York largely did just fine; Major Food Group actually expanded. “You can’t be a one-restaurant chef anymore,” said chef Eric Huang of his own struggles to scale and compete during this time. The numbers seem to check out. Between 2019 and 2022, Franchise Times, which issues annual reports on the country’s Top 200 restaurant groups, reported that revenue in the industry grew from $40.5 billion to $53.3 billion. Though overall growth in the restaurant sector is currently down, revenue for the Top 200 continues to grow. New York-based website Eater made it official, declaring that “restaurant groups are the new chains.”

High-end restaurant groups aren’t bad, per se, and New York has many of them. That’s to say nothing of the elevated fast-casual takeover (Dig, Little Beet, By Chloe), which offers the convenience of Starbucks or Chipotle for the more refined urbanite. Yet often, they deliver a dining experience more based on marketable aesthetics, trendy buzzwords and perceived exclusivity than actual food or service. This misplaced emphasis undermines New York’s foodie dynamism, the very diversity that progressives like Mamdani claim to champion.

So forget affordability; that’s long dead. Under Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist rule, restaurants are only going to get more expensive. But given that New York is the world’s richest city, habitual diners won’t be too perturbed. The real crime is that the New York food scene will be further dominated by the tastes of a select few, and a dining experience that all blends into blandness.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

November 5, 2025
When did restaurants get so boring?

The New York Times recently released its annual list of America’s Top 50 restaurants – and the perfectly predictable honorees highlight just how beholden the restaurant industry is to the tastes of a would-be cosmopolitan class. The casually refined, vaguely ethnic-fusion cuisine that you stumble upon even in America’s most provincial places is rife.

From New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, America’s restaurant industry has never been more diverse. Yet somewhat counterintuitively, it’s also never offered more of the same.

Often, these restaurants propose some mix of French staples (think mother sauces, patisserie) or Italian comfort food (pasta, pizza) fused with Latin, Asian and/or Middle Eastern flavors. Other times, lowbrow American grub gets ironically elevated with a flourish of chef-y technique.

For example, Colorado’s Bin 707 Foodbar offers an elk tartare flavored with Japanese plum and a French béarnaise served with a side of Italian focaccia. Pair it with the miso chimichurri pizza.

Aesthetically, dining rooms are often hypermodern or performatively rustic, but either way, they feel overdecorated

At Knoxville’s JC Holdway, try a spicy watermelon gazpacho before a bowl of bolognese pasta with cornbread crumble. At Diane’s Place in Minneapolis, sample the titular chef’s award-winning French pastries before a hearty Asian meal “inspired by her Hmong heritage.” And at San Antonio’s Isidore, who wouldn’t love some popcorn chicken in a decadent velouté or a slice of Southern buttermilk pie peppered with the umami notes of fennel?

These are all vastly diverse dishes, yet the overarching “concepts” blend together. Click on any restaurant’s “about” page and there’s often a great emphasis on local and sustainable sourcing despite the foreign flavors. It’s also likely to feature a morally loaded tale of the chef’s culinary journey – embracing their heritage, overcoming assimilation struggles and crafting a “new authenticity” for themselves.

Aesthetically, the dining rooms are often hypermodern or performatively rustic, but either way, they feel professionallyoverdecorated. Even the concept of a “concept” restaurant has become overwhelmingly banal. Gone are the days of the traditional steakhouse, luxurious French prix fixe, or even a classic pub or diner (although, in fairness, a handful of these still made the Times list). They’re considered stuffy, dated and, perhaps worst of all to the urban hipster, boring in their simplicity.

Instead, you get the consumerist ethos of more, more, more – a perpetually expanding matrix of flavors and ingredients that feels more beholden to the diversifying forces of the market than to the preferences of a refined palate.

Which is why these types of restaurants greatly appeal to a certain kind of rootless midwit, one probably not raised on haute cuisine, but now, having earned the right credentials and relocated to the right urban center, fancies himself a tastemaker – or in modern lingo, a “foodie.” He aspires to a life of truly cosmopolitan affluence but, stuck in the purgatory of middle- to upper-middle-class striving, he emulates sensibilities that feel “global” and “sophisticated.” With only a phantom idea of what those words even mean, he’s inevitably drawn to something somewhat familiar.

The result of his urban influence, which then trickles out to the periphery, is now the dominant model of the restaurant industry: elevated but approachably casual, exotic but still mostly recognizable, a little bit ironic and ultimately completely nondistinct.

A world that appears ‘diverse’ in its mosaic of faces and flags has become increasingly uniform in its cuisines

In trying to be inventive, these restaurants all wind up being the same. Far from being unique to chef or region, each menu is mostly interchangeable. Sure, a swordfish Reuben at Birmingham’s Bayonet sounds delectably unique – but in being so quirkily unpredictable, it fits in just about anywhere.

In this, we see a microcosm of globalism, but more saliently, its endgame. While globalists theoretically champion open markets, borders and cultural exchange in the name of an optimally diffuse multiculturalism, in practice, their program delivers total homogeneity. National economies are leveled under standardized consumerism; unique customs and traditions are sidelined by the culture of globalization itself.

Does America seem more diverse today, as a blend of global cultures has metastasized from coast to coast, or 50 years ago when each region was still largely beholden to its geography? A world that appears “diverse” in its mosaic of faces and flags has become increasingly uniform in its underlying systems, values, lifestyles – and clearly, cuisines.

The American restaurant industry is struggling: growth is down, costs are up, and consumers just aren’t eating out as much. Perhaps the answer doesn’t lie in catering further to the pretensions of a garish yuppie class and its twisted insecurities, but in giving the average American a comfortable, traditional and, above all, delicious reason to leave the house.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

October 21, 2025