The Social World

Category: Life

A rendezvous with destiny

Gianluca and I mounted the steps to the Friedrichsbad in Baden-Baden, Germany, in pensive silence. We hadn’t made eye contact since we’d met in reception at our hotel, the divine Brenners, for this rendezvous with destiny. At the front desk, we were sternly reminded of the dress code. We nodded. For the next three hours we were going to be stark naked in a 19th-century, Renaissance-themed, domed and frescoed temple to the God of Thermal Springs, adorned with hand-painted majolica tiles, statuary and a sequence of pools and chambers. “Kein Textil,” the woman repeated.

After removing every stitch, we processed to the shower room – me checking that the area, equipped with vast ceiling-mounted bronze fittings, had several exits – wearing only blue plastic slippers. Gianluca had left his spectacles behind. “Probably a good thing,” I said, as I wrenched a lever for my regulation three-minute drenching. My towel was already soaked so I abandoned it in a hammam where men lolled on stone benches, legs apart. Gianluca and I sat in silence on a raised dais, snuffing the sulfurous airs and glancing at fellow bathers as if this was the most natural thing in the world.

We are like babies who have returned, in advanced middle-age, to the blissful ataraxy of our mothers’ wombs

In my head, I had entered a rhapsodic state already. “This is marvelous,” I was thinking. “When in Baden-Baden, you should definitely go to the Bad, not that modern one next door, the Caracalla, where you’re allowed swimwear, but here, this is the echt Bad,” I was telling myself, pitying the others who’d chosen to go to the super-deluxe spa and pool at the Brenners and how they’d all wish they’d been to this proper old one by the ruins of the Roman baths. For the next hour we moved silently between numbered pools and chambers designed to warm and cool the body with air and water and purify the mind. I had entered a fugue state. It was clear to me now. The reason you or I can be as naked as a Lucian Freud is that this is the one place you would never announce, “But don’t you know who I am?” – it only works if nobody knows who you are. We are all equal, and equally human! This is helped by nobody talking. Being naked while simmering in waters spouted onto the earth’s surface by artesian pressure from 12 springs containing sodium chloride, from a depth of 2,000 meters – waters that reach a temperature of up to 155°F – cannot be improved by small talk of any kind.

Gianluca and I were lolling in a pool underneath a cinnamon-painted dome. This is one of the only times, I was thinking, where we can bask in an amniotic bubble as if we are babies who have returned, in advanced middle-age, to the blissful ataraxy of our mothers’ wombs, all our needs and wants provided for by this warm immersion, cares washed away.

Without his spectacles, Gianluca couldn’t see where we should go next – there were so many options. He turned to a man he assumed was a regular, standing at one end of the pool we were in. He was wearing glasses. He looked at home. Unfortunately, he turned out to be Scottish. “I’ll show ye,” he said eagerly, hauling himself out. We had no choice but to follow his buttocks into a room where you bobbed in shallow water on slabs, like beached whales. Look, I didn’t mind showing my front bottom to any number of naked Germans. Given a choice they’d be naked all the time. But I found I minded someone from Auld Reekie asking out loud in front of half of the Black Forest (no pun intended), “Are you Rachel Johnson?” And then saying he knew it was me, confiding “it’s your hair” and so on, breaking the fourth wall and whipping away my invisibility cloak at the same time.

As we lay with our herbal teas on daybeds afterwards, Gianluca apologized, but I was over it already, and asking him how it was for him. Was there a vibe? I mean, were men checking each other out? I couldn’t tell as I am not a gay man, you see. “Within seconds,” he said, and then explained about the various men, “the skinny one in the corner” and “that fat blond one with the button mushroom,” the looks exchanged and how only gay men sat like that, legs akimbo.

As we left, pink, clean and moisturized with mineral lotions, the fat blond one with the button mushroom turned out to be from Newcastle, England. I know this because as we exited, he followed us out of the changing room, and suggested we went “for a few beers.” Reader, we made our excuses and left the Geordie with the chode (don’t ask me to explain) on the steps of the Friedrichsbad.

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

October 21, 2025
The tyranny of the mass-intellectual

In the classical world the question of whether virtue can be taught, or is rather acquired by interior inclination and moral development, was the subject of intense debate by the best Grecian and Roman philosophers. None ever succeeded, however, in agreeing an answer.

Progressive education along narrow lines is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority

Since the second half of the 20th century, academics and intellectuals have seemed to believe that they have answered the question definitively and to their own satisfaction. Virtue, they have decided, can indeed be taught, and liberal democratic education is doing it, in public and private schools and universities alike throughout the western world. A high-school diploma is confirmation that one’s progress toward virtue and the virtuous life has begun; a Bachelor of Arts degree is the equivalent of a certificate of virtue acquired; and a PhD is confirmation that the holder is an adept in virtue, entitled to go forth into the world to rule, transform and perfect it. This explains the self-assurance and self-regard of the liberal governing classes, their smug certainty of their own superiority and their unconcealed disdain for the uneducated and unlettered masses beneath them, the people Hillary Clinton, a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School, calls the “deplorables” – the Republicans, Trump voters and other reactionary ignoramuses, many of whose parents, and their parents before them, voted the Democratic ticket and were rewarded for doing so by the beneficiaries of their votes.

The result, before the Obama administration was replaced by Trump’s first term in office, can be fairly described as the tyranny of the educated and the intelligent; or, put less politely, the mass-intellectual, a product of the industrialization of liberal education throughout the western world. Sir Francis Bacon understood knowledge as power; power over nature in service to a more comfortable future for humanity. Modern liberals, and now progressives, understand it as their inalienable right to power, conferred by an ideological education that guarantees the promotion of the sole correct way of thinking about politics and society, man and nature, man and his human destiny, that is not merely in itself virtue but the one and only true virtue.

Thus progressive education along narrow and restrictive lines of thought fixed by the adepts is, for liberals, the source of all legitimate moral authority: the Church of God Without God, recognized as the institution entrusted by them with the privilege of baptizing in its name the present and future members of the new ruling class, endowed with power and the material rewards that come with power – the new Lords Temporal and Spiritual. It is no coincidence that the logo chosen for Tim Cook’s Apple Corporation should be a bitten fruit, symbolizing knowledge acquired through metaphysical rebellion and power as virtue, whether or not acquired by virtuous means and wielded to moral ends. I read only the other day of a team of American scientists who, working with a human egg and a piece of human skin, have succeeded in creating a human embryo, thus realizing, potentially, the ability of two men to sire a “child” that is, indeed, their own and without genetic contribution from what we used to call “Mother” Nature. (The question of what the life of such a freak would be like never – apparently – occurred to them.)

Scientific “achievements” like this one are the result of the modern worship of narrow intelligence and the complete neglect of what used to be called “intellect,” a word one scarcely hears anymore. Every child for the past three-quarters of a century at least has been subjected to a so-called “intelligence test”; none to what one might call an “intellect test.” Intelligence and intellect are clearly two critically different things. To the extent that intelligence really is susceptible to accurate assessment (a claim of which I am extremely skeptical), it needs to be far better, and more comprehensibly, understood than it is in modern western technocratic society.

Intelligence tests are designed to measure the mental capacity of a middle, or upper-middle class, person to succeed in the middle-to-upper-class world of business, the law, medicine, the sciences and technology generally. Success in these fields certainly requires intelligence but by no means necessarily intellect, which implies a comprehensive sense of the entirety of human understanding and culture and of the relationship and balance between their separate categories, including theology and philosophy, history, languages and the arts and fine arts. Many of the finest minds in one field or the other have been hopelessly incompetent in, and even ignorant of or blind to, the others. Music is an art with a fundamental relationship to mathematics. Nevertheless, who can say how Bach would have scored on an SAT test that included geometry and the sciences? Or Shakespeare? Or Rembrandt? Or, for that matter, Saints Paul and Augustine and Aquinas?

However that may be, it is a virtual certainty that none of these men would have seen in modern education anything less than a civilizational, moral and human disaster. Descartes has been famous for nearly five centuries now for his maxim, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Christianity has given the world another, and infinitely deeper, one, though so far as I know it has never been formulated succinctly. That is, “J’aime, donc je suis.” It would take a person of intellect – not necessarily one of high abstract intelligence – fully to recognize the profound human truth of that one.

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

October 21, 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
Why I haven’t created a tomato-cannabis hybrid

Jean-Louis was leaning out of his second-floor window. “Bonsoir, Dan!”

I could hear the rumblings of a social gathering behind him – no music, just a cacophony of French voices battling for supremacy. I bonsoired him back and that would have been that, only my dog took the opportunity to evacuate by his front gate.

“Montes boire un verre!”

Jean-Louis was clearly drunk, but after 12 years of cordial nods, I momentarily allowed myself to believe I’d cracked the inner circle of village winemakers. And so, poop bag in hand, I politely accepted.

Right away, it was clear that the vibe was off. Everyone had stopped talking and was looking at me as I stepped into the kitchen. As I dutifully did the rounds with individual greetings, the penny dropped that I hadn’t been spontaneously invited to join a convivial apéro. I’d been summoned to an agricultural tribunal. There were ten villagers sitting around the table and one empty seat at the head, presumably made vacant by Jean-Louis, who gestured to me to take it.

Marie-Caroline was the first to speak. She had the clipped authority of a minor bureaucrat. “Alors, Dan. T’as créé un hybride tomate-cannabis?”

I sat back heavily in my seat. Had I created a cannabis-tomato hybrid? Was she for real? I’m known as a “budding plant scientist” in the village, but homemade GMOs? Apparently there were rumors circulating concerning my generously distributed tomato seedlings. Some had produced fruits that allegedly caused… side effects. Headaches. Strange dreams. One elderly lady claimed a cherry tomato had sent her into an existential spiral. Another said colors seemed “too sharp” for days. Marie-Caroline herself had experienced visions followed by nausea.

“You ’ave a reputation,” Marie-Caroline declared graciously, in English.

I looked up at Jean-Louis for support but he was just smirking, somewhat delighted with himself for spontaneously organizing the evening’s free entertainment. My “reputation” wasn’t completely unfounded. Several months before, I had indeed given out some tomato plants that I’d raised in my basement. It’s no secret that this space sometimes hosts other exotic botanical projects. Perhaps the run-off nutrient from one set of plants may have been repurposed for another. But hybridization? Impossible. I tried to explain that tomatoes and cannabis belonged to entirely distinct plant families. Hybridizing the two species would involve some serious genetic manipulation in a multimillion dollar laboratory and was, in any case, considerably beyond my ken – and the boundaries of modern science.

Normally, I might have found my fellow villagers’ overestimation of my capabilities flattering – but something else was on my mind. I hadn’t touched any weed for six months. But, on this particular evening, just 90 minutes beforehand, I’d swallowed a homemade gelatin capsule stuffed with 120mg of decarboxylated, finely ground cannabis flower – a particularly potent strain ominously named “Kerosene Krash.” My wife and I, in a bid to approach cannabis with a modicum of middle-aged maturity, had recently begun making our own “herbal supplements” and I had decided, in my wisdom, to get the evening dog walk out of the way before it kicked in.

I had assumed that I’d be safely back home by the time it hit. Instead, I was now sitting at a table of stern French vignerons being accused of pioneering psychedelic horticulture and testing it on an unsuspecting population as wave after wave of cannabinoid began crashing into my brain.

The lights were too bright. The perfume was too strong. Everyone was talking at once. I was a freshly landed Martian hearing French for the first time – marveling at the way they suffixed an extra vowel at the end of each sentence-zuhhh, elongating it as a verbal defence against interruption.

“Mais… c’est impossible,” I said – or thought – my mouth newly upholstered with dusty velvet. My grasp of French was rapidly disintegrating. I declined wine and asked for some water instead.

“Comment tu expliques ça, alors?” asked Marie-Caroline, eyes narrowed.

I searched my brain for plausible explanations, but none were forthcoming, other than the tendency for wild superstitions to fill the void of poor scientific education.

The capsule was in full bloom. I began to wonder if I was about to be arrested.

“Je dois partir,” I croaked. “Ma femme m’attend.” I stood up carefully and looked around for my dog who was busy scouring the floor for crumbs.

The group watched me go, disappointed, and chattering. As I reached the door, someone said, not unkindly, “Bon courage.”

I floated home, a man accused of inadvertently dosing the village with rogue nightshades, wrestling with the abrupt end of a six-month tolerance break. I still don’t know what happened to that poop bag.

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

October 21, 2025
Can American restaurants thrive in Britain?

To mark the arrival of Carbone in London and the imminent opening of Straker’s in New York, The Spectator’s Angus Colwell spoke with writer Gage Klipper about the differences between British and American restaurants, whether bad-boy chefs are back in – and which eateries couldn’t exist anywhere else.

ANGUS COLWELL: Shall we talk about Carbone, which has just arrived in London?

GAGE KLIPPER: For sure. I’m a certified Carbone hater: New Yorker, born and raised, but for me, Carbone just never really fit the New York vibe. It’s the Instagram person’s idea of what New York fine dining should be. Of course, they cater to this old-school, showy New York sensibility, but it’s not really New York in any real sense. It’s what the expat coming in from the Middle East, or the Russian oligarch’s daughter, thinks is exclusive New York or it’s where celebrities go to because their publicists tell them. That’s just not New York in any traditional sense. Carbone does pretty well in Miami and they’re all over the Middle East, which makes sense. It caters to this rootless, global, striving, wealthy elite. They have this glamorized, if foreign, vision of what elite American tastes are because, at its core, Carbone is red sauce, Italian-American food, which I grew up with. My grandma served it in Queens and Carbone elevates it and charges out the ass for it. And it’s overall fine. But that’s really all you could say about it: it’s fine. It’s not about the food; it’s about being able to take a picture of yourself there.

AC: I spoke to some people who were at Carbone in London on Friday night, and they said that it was all ridiculous and that the food gradually got worse. The appetizers were kind of all right; the starters were fine. As the evening went on, the guests got more drunk. Victoria Beckham was there. Then the veal parm arrived and it was inedible. All the reviews have gone like, “Oh, this is a show.” But I find this to be a bit of a shame because over the past two years, particularly in London, we’ve had this strange thing where everyone’s gone Italian American. Some places have done that well. There’s a place called the Dover, which is gorgeous. It looks like a great martini bar in Mayfair. The cooking is good. Then we’ve also got Grasso, and I really wouldn’t be surprised if it closed soon. It tries to do red-sauce Italian, but charges £30 for a plate of “Nonna’s meatballs.” And it just looks disgusting, and the reviews are bad. In London, we’re told this is all “authentic New York” because London has always been obsessed with New York. But it’s clearly not New York. There probably aren’t many places like the Dover that New Yorkers choose to eat at. In the eyes of Londoners, the three main New York restaurants are Carbone, Balthazar and Katz’s. I’m sure New Yorkers would feel differently.

GK: Well, I think Balthazar deserves to be considered an authentic New York restaurant. But Carbone? You could walk 15 minutes over into Little Italy and have a million times better meal than at Carbone at half the price or less.

AC: The thing that strikes me about the Carbone menu is how safe it is. They’re catering for celebrities. It’s intriguing to me that you can choose a route through the menu like you’re ten years old. The same is true at the River Café in London, which is our premier celebrity restaurant: it’s unbelievably expensive. You have a pizza, a pasta, then ice cream, and you can do that as a 60-year-old man. These restaurants retain some kind of allure for the wealthy: they allow you to act like a child.

GK: That’s interesting. The service at Carbone is pampering, too. But at the same time, it’s lost any of the elegant charm of real fine dining. The waiters are in tuxedos and they bring over the amuse-bouche and you’ll have a whole team coming over asking consistently if you need something, replacing silverware, replacing plates. So, although it does cater to the ultrarich, it’s the nouveau riche, the baby rich, who have a very gauche taste. The fact that Carbone could even be seen as elevated cooking speaks to how shitty everything else is. It’s common to not be able to get a decent plate of pasta or pizza in divey Italian spots. That’s not how it should be. It’s crazy. I’m based in Baltimore. There are all these Italian restaurants that have been here for 50 or 100 years – and there’s not one place you can get a decent bolognese.

AC: What’s worked well from London coming over to the States? The steakhouse Hawksmoor?

GK: Oh yeah, Hawksmoor. That’s been on my list for ever. I’ve always heard great things. Novikov: that’s come to Miami. I think it works well there because it fits the seedy vibe. It sticks to the model; it knows what works. Restaurants hit the wall when they try to cater too hard to a demographic or a city they don’t know anything about.

AC: I don’t know if you’ve ever read Jay Rayner’s review of Novikov in London. He said, “You don’t have to hate Novikov on principle. There’s more than enough about the place for you to hate it on its own terms.” This is a classic thing that British restaurant critics do, which is pull their punches for a lot of the small places or where industry darlings work. And then they go after a place like Novikov or Carbone. I’m expecting to see a savage Carbone review soon.

GK: I’m a lot more optimistic about Straker’s coming to New York. The Novikov-Carbone model: people are just tired of it. I think Straker’s is set to do well, if he follows Keith McNally’s footsteps, which is interesting because he is opening on the site of Lucky Strike: a classic McNally restaurant. McNally viewed the restaurant industry as an artist might, with that cinematic nostalgia. At his restaurants, when you walked in, no matter who you were, no matter what time of day it was, you felt like you were walking into a suspension of reality. Thomas Straker seems to follow that approach.

AC: He actually doesn’t. In fact, the closest we have to McNally in London would be Jeremy King, who used to own the Wolseley and Zédel and these big brasseries. But I agree about Straker’s opportunity. There are several reasons why this move is genuinely interesting. First, I think it’s the first British restaurant that has opened in New York. Hawksmoor is as much of an American steakhouse as a British restaurant. Even in the London branches, there’s a “mac and cheese.” Straker’s menu is very British: he’s into game. Say I went to Straker’s tonight, there’d probably be pigeon on the menu. There might even be grouse. Recently I had pork belly, lamb sweetbreads, radicchio, that kind of thing. It’s a genuinely very British and seasonal menu, which I’m sure Straker will want to do in New York, too. The second point is that he really is public enemy number one in the London restaurant scene.

GK: I know he had that scandal with the all-white cooking staff.

AC: Basically, if you talk to a lot of chefs, they’ll just say, “Oh, Straker’s a wanker.” He’s a proper posh Richard E. Grant lookalike, sharp cheekbones, cocky guy. He’s quite right-wing coded: he likes shooting and all that. He’s become so easy to hate, and I think a lot of the hate is lazy. New York may just not care about any of this. How evergreen is the supposed charm and appeal of a posh Englishman in New York?

GK: McNally has a famous line about that: he said he only succeeded because you can never lose the charm of a British accent in New York. But the bad-boy edginess of it all, bucking the status quo, rebelling against sustainability and vegan options and all of that; I think New Yorkers are tired of that. That said, I hop between New York, the DC area and Miami and of all those places, downtown New York is where being right-wing coded is becoming cooler and edgier.

AC: If there were three restaurants in New York that you think can only exist in New York, that you’d recommend, what would you go for?

Even when EMP went vegan, it had an extremism that’s hard to understand unless you’re in New York

GK: Smith & Wollensky, right off the bat. It’s just so quintessentially New York. It has that old-school steakhouse vibe. It only goes back to the 1970s, but it feels like it’s been there since the 1920s. You get all the prime US cuts. They dry age, which is not something I know you Brits are a huge fan of typically. And you just can’t beat the service. The food is fantastic. It’s always the same. I grew up going there. They’ve had the same bartender since I was born. You really do have to have an Italian one. Il Cortile is one of my favorites. It’s also very old. Not really red sauce: it’s elevated. They’ll do a whole selection of meat and fish and, of course, you can get some pasta to go with it, but it’s the full Italian-American experience. It’s very family oriented and casual in a way that the WASPs could never really wrap their minds around. I don’t think that would transplant to the UK. And then I’m trying to think of a real fine dining scene that feels quintessentially New York. Something like Eleven Madison Park: it’s arguably overrated now and maybe always was, but it took everything to the utter extreme with its tasting menu. Even when they went vegan, it was always just this New York extremism that it’s hard to understand unless you’re in the constant whir of New York City. How about London’s quintessential places?

AC: I’ll give three, too. St. John is probably the classic, but that’s too obvious. I would say a “caff,” or a greasy spoon, is very London, not very New York. I’d have recommended the Regency Café, but they’ve had a change of ownership, so no one knows how that’s going yet. Instead, I’d recommend the café across the road, the Astral. They’re rude to you in there. Taxi drivers love it. And it does a great breakfast. There’s another good place in north London, in Finsbury Park, called Tollington’s Fish Bar. It was a fish and chip shop that has been turned into a Spanish pintxos bar. It captures what I like about London: strange things popping up in strange places. The third one would be Black Axe Mangal, which has a menu that I don’t think could exist anywhere else in the world. It’s run by the former head chef of St. John Bread and Wine, Lee Tiernan. About ten years ago he just set up a restaurant and no one could describe the cuisine. They still can’t. But to give an idea: I recently had a jellied Szechuan pig’s head, then a lamb offal flatbread, then a deep-fried calf’s brain bao. Then crispy rabbit. They brought a whole gilthead bream covered in squid ink and Morteau sausage, and then a pina colada dessert. It’s wild. That mixture of Turkish, Szechuan, offal. It somehow feels very British. Would that work in New York?

GK: That sounds amazing, but I think it’s a tougher sell for sure. New Yorkers aren’t used to that elevated, modern twist on Turkish/Middle Eastern food. I’m also not sure New York is ready for offal.

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

October 21, 2025
In awe of Fuji-san

My personal version of hell? Shibuya station, Tokyo. Shibuya Scramble is one thing: the busiest pedestrian intersection on the planet, it sees two million people elbow each other, every day. But the train station that thousands of them are trying to get to? That’s where my hopes go to die. A place where you’ll find me near tears, wondering if I’ll ever see my loved ones again. It’s almost impossible to navigate, spread across a dizzying number of floors and stuffed with throngs of human beings speaking a dozen languages. New platforms spring up all the time, often at the top of an unassuming escalator, or via a tiny hidden exit of the Hikarie shopping mall. There are (one or two) signposts, sure, but my Japanese leaves much to be desired.

Hopping on a limousine bus from Shibuya Mark City, which is attached to Shibuya Station, to Kawaguchiko had sounded doable, positively luxurious compared to my myriad disastrous transport experiences in the world’s most populous city. Like most wide-eyed first-time travelers to Japan, for reasons I wasn’t quite sure of, I just had to get to Mount Fuji. There’s something intangible, even magical about that volcano, its indelible shape scoring our collective consciousness through pop culture: I must have absorbed it through anime, wall posters and Godzilla movies.

A friend and I would spend three nights at Hanz Outdoor Retreat, a mini-village of glamping villas and dome tents amid forests and lakes, Fuji (or “Fuji-san” as the locals call it) providing a pretty unforgettable backdrop. It would be the perfect escape from the maelstrom that is Tokyo.

“Run!” Claire screeched via a voice note. I had seven minutes to follow photos she hurriedly sent through WhatsApp, breadcrumbing essential directions needed to find the series of escalators and narrow staircases hidden behind random doors that would eventually lead to the tiny coach terminal at Shibuya Mark City, found inexplicably on “4F.” Sweating, I found my comrade, and we tracked down the right vehicle by sheer luck. On instinct, I followed a tourist wearing a T-shirt printed with an image I’d associated with Japan as long as I could remember – Mount Fuji peeking out from behind a huge white-crested wave, in a storm-tossed sea. If anyone knew where I was going, it was this guy.

Like most first-time travelers to Japan, for reasons I wasn’t quite sure of, I just had to get to Mount Fuji

As the journey wore on, he and the rest of the passengers pressed their noses and phones to the windows, distracted by the mountain’s sheer magnificence, said to have formed over the past 2.6 million years.

Picked up two hours later by our guide Savvas, we had no difficulty settling into the peaceful hotel complex, stopping in the grounds to stare up at the volcano. Our villa was reminiscent of an old-fashioned nagaya (Japanese row house), laden with heavy fur throws and slouchy bean bags. A cavernous private Jacuzzi bath tempted us for a quick soak before a porter arrived with the ingredients for a tremendously large Sukiyaki hot pot to cook ourselves, on our freezing private terrace. We duly put on our coats.

“We call it wine beef,” Savvas explained, talking us through the types of Wagyu bubbling in an umami broth as he unwrapped huge plates of pickled butterbur and tuna carpaccio. “The meat is from Kodagu and Koshu,” Savvas explained. After weeks of being spoiled by Japan’s precision flavors, meticulous food rituals and exceptional regional specialities, I’d set impossibly high standards. Yet this meal stood out as the best of our six-week trip, the hot pot loaded with thick noodles and fresh vegetables.

“Umami is more than a flavor; it’s an essence,” Savvas added, using chopsticks to push slabs of beef deeper into the pot. Stays at the retreat are hands-on; at the breakfast counter we found marshmallows for toasting on a huge outdoor fire. Guests are given camping stoves at each table to heat sausages and cook their eggs any way they choose. Later, Claire took great pleasure in chopping a piece of firewood cleanin half.

“I feel… powerful!” she yelled, hotel staff erupting in applause. The main building is made with materials purchased from a Samurai’s family home and held up by old wooden rafters. Inside are small, gendered bathing areas – ubiquitous in Japan – with waters heated to a toasty 107°F. One ten-person villa comes with a private chef, for groups who want to live as the Japanese do. Parties gather around the irori – a sunken hearth for feasting and keeping warm – while getting tipsy on chunky regional sake. I prefer a craft peach Chu-hi, a sweet, low-alcohol drink made from potato or wheat.

“What animals live here?” we asked. “Cows… frogs. Plenty of deer. Look out for flying squirrels, too.”

Our first morning took us to Fujiyoshida Sengen shrine, a Shinto sanctuary at the volcano’s base. Through relentless rain, we huddled under umbrellas to admire the stone lantern-lined entrance, purify our hands and purchase amulets for fortune and safe travels. The main trail to Fuji’s summit – a six-hour climb – was closed for the season. Instead, we’d tackle a shorter ascent that promised yet another perspective of the mountain’s perfect symmetry.

After filling our bottles with Fuji water from the retreat’s well and raiding a local bakery for matcha bread and pork cutlet sandwiches, we strapped ice grips to our boots. Ascending Dragon’s Mountain on snow-covered pathways proved challenging – to put it politely – but the view of Motosuko, one of the Fuji Five Lakes, rewarded our efforts. An hour later and just shy of the top, we admitted defeat, stopping to open flasks of coffee. The snow-capped peak of Mount Fuji was starting to feel like a family member.

“She was worth it,” Claire nodded, pleased with herself.

“She’s a she?” I pondered.

“Look at her. How could she be anything else?” said Claire. A quick Google found Claire to be correct: Mount Fuji is often referred to as a woman, or “Onna Fuji” (with a gently sloping ridgeline and a huge crater at the summit, go figure). My internet search informed me somewhat ironically that women were forbidden from climbing mountains in Japan until 1872.

We felt the guilt for not continuing on, but we had a villa to vacate, a forest to camp in, and charcoal that wasn’t going to light itself.

Cooking our next meal by lamplight, on an open flame, I prayed to any god who might be listening that I’d cooked the chicken through. I scraped garlicky ajillo sauce from a jar, and warmed vegetables dipped in oil. We skipped beers at the bar stationed next to our tent and passed out under thick blankets.

The next day, after burning our breakfast sandwiches, we slid our feet into Crocs and crunched across the icy forest floor to an outdoor sauna. There we remained until it was time to bid the retreat, and our girl Onna Fuji, “jaa ne.”

It was a tough goodbye, one that had us resolving to come back one summer – but she wasn’t done with us just yet.

Feeling brave, we opted to take the train back to Tokyo, Savvas helpfully translating ticket machine instructions. We waved him and Mount Fuji goodbye, before pulling out laptops and phones to catch up on work. Two hours later, I surfaced from a sea of emails to check on our progress.

“Um, Claire. Why can I still see her?”

A gasp.

“We missed the stop. We were supposed to change trains a while ago. Oh my god, we’ve been going in a circle.”

We laughed hard, counting exactly how many angles from which she’d now silently judged our navigational prowess.

A sweet young commuter named Yoshi kindly directed us to the correct train line and the new tickets that would help us finally wave off our sister. Chatting until we reached our stop, I asked him if he might know the name of the artist responsible for the T-shirt print that had helped us find Mount Fuji in the first place.

He took out his phone, and together we found it to be Katsushika Hokusai, or Hokusai, a painter and printmaker from the Edo period. “It is a woodblock print! It is called ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa.’” Reading over his shoulder, I started laughing again.

“Claire. That artwork with the wave. It’s from a series of prints. Guess what they’re called.”

“Go on.”

“Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.”

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

October 21, 2025
Gossip is good for you… so I’m told

The late Pope Francis hated gossip. In his Christmas message to his Vatican advisors last year, he warned that it is “an evil that destroys social life.” It wasn’t the first time he’d attacked rumor-spreading. He once compared gossips to terrorists because “he or she throws a bomb and leaves.”

His condemnations are of particular concern for me because I was recently accused of being a “notorious gossip.” I vehemently reject the charge, but if it were true, at least I’d be following a proud journalistic tradition. In fact, if it were not for gossip, this very magazine might not exist. The original Spectator’s founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, filled the 1711 incarnation by hovering around coffee-houses, picking up gossip for stories. Coffee-houses had become so hated by the establishment that Charles II denounced them as “places where the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers.”

Rumor has it that the first example of gossip dates back to 1500 BC. According to the journalist Roger Wilkes, who wrote a history of scandal, cuneiform tablets describe a Mesopotamian mayor having an affair with a married woman. While the details remain unclear – Mesopotamian languages are hard to interpret – this anecdote suggests that humans have always been fascinated by the lives of others, par-tic-u-larly when a story involves betrayal or impropriety. Gossip in ancient Mesopotamia didn’t just circulate privately, it was often formalized in public records, scratched into clay for all eternity.

So why do we gossip? The word itself descended from godsibb (“God sibling”), an Old English term for women who would support a friend or relative through childbirth. The term lost its positive connotations over the centuries, as exemplified by a 16th-century Scottish torture instrument called a “gossip’s bridle,” a horrifying spiked muzzle that was clamped down on to the tongues of women accused of witchcraft.

Yet anthropologists believe the innate desire to gossip might not be bad for society; indeed, it has some evolutionary advantages. One study argues that human society would not be sustainable if it weren’t for gossip, as for much of our history it was the only way to spread information over large groups. Another paper says that gossip reinforces and polices cultural norms and keeps members of the tribe in check. The most recent paper on the subject agrees, finding that “dissemination of information about individuals’ reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others’ reputations.” In other words, gossip is evolution’s way of saying “Don’t be a dick.”

I hear gossip’s good for our health, too. One 2012 study found that when participants were gossiping about an antisocial person or behavior, their heart rates reduced and the activity “calmed the body.” Another set of experiments shows that sharing rumors activates the ventral striatum – a part of the brain’s reward and motivation system – while another study found that gossipers going through tough situations had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than those better at keeping secrets. So gossiping is quite literally good for body, mind and maybe even soul.

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

October 21, 2025
Is something ‘greenlit’ – or ‘greenlighted?’

“It’s got to be greenlighted,” said my husband, as though saying so made it true. I had been complaining of the vogue for using –greenlit in the sense of both gave the go-ahead and given the go-ahead. In an obituary, the London Times noted a low moment in the career of the film executive Frank Price, when “he greenlit a sci-fi comedy about an alien duck who finds love on Earth with a singer named Cherry Bomb.”

For what it’s worth, my husband’s reasoning was that when referring to the means by which things are illuminated, one says moonlit, sunlit, lamplit, firelit. When using a figure of speech accidentally employing the word light, such as to moonlight, then one says moonlighted, not moonlit.

I fear language does not abide by logic. In which category would you put highlight? The verb is definitely to my mind highlighted, as the past tense or past participle. Yet the Oxford English Dictionary states that highlit is an established form of the past tense, though it gives no examples among the quotations it furnishes, while giving five quotations with high-lighted. In any case, greenlight, first recorded in 1941, had certainly acquired the form greenlit as well as greenlighted by the 1960s.

The first references to a green light on the railways come from 1839. But then, a green light still meant “caution,” and red “stop.” White was used for “all right.” But, as colored lights de-pended on the glass fitted to a lamp, the danger remained that a red or green glass might fall from a lamp and leave a false white signal.

A parallel case to greenlight is gaslight, which I have written about before. It derives from Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1938) and means “to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity.” It is often now reduced to meaning “disagree (with us)” or “suggest that we are mistaken.” Whatever gaslighted meant metaphorically, it was never in the form gaslit. I couldn’t greenlight that.

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

October 21, 2025
In memory of Saul Zabar

On what is controversially called Columbus Day weekend, which this year fell uncontroversially at the end of Sukkot, my wife, daughter and I found ourselves in our native habitat: New York. Naturally, this meant a trip to Zabar’s, though because our daughter is a toddler who travels by stroller when she is not toddling, I decided to make this Saturday different from all other Saturdays: “to” Zabar’s meant this time “up to but, alas, not inside.” After all, weekends are always a madhouse in the country’s most famous “appetizing” store, founded in 1934, but especially so four days after patriarch Saul Zabar’s death on October 7 (of all days) at the age of 97. An awful lot of pilgrims journeyed last week to the mecca of this self-described “lox-smith.”

There are other great places in Manhattan to buy smoked fish. Indeed, there are two other venerable establishments in the very same zip code (10024): Murray’s Sturgeon Shop, founded in 1946, and Barney Greengrass, founded in 1908 and at its current location since 1929. But Zabar’s is an institution unto itself with its iconic orange lettering, extraordinary cheese selection, array of coffee varieties and general chaotic atmosphere of Upper West Siders and other meshuggeners seeking bagels, knishes, pastrami, chopped chicken liver, rugelach, strudels and babkas, as well as sable, whitefish, herring in cream sauce and so many other fishy appetizing staples. (By the way, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary spend too much time in Oxford, for there’s no other way to explain why the last illustrative instance of the adjective “appetizing” dates to 1865 and why the dictionary of record ignores the nuance of its use with a noun like “shop” or “store.”)

It was thanks to trips to Zabar’s with my father, when I was not much older than my daughter is now, that I understood that there are many kinds of smoked salmon and grasped the distinction – vital but neglected in ordinary American parlance, as well as by the OED – between nova and belly lox. (In case you ever wish to give me some, I prefer lox, but my wife goes for nova.) The last time I had a one-on-one conversation with Saul Zabar was perhaps half a century ago – my father having instructed his small son on how exactly to stand his ground in the madding crowd and order paper-thin slices of lox – though like pretty much every New Yorker I grew up with, I felt I knew him and his brother Stanley (now 93) pretty well.

Saul was a presence in the store for my whole life, and well before, and I and many others learned more about him in 2022 when Schocken Books came out with Zabar’s: A Family Story, with Recipes by his niece Lori, with whom I had a passing acquaintance and who, very sadly, died a few months before publication. Of all the many brief pieces, past and present, on Zabar’s and the Zabar family, my favorite is one that James Panero published in these pages when the book appeared.

And then, on Saturday, October 11, just like that, Diane Keaton died. It’s not a special scene as such, but in the 1979 movie Manhattan, which is a love story to the borough, she appears with Woody Allen outside Zabar’s. I can’t stop thinking about it.

The Katzes recently moved to Washington, D.C. There’s nothing like Zabar’s there. Fortunately, appetizing food can still be yours – and frequently is ours – even if you do not live around 10024, provided you tolerate the cost of one-day shipping. I regret that my daughter will never get to meet Saul Zabar, and probably I should’ve braved the madness on Saturday and pushed her stroller into the store as a tribute. Still, the girl loves fish – and I suspect there’s a lot more lox in her future.

October 13, 2025
Solar panels are a waste of money

The house fell silent as the last of the tourists took their oat milk and pretend cheese from the guest fridge.

Winter came in the nick of time. I’ve bitten my lip for six months while the B&B guests have forced their pro-Palestine, anti-Trump views on me, while refusing to eat normal food or use the dishwasher because, in leftie parlance, dishwashers cause neurological damage.

“What does the shower cause?” I wanted to ask some of them, who didn’t even use one towel or open one wrapped mini-soap in a week-long stay. Is soap carcinogenic now? Are you staging some sort of Gaza protest by not washing?

The bookings dried up just before I lost it completely with the next long-haired hipster asking for coconut milk or declaring themselves gluten-free.

I was ready to start beating my car with a tree branch by the time the last of them checked out, and we were just left with the solar-panel fitter, booked in for two weeks while he fits panels to a house on a large country estate down the road. He works all day in the driving rain and returns at night drenched and exhausted.

We’ve been in a white-out of squally storms for the past week, and solar guy is unable to explain how his clients will be powering their house off the eye-wateringly expensive equipment he has fitted.

“It all works beautifully,” he announced, coming back in his day-glo work anorak the other day, and sitting down at the kitchen table to a plate of his favorite jumbo sausage rolls.

But when I asked whether that meant the millionaire’s house would be powered by solar, he pulled a face. “I mean the system works, as in I’ve wired it all up correctly,” he said, munching. Then he laughed, as though the next bit was obvious: “But it won’t produce any power without direct sunlight, obviously.” And at that moment the wind howled, and we all stared out the kitchen patio door at the driving rain and the thick soup of a turbulent sky.

The weather comes pounding off the sea here, and while there are sunny days, it’s hard to remember a time when there was a run of them together.

Rain and sun, rain and sun, rain and sun all summer, that’s Ireland. And in the winter, it’s like living in a bowl of mushroom chowder. There are days when you come out the door and you can’t see a few feet in front of you.

But despite the almost permanent lack of direct sunlight, Ireland is mad for solar energy. Incentives galore scream at you from advertising hoardings, and roofs everywhere get clad in shiny panels so they can be pounded by the endless rain.

It’s all because Ireland burns so much fossil fuel and oil to keep itself warm that the government has had to tell its EU masters it’s going to be a good boy and do some green stuff. Nearly all new-build houses aren’t allowed a chimney or an oil boiler. Everyone must go electric. The only problem is, there’s no sun. The solar-panel fitter estimated that his clients might get some electricity from their 50-panel system for four or five months of the year. But that didn’t matter, he said. Because they’ve got a big diesel generator for when there’s no sun. And she’s plugging her washing machine and tumble dryer into an electrical point connected to the grid in a farm outbuilding.

Also, they have another house down the road they can go to in bad weather and that’s on the grid. Of course they do. What was I thinking? These people aren’t amateurs.

The solar-panel fitter was still munching philosophically because to him it’s all par for the course. He deals with this nonsense every day. It’s his bread and butter to come up with hair-brained systems that don’t work except in theory. He’s not going to point out the lunacy of trying to make power out of sunlight that isn’t there.

The solar-panel fitter himself lives in a bus which he powers with solar, but a bus is small enough to do that, and also he uses wood burners.

Another issue he’s discovered, he said, was that you need somewhere to dump all the excess solar energy you get on sunny days because once you’ve used what you need you can’t store the rest.

The way he deals with this is by having a big hot tub in his back yard which he heats constantly on sunny days. “That’s nice,” I said. “I bet you and your wife enjoy that.”

Not really, he said. They didn’t use the hot tub much, because you want it on cold days, not hot ones, and on cold days there isn’t any solar power.

But at least it meant he was dumping all his free energy back into his own property, rather than selling it back to the grid at an extortionately bad rate.

I said that all things considered, I didn’t want solar panels. He said I could suit myself, and he shrugged.

But he nodded to the kitchen light bulbs, tutting, and told me we must at least switch to LEDs. I told him our electricity bill is very low, because we don’t leave lights on. Even with the B&B guests, at the height of summer, in a six-bedroom house full of people, our bill was barely £100 a month. And in winter when the guests are gone it’s half that. The builder boyfriend has this wacky idea, I explained, that if we just use less it will cost less money, and do less environmental damage.

Solar guy kept sucking air through his teeth and shaking his head and warning us that unless we got warm white LEDs we’d be sorry.

As it happened, I got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water and saw that he’d left his bedroom light on, and was snoring away with his room fully lit.

October 11, 2025