Dramatic flavours and look-at-me food will wake the polite ghosts at a grand old restaurant haunt
Double Dragon, 84 Rosebery Avenue, London EC1R 4QY (020 7683 0326). Lunch £7-£13, all dishes £5-£14.50, desserts £8, wines from £23
In the 1970s, my late mother, Claire, became a regular at a restaurant called Thomas De Quincey’s in Covent Garden. It was named after the 19th-century essayist who had written his most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, while living in the same building. If an editor or publisher needed schmoozing she lunched them there, and talked breathlessly afterwards about the ethereally light quenelles of pike mousse they served, but she never took me. I understood Thomas De Quincey’s to be a part of the glamorous adult world to which I had not yet been granted access.
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