The restaurants of London (which I review for a magazine) are various and excellent: there are flowers on the fairy food at Dabbous; there is a coffee shop called Attendant in a former public toilet, which I love, but I have a weakness for wordplay. At the top are the restaurants of the tax-efficient playpen that is London for the international rich, and they thrive. Perhaps this is why the ugly flats at One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge are shuttered are the residents simply dining out?
Nothing in London can yet match the madness of Alain Ducasse's Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo, which features trees and an ice-ball spouting bottles of Krug like the spines of a plutocratic porcupine but how long will it be, when such restaurants do so well? Novikov, the Italian-Asian restaurant in Mayfair that manages to fuse two entire continents under one convenient roof, has a turnover of £35m a year; so bloated are the profits, the owner opened the equally opulent Rextail.
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