The Brooknerian

Another gem from the  Spectator  archive. 'My Favourite Foreign Restaurant', 1987: I dislike important restaurants and do not really appreciate ambitious cooking. My choice of a place for lunch would be Queenie's Bar in Nice. It is an all-purpose café-restaurant which seems to be open whenever you want it to be. If your nerves are good you sit outside and watch the traffic on the Promenade des Anglais. If not, the interior is darkish and cool: there is, of course, no music. The chef shops daily in the market and the fish is good, infinitely better than anything one could get in London (except at Graham's, Brewer Street). The menu is sparse, which means that the dish of the day is reliable. The  tarte tatin  is superb.

'My Best and Worst Restaurants': A gem from the  Spectator , December 1984: My least favourite restaurant is the one at which I eat lunch every day and it had better not he named. It is a vegetarian restaurant and it leans heavily on quiches made with wholemeal flour; the food is incredibly good for me and it tastes like rubble. Surely, the best restaurant in England is Les Quat' Saisons, although I haven't tried it since it moved from Oxford. I remember delicate food, beautifully presented, and irresistible even to the faint-hearted. For heartier moods I like Le Dauphin, rue Saint-Honoré, Paris, an old-fashioned eating house which takes itself seriously but manages not to smell of food — a feat unknown to nearly every restaurant in London.