London can do flash and London can do smart, pricey, international. Have dinner at Plateau in Canary Wharf, a restaurant in an office block above a smart mall east of the City. It's glitzy and buzzing. The coloured lights of the skyscrapers reach into the night sky and dance on the water. Everyone is dark-suited and chic, and they're from Japan, France, China,
the US, Russia, Ireland. You could be anywhere — Hong Kong, Chicago, Sydney, Madrid. There's high living, high finance, bright lights, water, traffic noise, work, movement.
I love Canary Wharf. If you're a Londoner, dinner at Plateau is like spending the evening in a foreign city and yet all you need to do is get on a futuristic, driverless train - the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) — for 20 minutes. Across the dark water is Greenwich; its pale temples and mounts are just visible in the gloom. But here in Canary Wharf you are in a separate spatial and geographic bubble. Greenwich is no more than an annotation on your global phone's World Clock.
Smart, snazzy, déraciné, Canary Wharf is kept deliberately distant from London. London has always been good at separating its money and its soul.
So I head back to the soul bit: to Charterhouse Square in Smithfield, at the edge of the City. This line of Georgian merchants' houses is pre-electricity dark. Occasional footsteps ring out on the flagstones. I've got my overnight bag, and I'm going to the only place where there's light and noise — the pub.
The Fox and Anchor has been here since Victorian times. When I moved to London, it was a famous dare to come here at seven in the morning and drink Guinness with the porters of the Smithfield meat market as they finished their shift. Drinking Guinness for breakfast is a world away from Canary Wharf,
but not so alien to London. Everyone drank beer with their
breakfast in the 19th century, children included. When these streets were laid out, the main meal of the day would have
been at 10am.
I start at a London inn because this is where the very history of hospitality begins. Throughout the centuries, travellers, most of them here on business, would have a good chop for dinner and a comfortable bed for the night. You could construct a kind of 18th-century Mr and Mrs Smith guidebook from the novels of Defoe and Richardson: inns were compared, celebrated,
damned, talked about.
Tonight, the Fox and Anchor's long, mahogany and brass interior is full of the hungry smart-casual classes devouring steaks and fishcakes. An oak side door leads upstairs to the accommodation. The room isn't large, but it's warm and stylishly lit. There's a big solid bed, a big solid bath, crisp white linen and a writing table. You can stay here for £100 a night. For the traveller who wishes for comfort and good food, but who must observe his purse closely, this is an excellent start.
London enjoys itself hugely in the boom times. But the town comes into its own when money is tight. Thrift, ingenuity, improvisation are very London talents - that, combined with an obsession with quality stuff.
London women love matching high-street bargains from
Uniqlo or a charity-shop find from the Notting Hill Housing
Trust with a single piece of designer indulgence from Bond
Street. Vivienne Westwood could only be an English designer. Punk and New Romantic were peculiarly English statements — kids with more creativity than cash let loose in the dressing-up box.
Men, meanwhile, go to Jermyn Street or Savile Row and spend a lot of money on handmade shoes at John Lobb or a suit at Kilgour, then forget about shopping for a year. There's a fashionable fashion concept of 'cost-per-wear' — you'll know the true price of something once you've divided the ticket price by the number of times you put the thing on. Men who shop on Jermyn Street have unknowingly been practising that principle for generations.
I ask my friend, Edward Sahakian, what to him represents real value in London. Unhesitatingly, he says his John Lobb shoes. They cost £2,530, but he has them resoled once a year and they last more or less forever. 'My father used to say that he couldn't afford to buy cheap goods,' he says. Edward is Armenian, but you'll seldom hear a more English sentence than that.
Edward's shop sits at the junction of one of London's most male streets: St James's, where men have their clubs, and Jermyn, where they buy their clobber. Edward's shop, Davidoff, sells cigars.
They are not the cheapest in London, but they are the best.
People fly in from all over the world to consult on the latest
arrivals and gossip from Cuba and the Dominican Republic.
We don't condone smoking, of course. But if you have to
smoke, here are two tips: first, don't inhale, and second,
get Edward to find a cigar that suits your personality and tastes. Do the thing properly.
I end up in the West End after a big dose of history at the Museum of London, just a couple of hundred yards from the Fox and Anchor. The museum has been more celebrated for its contents than the exterior, an anonymous building above a roundabout, where the old Roman wall is hemmed in by office blocks. But now the place has become a shop window on history, but while the Galleries of Modern London open with a glass frontage, here there is gloomy brick. 'Modern' means from 1666 onwards: a good London sort of definition.
Then I wander through Clerkenwell, where fashionable
loft-dwellers busy about beneath grave Georgian houses and medieval gatehouses, and drop in at Sir John Soane's Museum. Here you get two quintessentially London — and free — experiences. First, queuing. Standing in line is an English art form, practised impeccably here in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Second, obsession and eccentricity.
Soane was a manic collector, and the small museum of antiquities, architectural fragments and works of art he established here is one of the most concentrated aesthetic experiences in London. Your only outlay is time. I suppose galleries and museums have their own cost-per-wear equation: frisson-per-footstep, perhaps? This scores highest.
What's the restaurant version of cost-per-wear? It's hard to pin down. You have to factor in the provenance — the quality of the ingredients you get for your money — then taste and atmosphere, which is the hardest thing to quantify. I suppose it all adds up to a kind of warm glow — glows-per-minute for the two hours you spend at your table.
Since money got tight, my highest GPMs have been at a small and ordinary-looking wine bar off Trafalgar Square called Terroirs. The menu is a limited and keenly priced selection of French and Mediterranean classics. It's all soups, rillettes, charcuterie, proper cheeses and decent wines. It's when the dishes arrive that you get glowing. You know from the colours, the simple arrangement on the plate and the noisy appreciation of your fellow diners that you are not going to begrudge a penny of the bill.
Terroirs is part of a new wave of restaurants and hotels that absolutely adhere to the less-is-more principle: more of an experience for less of your money. Arbutus in Soho led the way, with Michelin-starred cooking using less expensive cuts prepared with real skill and flair. Four years on from its opening, you still have to work hard to spend over £100. The £100 threshold has created a real buzz in London's hotel business too. At the Hoxton and Dean Street hotels, they apply the pricing tactics of the airlines and train companies. Book far enough in advance and you can slip in for under the magic three-figure mark. And instead of a noisy cell where the only luxury is a trouser press, you get a funky room in a funky neighbourhood.
Now the five-star joints are trying just as hard. For my Saturday night treat, I book a movie, a room and a dinner at One Aldwych. The hotel really shook the tassels of the traditional five star when it opened in 1998 with owner Gordon Campbell Grey's pursuit of 'intelligent luxury': lots of comfort, no fripperies, lots of art, no artifice. The movie package is a singularly good deal (a glass of Champagne, a three-course meal, the film and popcorn for £38.50 a head). You get very fine food at Axis — no corner cutting on the set menu — and a huge and healthy breakfast in the main hotel. Finish your wine in a beautifully intimate screening room, then retire to a luxe room for as soothing a sleep as you'll get.
The other people redefining luxury and price in London hotels (and now New York too) are Tim and Kit Kemp, the people behind the Firmdale group. On Sunday, I want to be out of the centre and somewhere greener and homelier. The Kemps' latest venture, Number 16 in South Kensington, is really a bed and breakfast. In England, those words have for years conjured up images of grubby carpets and strange smells. In this B&B, you get a riot of colour, artworks on every corner, dazzlingly amusing and comfy rooms and - you'll think I'm obsessed, but it is important — a top-class breakfast.
Do you miss a restaurant? No, because Racine is just around the corner. Racine gets my less-is-more gold award for London. In fact, I have what I call the Racine test. It's a benchmark. We all have benchmarks, ways of keeping our financial feet on the ground ('It's nice, but I could get a Paul Smith suit for the price of that sweater', 'I could buy that handbag, but then I could also fly Club to New York'). My food benchmark is, 'It's good — but
I could eat at Racine for that/half that'.
This small and unpretentious bistro is opposite the Brompton Oratory, just down from Harrods. Racine does everything so impeccably — the chilledness of the Champagne, the wobbliness of the saffron mousse, the mustardy sauce on the rabbit, the ESP of the waiters — that you quite frequently want to weep: weep for all the overpriced, over-lauded, overly-pleased-with-themselves eateries in the world. It's something of a paradox, too. A classic French restaurant, whose equal you'll struggle to find in Paris these days, run by an Englishman called Henry.
Racine is not fashionable. It got over all that nonsense years ago. And that's the genius of London, really. One of Henry's investors is the Anglo-American world's most fashionable club owner and hotelier, Nick Jones of the Soho House group. But Nick, who looks like any dad you'd see down the park on a Saturday morning, hates being called fashionable. The trouble with being hot, he says, is that you inevitably go cold. So if you see this little article as a guide to what's hot in London, then I hope, very sincerely, and in a very English way, that I've failed.
Wanted! your LUXE for less tips
This is the perfect time to travel in real style. Hopefully the worst of the financial crisis is behind us. Hotel rates are cheaper and the cost of living has gone down. If you're a savvy traveller, extravagance no longer needs to break the bank. So, if you know of a five-star villa at a two-star price, or perhaps a luxury ski chalet where the prices aren't mountain high, we would love to hear from you. Based on your experiences, we're building an invaluable guide to the places around the world that offer fabulous holidays at a fraction of the cost. And soon we will be launching the first High Life Luxury for Less Awards. Watch this space.
