What is a right-wing restaurant? A home for reactionary politicians to plot their coups over thumping claret and overcooked hogget, perhaps. Or it may emerge in the character of the staff: help, my sommelier won’t stop talking about the ECHR! Or is it a place that – through menu, design and patrons – makes an implicit case for the Commonwealth? “This is a reductive way to think about restaurants,” I hear you muttering, to which I say: yes. And fun too.
After Orwell, Kenneth Clark might be the most over-quoted man on this island. But, to adapt a phrase, I cannot describe a right-wing restaurant but I know one when I see one. And I am sitting in Simpson’s in the Strand on a hazy Sunday evening in late summer, in a room apparently designed by a committee of Alan Clark, Charles Moore and Sir Robert Peel. What is that feeling? Should we re-annex Ireland?
This is one of London’s oldest restaurants, in operation since 1904, barring a period of closure in the wake of the pandemic (it reopened in March this year). The walls are high and wood-panelled; the art is early 20th century pretending to be 18th. There is a beef trolley pinballing around the booths and the staff are in bow ties. Fans of quail, apply here: after finishing its roasted breast you can turn to its egg, cracked over a venison tartar. And were you to write a history of England through the evolution of its condiments, the menu would aid your research: there is bread sauce, mint sauce, tartare sauce, parsley sauce, devilled sauce, horseradish “sauce” (more commonly known as “horseradish”).
Simpson’s is not sui generis – London is littered with Conservative and conservative restaurants. There is the gouty Rules in Covent Garden, and an attempt to make Scotland interesting at Boisdale in Belgravia (Scotland is interesting, just not the version found in Belgravia). In St James’s you can lunch at Wiltons – Rule Britannia but make it fish. In fact, your correspondent has personally seen Nigel Farage at two out of the three. Which – I would like on record – reveals nothing of her own politics. Write it down.
But what is it that they have in common? Aside from the ambient presence of the Honourable Member for Clacton. The cloches, the silverware, yes; the menus rooted confidently in the British Isles, sure. The heavy atmospheres stifle revolutionary dissent. But it is more than the superficial veneer of, say, the ingredients. Dover sole is fundamental, but fish are only so powerful in the political typecasting department – just as the three-piece suit is a necessary but not sufficient condition to Jacob Rees-Mogg.
No, these restaurants are united by the oh-so-Tory instinct to look backwards for artistic inspiration – conservatives like neoclassical architecture for the same reason they like oak panelling and bread sauce. The past was good – Lord Salisbury was still prime minister! – and therefore the Scandi-minimalist restaurants of London’s E postcodes in 2026 are bad. “White miso-glazed turnip” with “pear” and “toasted milk” down at Albers in De Beauvoir might have killed Disraeli.
I am not minded to complain. For the most part, I like the arch-Tory restaurants of this city – tradition can be as exciting as modernity. For all the innovation of the past decade in London’s restaurant scene, it’s also had a flattening effect: a race to achieve pan-European-Asian-infused-small-plate singularity. I would not willingly give up oxidised white wines and fuseau artichokes – but I suspect they can live in harmony with roast beef and Woolton pie and thick carpets, too. In fact, Silver Spoon’s magnanimous diplomacy might be what we need finally to heal this fractured, splintered and unhappy isle. As if you have a better idea?
At Simpson’s we eat morels and rabbit ballotine – a word not committed to paper since 1995 – in mustard sauce, and drink a 2023 Côtes du Rhône, an unusually Gallic route through a turbo-English restaurant. And I find myself first wondering what exactly it is that makes a right-wing restaurant. Maybe my question is glib. But I can tell you this. Ottolenghi? That’s for Lib Dems.
[Further reading: Stand up for your right to drink a pint vertically in Soho]
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This article appears in the 02 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Meet Generation Screwed
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