Wednesday, 9 September 2026, London: Art, Ochre Brasserie, Simpson's in the Strand, and The Comedy About Spies

Written 1 October 2026

Last full day in London. This morning, I didn't bother with the QR code and just ordered breakfast at the bar.

David repeated yesterday's choices, but I ordered strictly from the "breakfast extras" section—two fried eggs (they were back to being perfect), two hashbrowns, and a slice of black pudding. Just what I wanted.

Along the way I got this shot of some of the eight huge LCD video screens that have gone up facing the Odeon.

As we strolled, we talked about where we wanted to start (knowing we wouldn't have time for the whole collection) and bemoaned that galleries never have rooms just devoted to still life, but we had other preferences to seek out (Flemish old masters, impressionists, etc.). Imagine our surprise when just a few rooms into our visit, we encountered a room devoted to still life! In this case, all floral and entymological.

And I loved this pair of little studies of insects (and a couple of plants) by Jan Van Kessel the Elder.

At the right is another I wouldn't mind having on my wall—"Flowers in a White Stone Vase" by Dirck de Bray.

On the other hand, the one at the left here—"Flowers in a Vase" by Rachel Ruysch—although it checks all my usual boxes for floral paintings (e.g., highly realistic, identifiable plants), is less to my taste. The stems and leaves seem to writhe, struggling to assume graceful (rather than realistic) positions. It reminds me of Audubon's paintings of birds—highly detailed, perfect for identification, but always in artfully artificial positions (with good reason, since the specimens he painted were dead; he arranged their positions himself).

After we left the still lives, I spotted this lovely church interior: "The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem" by Pieter Saenredam. It was displayed as part of a group illustrating "perspective and perception."

We found two Vermeers, "Young Woman Standing at a Virginal" and "Young Woman Seated at a Virignal," both of which we saw at the big Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2003 (see my diary entry for 4/5/23). Good to see that they made it home safely.

I liked this "Four Age of Man" by Valentin de Boulogne.

And these are just random views of rooms we passed through.

I generally like Carravagio, but for me, the main attraction of this "Dinner at Emmaus" was the care he took with the little still life of fruit in the foreground, which I took a close-up of, shown here at the right.

The close-up also made me wonder what kind of a roast bird Jesus's hand is hovering over, with those long, skinny feet.

Then we came to the Canalettos—the museum has a whole room full of them! Here are two of my favorites, "Venice: The Basin of San Marco on Ascension Day" and "Venice: The Grand Canal with S. Simeone Piccolo." How does he do that?!

And of course, I always linger in front of the museum's pride and joy, and my personal favorite, "Whistlejacket," George Stubbs's masterpiece. No room to display its full magnificence here, but the painting is pretty much life size.

Whistlejacket was one of two prize stud stallions owned by the second Marquess of Rockingham, and the Marquess commissioned his portrait and that of the other stallion, Scrub, at the same time, then rejected the painting of Scrub. Stubbs added a background and sold it to somebody else. It's pretty clear, despite (or perhaps because of) the painstakingly accurate portrayal, that Scrub just didn't have the looks and personality that Whistlejacket did.

Next up were impressionists (this place has everything!). David's comment was "I'm glad to see Manet getting his due; most places, it's Monet, Monet, Monet." But since I'm an ardent Monet fan (I can take or leave Manet), that's what I took pictures of.

The fruit at the left is a very early work, before he had really found his niche. The snowscape at the right shows him in his full flower.

I'm not generally a fan of van Gogh, but I like some of his early work, like this little study of crabs.

And when I came across this lady and her daughter ("The Lavergne Family Breakfast"), I was struck by how much she reminded me of the "Chocolate maid" we first saw in a German chocolate shop as a life-size sculpture made of marzipan (yes, really) and later saw in Dresden as a painting (on which, it seems, the marzipan version was based). So I looked it up, and sure enough, the breakfast scene was painted (actually, drawn in pastels) by the same guy, Jean-Étienne Liotard. Now I know where the maid was taking that tray of hot chocolate!

Around noon, we went to the "middle" of the museum's three eateries, the Ochre Brasserie, and had "afternoon tea" for lunch. Assam tea in heavy silver pots and this lovely three-tier stand bearing, from top to bottom, scones (plain and, on the far side, raisin) with strawberry jam, orange marmalade, and clotted cream; finger sandwiches (for each of us, one each of ham with tomato, mustard, and mayo; cucumber and butter; smoked salmon and dill; and egg salad with watercress); and a lemon meringue tart, a strawberry-cream-filled cake dome, and a tall cylinder of carrot cake. Yummy, all of it. The scones were way better than the little hockey pucks Viking serves at its afternoon teas.

Then it was back to the hotel to rest up before strolling down to the famous Simpson's in the Strand (featured, e.g., in the Hitchcock film Sabotage and mentioned in many a Wodehouse novel and story) for dinner. The photo at the right is the church of St. Martin in the fields, right next to the National Gallery.

Written 4 October 2026

Back in Leicester Square, we found that the rest of the screens had gone up, and all were now lighted, displaying "Screen one," "Screen two," etc., up to "Screen eight."

Then later, on as we walked along the Strand toward Simpson's, I spotted this extremely narrow house, which I hadn't noticed before. It's now "The Port House," serving port, tapas, wine, and sherry.

Studying the wine list, David was delighted to find that he could order "Vieux Télégraph" by the glass! And he was doubly delighted to discover the gadget the sommelier used to pour the glass. It's called a Coravin, and it dispenses wine from a closed bottle by means of a needle inserted through a self-sealing rubber diaphragm lid by injecting argon gas into the bottle. Apparently, both CO₂ and nitrogen alter the flavor of wine, whereas argon is completely inert.

I started the meal with flaked hot-smoked salmon trout with an endive salad and half a boiled duck egg. The endive (what the French would call friseacute;e) was tightly coiled within a restraining cylinder of some sort, and the leaves were bristely and prickly enough to interlock and hold that shape when the trout was added and the cylinder was lifted off.

David started with an heirloom tomato salad. It included a few lettuce leaves and edamame for contrast, but mostly it was just chunks of heirloom tomatoes of different colors in a light vinaigrette. David is developing a real appreciation of heirloom tomatoes. We're both old enough to remember when tomatoes tasted like tomatoes!

I then moved on to the ox-cheek pudding and buttered cabbage. The juice with which the pudding ws doused was so rich it congealed on the plate as it cooled and could be scraped up in chunks. (I was actually heartbroken to miss the following day's pudding of the day—steak and kidney—which I have been lamenting steadily that you can get anywhere any more.)

But David couldn't resist the roast beef trolley. They bring you a plate bearing a fluffy Yorkshire pudding, then the guy with a big carving knife rolls a huge silver-domed trolley to your table, opens it up, and proceeds to carve off two big slices (one is under the Yorkshire pudding) of beef of the degree of pinkness you specify. Then he presents you with a silver pitcher of gravy and, if you like, ladles a big dollop of horseradish sauce onto one edge. We've been to Simpson's before, and both had the bee—I can vouch that it's superb.