The best restaurants for a pre-Christmas meal with friends

Arranging a Christmas dinner with friends doesn’t have to mean settling for a crammed corner and dried-out turkey. Here’s our guide to the best restaurants for feasting.

Festive meals are not always the most relaxing. Whether you’re trying to avoid getting into an argument with your Uncle Geoffrey about the Irish backstop or tasked with finding a restaurant within budget for the office party, they don’t always spell fun times.

The one Christmas meal that has a fighting chance of being enjoyable is the one you have with your friends in early December, after 8,052 messages in the WhatsApp group chat. You’ve done the Doodle poll to find a date everyone can make, now here’s our pick of where to actually go. 

Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas

It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points. Elsewhere, Thomas has written compellingly about her own orthorexia (or obsessive desire to control her diet); but this doesn’t mean that she is above lampooning the hysterical pronouncements of the diet-obsessed — not least that fruit, unless you pick it in the wild yourself, contains so much sugar that you may as well eat Haribo, which is nicer, after all.

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Contemporary fiction’s favourite battle-axe, Olive Kitteridge, is back.

Olive’s first outing as the titular anti-heroine in Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 novel won the author the Pulitzer Prize. She was also played by Frances McDormand in a HBO mini-series of the same name.

Strout has said she never expected to write about Olive Kitteridge again but “she honestly just showed up. I could see her in her car, nosing it into the marina […] I just saw her so clearly that I thought, ‘OK, I guess I will have to write this down.’” In Olive, Again, Kitteridge is now in her early 80s but she is the same woman who, in the earlier novel, said to her only son of his new wife, “She’s so nice, Christopher, it makes me puke.” 

Fleishman Is in Trouble

In the heady days of summer before Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, was published and before David Cameron had unleashed his memoirs, the most talked about books all centred on love and relationships. From Lisa Taddeo’s riveting non-fiction examination of female sexuality in Three Women to David Nicholls’s latest novel, the lovely Sweet Sorrow about an adolescent relationship, the books that were most hungrily passed around from reader to reader were those concerning our most intimate relationships. Perhaps the hottest book of all, however, has been The New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s first novel Fleishman Is in Trouble. In fact, so in demand did the novel become, that it was briefly unavailable whilst it was being reprinted. “Believe the hype. Fleishman Is in Trouble is even better than we were promised” was the first line of The Washington Post’s review.

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

The Secrets We Kept is a novel about a novel. Lara Prescott has written a fictionalised account of the battle to publish Doctor Zhivago and its repercussions, and the CIA subterfuge in getting it read by Russians.

Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker in 1958 that “Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history”. The Kremlin did not agree. It suppressed Boris Pasternak’s novel and it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Doctor Zhivago is the story of the physician and poet Yuri Zhivago and his struggles in the turbulent and tragic decades of the first half of the 20th century, spanning the Tsarist age, the Bolshevik and the Stalin years. He falls passionately in love with Lara Antipova (memorably played by Julie Christie in David Lean’s 1965 film) but woven through the epic love story is a disillusionment with revolutionary ideas.

Domestic Noir with Lisa Jewell and Louise Candlish

If you enjoyed Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies or Louise Doughty’s recent Platform Seven, then you are already a fan of domestic noir. This sub-genre of crime fiction was defined by the writer Julia Crouch as, rather thrillingly, having “as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants”. Novels in this category usually take place in the home and workplaces and they often focus on the female experience.

I’ll be discussing domestic noir with Lisa Jewell and Louise Candlish, alongside their brilliant new novels The Family Upstairs and Those People, over wine at Dulwich Books on Tuesday 1st October from 7pm. Tickets are still available via the link below. Join us!