Eating good in Money Town
Patrick Radden Keefe, author and real eater, on his favorite London restaurants and bookstores
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— Jonah & Erin
The world knows Patrick Radden Keefe as one of the great living nonfiction writers, with a string of incredible New Yorker stories and best-selling books under his belt, among them Say Nothing, about the Troubles, Empire of Pain, about the family that got rich off the opioid crisis, and Rogues, an excellent collection of his magazine pieces.
Patrick’s reporting? Deep. His prose? Elegant. His tales? Enveloping. He is our foremost chronicler of illicit systems that would prefer to do their dirty work in the darkness, and which he drags into the light.
Also, he is a charming, handsome and tasteful clothes-rocker known to casually drip down in some 45R or Oliver Church.
It’s to the point where you might think the man walks on air, free of self-doubt. But I (Jonah) have had the fortune of calling Patrick the Big Homie for many years, and I know a more vulnerable side of him. Case in point: Around this time last year, he called me up on what sounded like the verge of tears. He’d finished a draft of his newest book, London Falling, and he was happy with it, but he couldn’t sleep properly, he explained, voice trembling, until I let him know what I thought. He sent me a PDF and, since Patrick is the man, I eagerly cracked it open and proceeded to read it in two sittings.
The book investigates the mysterious death of a teenager named Zac Brettler, who plummeted from the terrace of a London luxury apartment into the Thames in 2019, under extremely strange circumstances. It emerged that Brettler had been passing himself off as the ultrarich son of a Russian oligarch, and become enmeshed with figures in London’s criminal underworld.
The book is a caper. A romp. Haunting. Profound. It’s about greed, delusion, predation, willful police incompetence, and the way money can poison the soul not just of a person but of a city. It’s also about the power — ruinous here, liberatory there — of fakery.
When I finished reading the draft, I told Patrick he’d done his damn thing, then gave him 4 small yet brilliant notes that made the book .000006% more fire.
London Falling comes out today. And wouldn’t you know it, last week Patrick called me up once again, once again on the verge of tears, this time saying that even though he’d booked big splashy interviews with the New York Times and a bunch of other places, the rollout was not gonna feel complete, and the book would not feel like an authentic success, until he’d tapped in with you, the beautiful & blessed readers of Spy Nation.
Rather than discuss the book, though, Patrick and I decided to talk about the book’s setting: London, where he once lived, and where he’s been traveling virtually every year for several decades now. In particular, we decided to talk about Patrick’s favorite restaurants in London — because he is a real eater with great taste in food — plus a little Bookshop Talk for good measure.
You can find our own London Recon Reports here and here. Whether you’re headed to the UK some time soon, or whether you’re one of the many Chill Spyfriends who call it home, enjoy Patrick Radden Keefe’s London: