I follow hotel workers home to find best places to eat, says Sarah Jessica Parker
Sarah Jessica Parker follows hotel workers home to find the best places to eat when she is on holiday.
The Sex and the City star, 59, said restaurants that are popular with locals offer the most authentic cuisine – not the “fancy” food served up in tourist hotspots.
“If you’re on holiday, trying to find restaurants... I do endless months of research where, where, where, where, where,” she told the Ruthie’s Table podcast.
“And you get to your destination and you’ll try to ask people and they’ll send you to the place everyone else in the hotel is going.
“And I’ll be ‘No, no where do you eat Mr Concierge? Where do you eat?’ And they won’t tell me because they think we want this stacked food, fancy.”
“I’ll just follow the employees home,” she continued. “I literally follow them home and I see where they live and their communities and their restaurants.
“And that’s where I go and that’s where I shop. It completes the experience. When you get to eat local you’re having their experience.”
Parker is reported to have become a regular at The Gate House pub in Highgate, north London, while she stars in a West End play opposite her husband Matthew Broderick.
Plaza Suite, a romantic comedy, is her first West End play and is on at the Savoy Theatre until April 13.
But Parker has been left unimpressed with the capital’s late-night dining options.
“I could go on and on about how deeply in love I am with this city,” she told the Evening Standard in January.
“However, you have a curtain that comes down at 10.12pm to 10.14pm and it’s your big meal of the day and you’re starving and the hustle to get there before you’re holding up an entire staff and a kitchen, which is the last thing we want to do.
“That’s the talk that surrounds the show – ‘where is our meal tonight?’”
Amy Lamé, the Mayor of London’s £120,000-a-year “night tsar”, has faced criticism in recent months over the state of its night-time economy.
More than 1,000 venues have closed in the capital over the last three years, according to the Night Time Industries Association.
