Mums, ever-discerning and always deserving of a treat, are notoriously difficult to please. But the day need not be too worrying.
This Mother’s Day, take her for afternoon tea, to a gallery, to a show. This guide will inform you of the best options going to ensure she has a spectacular time.
The obvious choice: afternoon tea at Mariage Frères
Wedding Brothers
Mariage Frères, founded in Paris in 1854, last year sailed past its 170th birthday. Now happily trading in London, the “world’s most exclusive purveyor of luxury teas” — there are around 1,000 varieties stocked, many of them rare — has brought its classic savoir-faire to Covent Garden. Afternoon teas are also available in a five-storey Georgian townhouse, with sandwiches, pastries and desserts on offer. There is also Champagne. The restaurant and tea room is open daily from noon till 7pm.
Adrian Lourie
Rambutan remains a stand-out of London dining but, a couple of years after opening, it’s now slightly easier to score a table there. At her Borough Market restaurant, chef Cynthia Shanmugalingam serves diaspora Sri Lankan food and dishes are cooked over an open fire. There might be dosas with coriander sambol, buttermilk fried chicken, Dorset mussel sodhi (stew), and black pork dry curry, all to be enjoyed alongside fun cocktails and a keen selection of affordable wines. Your mum will love it.
The immersive show: Moonwalkers with Tom Hanks
Justin Sutcliffe
Hollywood star Tom Hanks narrates an immersive show at the Lightroom in King’s Cross, offering a new perspective on humankind’s exploration to the moon, past, present and future. There are stories of the Apollo missions, insight into impending crewed surface missions, and a look at the Artemis programme, including interviews with astronauts. There might be no better place than the Lightroom, where visuals and sound are used to powerful effect, to examine our celestial neighbour. The exhibiton closes later this year, on June 1.
The exhibition: Edvard Munch at the National Portrait Gallery
Dr Daniel Jacobson, Edvard Munch, 1908. Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Denmark
This exhibition — this five-star exhibition, according to the Standard’s Martin Robinson — tells a life full of love and revenge. It collects 40 or so Munch’s portraits, many lesser-known, which reveal his countless sides. It is a show stuffed with his friends, patrons and love interests — but so too his enemies. It is a show that questions our relationships with those around us, especially those we revile at the same time we rely on them. “Munch may be, as collector Max Linde put it ‘a fine interpreter of the human soul, a Hamlet figure who likes to brood and ponder,’ but well, we all have our moments don’t we?” writes Robinson. “Munch was not a maniac, he was merely the most vibrant of sensitive souls.” Not one to miss.
Until June 15, The National Portrait Gallery, npg.org.uk
The theatre: Much Ado About Nothing
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Marc Brenner
Treating mum? This show is worth the outlay. One of Shakespeare’s finest romantic comedies, this Much Ado About Nothing takes the story of Hero and Claudio into the rave-fuelled world of the early 1990s. Granted, it sounds a horroshow but does, in fact, work. In part that owes something to colourful, gleeful staging, but having Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as Benedick and Beatrice doesn’t hurt. In fact, their chemistry fuels the show: it is explosive, very funny, and picked up five stars in a review by the Standard’s Nick Curtis.
Chicken tonight: The new restaurant will launch next month
Baby Bob
Bébé Bob is the casual sister restaurant to Soho’s ever-frivolous Bob Bob Ricard. Since opening, it has only gone from strength to strength and now is on the form of its life, as a recent visit confirmed. It isn’t short of glamour and sophistication: there, chicken from Vandes or Landes in France is served as rotisserie, with good fries; caviar and champagne are optional but — at least on Mother’s Day — probably necessary extras. The space is chic and the service refined, and so there are few better restaurants within which to entertain without having to overthink things.