Madonna labelled it ‘heaven’ on a recent visit, but the cost of living in the seaside resort is hitting many residents hard

Not many chefs working in small, family-run restaurants expect global megastars to turn up for dinner and to design them a menu from scratch.

But that’s what happened to Simona Di Dio last weekend, when she cooked dishes inspired by her Italian grandmother’s recipes for Madonna, who sat on the single wooden dining table in Di Dio’s cosy, candlelit Italian restaurant in Margate’s old town.

Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate
Munch, Bourgeois, Gormley and Baselitz go shoulder to shoulder with up-and-coming artists in an exhibition that revels in its stygian gloom

Tracey Emin catches me looking from her self-portrait to her as I try to assess the closeness of the resemblance. Not that close. This inky screenprint is bigger than she is, its face wider and taller. But it’s not a picture of the outer person but an inner vision. As we stand in front of it I seem to fall into radiating pools of blackness – to cross into darkness.

Emin has curated an exhibition for the depths of winter. It’s a generous, unexpected show with an eclectic yet profound openness to kinds of creativity many might think incompatible: paintings, installations, performance art all face the night here. She sets artists she nurtures at the Emin Studios alongside her heroes Edvard Munch, Louise Bourgeois and other luminaries of modern art – if luminary is the right word in this stygian setting. For, by a stroke of lighting genius, the Carl Freedman Gallery has been plunged into nocturnal shadow that still lets you see the art.