Not nearly as cliched as you might think at first glance Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A fine dining restaurant with a much-vaunted chef at the helm has opened in leafy, wealthy zone 1 West London and serves dishes based on seasonal British produce. If that sentence of postmodern London restaurant cliches … Continue reading
The Langham’s second hotel bar in all but name I review relatively few gastropubs, not because I have any objection to them but due to a pair of far more prosaic reasons. For starters, many of the most interesting new gastropubs seem to be opening outside of London. As as a typical rootless cosmopolitan elitist, … Continue reading
Judging a restaurant on more than how good it looks on Instagram Update 31/7/2017 – added remarks about the bone marrow to the details of the goat curry An opinion column published on the newly launched London version of Eater caused a small stir among the capital’s restaurant watchers. The piece railed against the pernicious effects … Continue reading
Cheap as chips and almost as good Trying to find a restaurant for a large group of people is a royal pain in the unmentionables. Cramming a baker’s dozen around a table can be a logistical feat akin to the Berlin Airlift, especially when everyone has competing, conflicting demands. My own unruly posse of dining … Continue reading
Xu’s cheaper and more homely neighbour By accident or design, the sumptuously superlative Xu isn’t the only Taiwanese restaurant on Rupert Street. The West End’s most unlikely restaurant side street is also home to Old Tree Daiwan Bee. This oddly-named Taiwanese restaurant originally started out on a site in Golder’s Green and must be one … Continue reading
The gastropub cousin to Bocca di Lupo Most new restaurants launch in a blaze of publicity glory with press releases spamming inboxes, repetitively woolly social media chatter, oversubscribed launch parties, a Ryanair-style rush for reservations and fawning coverage from all the usual suspects. Plaquemine Lock, the new gastropub from one of the bods behind Soho’s … Continue reading
Live music and a celebrity chef amount to a hill of beans I try to avoid mentioning celebrity chefs when writing about their restaurants. Apart from trying to avoid the cult of personality that most newspapers trip over themselves to indulge in, I just don’t think it matters to the experience for the diner at … Continue reading
