Update 19/4/2021 – added reviews of The Big Smoke (Bromley), Crossroads and Pappy’s Summer and barbecue go together like Bank Holidays and rain. One naturally follows the other, but even better is a summer filled with American-style barbecue, a world away from a typical suburban garden grill topped with bangers and burgers. The low ‘n’ … Continue reading
This six-month residency needs to become permanent We all have friends that say the stupidest, most regrettable things. Jaw-dropping comments that almost make you regret befriending them in the first place. In the case of one of my dining companions, his self-professed dislike for pork and ‘samey Asian food’ is a black mark against an … Continue reading
The best dishes of the year that you haven’t tried yet As another year – and another decade – come to an end, it’s tempting to feel a sense of melancholy. The country as a whole rushes headlong into what will almost certainly be a jingoistically embarrassing debacle, while countless cherished restaurants have shut their … Continue reading
Grilled offal, Cornish pasty-lookalikes and hearty doughnuts are just some of the charms at this Lambeth North restaurant Not having to cook is one of the more pragmatic attractions of eating out, rather than staying in – it’s part of the service that you’re paying for after all. This utilitarian consideration probably helps explain why … Continue reading
Halfway between Elephant & Castle and London Bridge, but nowhere in particular Updated 30/9/2019 – added reviews of new traders and updated the reviews of Badiani, Duman, Little Sicily and Turkish Garden Updated 16/4/2019 – added hyperlinked table of contents, corrected spelling and grammatical errors The weird thing about street food in London isn’t the … Continue reading
Iranian stews and kebabs in Soho It’s strange to begin a restaurant review by talking about another restaurant, but bear with me for a moment. Some of the best dishes at Brigadiers, an Indian restaurant in the City, were the kebabs which meant it was immediately noticeable when the kebab chef responsible, Kian Samyani, left … Continue reading
Picklery not gimmickry. The sweet life. Keep it sweet. A sweet deal. Sweet as honey. Sweet as pie. Our understandable preoccupation with sweetness and sweet foods is so deeply ingrained that the word itself has become a synonym for all that is desirable and good in the English language. But this has also blinded us, … Continue reading
2017 has been an incredibly hectic year for London restaurants, even by the frenetic standards of this city. Despite the closure of some much missed favourites, new restaurants have continued to open at a dizzying and surely unsustainable pace. Some of that has been driven by a modest influx of celebrity chefs from abroad – … Continue reading
Disclosure: I contributed to Santo Remedio’s crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter with a modest donation in the region of £75-200. Updated 25/02/19 – added details of 2019 revisits Arrogant. Cocksure. Overconfident know-nothing. Snooty elitist. Those are just some of the epithets slung my way in the hatemail that I try to ignore (usually quite successfully). That … Continue reading
