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’ slow method of smoking meat produces such sublime results, that it has become … Continue reading
With lockdown, I have fewer respites from the amateurish tedium of my own cooking. It was this, combined with the need to run errands for an ill dining companion, that led me to pucker up for a cheeky Nando’s for the first time in years. At the same time, the existence of a notable competitor in the form of Roosters Piri Piri, a franchised chain with branches in London as well as farther afield, piqued my curiosity. There’s only one thing for it – a takeaway piri piri chicken-and-chips comparison. Continue reading
Everest Curry King is as much a takeaway as it is a caff, even in the halcyon days before the lockdown. Curiously though, the takeaway menu can differ dramatically from the sit-down menu. Continue reading
Despite its liberal use of fairy lights, exposed brickwork and repurposed shipping containers, Vinegar Yard isn’t the plucky bohemian operation you might think it is. Continue reading
‘What’s an Italian steakhouse?!’ The answer, of course, is a restaurant that serves steak cut from Italian cows. It’s a revealing response – pasta, pizza and pesto cast such a shadow over the perception of Italian food in our collective imagination, that anything else is literally inconceivable. If goldfish really do have a memory of just three seconds, then our gestalt intelligence is seemingly limited to just three things per subject. Continue reading
The entire menu reviewed starting with all the vegetarian and vegan dishes The surprising thing about Chuku’s, to me at least, isn’t that this Tottenham restaurant serves Nigerian food. Although comparatively uncommon, Nigerian food isn’t too hard to find in London’s southeastern suburbs from Nigerian restaurants to (broadly) pan-West African takeaways. But those eateries not … Continue reading
What’s the point of all this? Fine dining used to be so easy to identify. The opulently decorated dining rooms, the tablecloths, the suited and booted staff – and that was just the physical environment, never mind the hushed aura. Then there was the food, itself a world apart from what most of us ate … Continue reading
This crab dinner has legs, but it’s running before it can walk The potential of Instagram to power and propel businesses from mere photographic ideas into actual money making businesses is well known. It’s one thing to read about it though and quite to another to sit in a restaurant that has its origins in … Continue reading
But the embers are already flickering out I’ve watched the growth and rise of Prairie Fire with interest and concern. Originally a street food stall with a stint at the original Mercato Metropolitano, this American barbecue restaurant has now found itself a permanent home in a former railway arch in White City across the road … 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
