Speedboat Bar Notting Hill review – loud Thai food worth shouting about
Punchy, varied and characterful Thai food is a hill worth dying on.
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Blue’s Smokehouse Twickenham review – dire suburban barbecue fit only for meatheads
The meal so bad, I had to apologise to my dining companion The cliché about the suburbs, especially those south of the river, is that there’s nowhere good to eat. That’s not quite true anymore, if it ever was, especially as London’s property crisis and the increasingly brutal restaurant market push more and more restaurateurs … Continue reading
Temper review – Soho meat palace serves exquisite beef, lamb and goat
Chicken? Where we’re going, we don’t need chicken. Update 25/2/2018 – updated formatting, added details of early 2018 revisit I try not to pay too much attention to a restaurant’s PR push before I eat there, as the nauseating buzzwords, jargon and marketing waffle can colour my view of the place before it’s even opened. … Continue reading
Smokestak review – barbecue street food settles down in Shoreditch
Smoke is the new black. It’s easy to rant and rail against hipsters and their rapidly gentrifying east London hub. For many, such as my dining companion Vicious Alabaster, they’re all little more than pompous, shallow, fad-chasing Macaroni twits. That may or may not be true, but I generally don’t care. From a utilitarian perspective, they … Continue reading
★★★★☆ / Indian / South Asian
Calcutta Street review – Indian supper club settles down in Fitzrovia
Curry that makes you feel at home. Sort of. Update 12/3/23: this restaurant has now closed I’ve never understood the compulsion for restaurants to describe dishes as ‘home made’. When eating out, I want professionally made dishes – culinary delights that I couldn’t make at home. That conceit is slightly different at Calcutta Street though. … Continue reading
Kiln review – Smoking Goat sequel dazzles Soho in a different way
Less of a sibling and more of a cousin Second acts are hard, whether you’re switching careers, releasing a second album or opening a follow-up restaurant. With the latter, the easiest ways forward is to copy the same template as the original or dilute your idea for a wider audience. Sometimes, second restaurants feel like … Continue reading
A. Wong review – Victoria Dim Sum and Peking duck
Plus the most mumbling tasting menu ever The overall trend in London restaurant menus, for the past few years, has been brevity. A few dishes, done well. Avoiding the false benefit of ‘choice’ and focussing instead on quality has been a very welcome development, but not every restaurant believes in short menus. A Wong has … Continue reading
★★☆☆☆ / Barbecue/BBQ / Burgers
Cattle and Co review – King’s Cross meat bandwagon rattles along
Botched burgers and bungled barbecue Conflating burgers and barbecue into the same menu is a common mistake. It’s easy to see why – alongside mac and cheese, they are the emblematic dishes of American cuisine in the popular imagination. But they’re also very different. The best burgers are cooked medium rare at high temperatures with … Continue reading
Pide Oven review – Turkish pizzas in Fitzrovia for lunch and take away
No kebabs here, sorry late night drunks Kebabs are usually the first things that come to mind when someone mentions take away Turkish fast food, but other dishes from that storied culinary tradition also lend themselves to quick bites on the go. Two of the most obvious are lahmacun and pide, a pair of separate … Continue reading
Cha Chaan Teng review – the weird Hong Kong homage that breaks all the rules
I ate here four times so you don’t have to Update 5/05/2019 – this restaurant has now closed I try not to read other reviewer’s opinions of a restaurant until after I’ve finished writing my own review, so as to not skew my own views. I couldn’t resist taking a peek at the social media chatter … Continue reading
Killer Tomato review – attack of the imitation Shepherd’s Bush burritos and tacos
And I mean that in the nicest possible way Update 16/6/2019 – this restaurant has now closed Stuff any old combination of meat, veg and sauce into a tortilla and someone, somewhere will call it ‘Mexican’ even if the result only has a tangential relationship with Donald Trump’s favourite country. To be fair, former street food … Continue reading
The Picky Glutton 
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