Slumming it in Mayfair for South Asian haute cuisine giggles Pitting Gymkhana against Indian Accent seems like such a natural thing to do. Both are pricey high-end Indian restaurants on the same street in Mayfair, located mere yards apart from each other. And yet the outcome almost seems like such a forgone conclusion. In one … 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
Plus a beast of a bacon sandwich Salvaging, reusing and repurposing old fittings and furnishings to adorn new restaurants is nothing new; it’s been an ongoing trend in the English-speaking world for at least a decade, if not more. Renovating old buildings, while judiciously paying homage to their original purpose, has received less attention but … 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
But it’s not the giant leap that London needs Santo Remedio was a startling breath fresh of air. Coming seemingly out of nowhere, that Shoreditch restaurant single-handedly revitalised the state of Mexican food in London with a deftness and depth to its cooking that was true to the mother country and a shining example to … Continue reading
Unutterable swear words suppressed The quality of American-style barbecue in London has made leaps and bounds in the past several years, but continual progress is by no means guaranteed. There’s no clearer example of the potential for setting back an entire genre through massive incompetence than Low, Slow and Juke. Owned by pubco Marston’s, this underground … Continue reading
