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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Hawaiian raw fish salad that isn’t sushi Every now and again newspapers and blogs alike fall over themselves to breathlessly pant over and extoll the latest food trend imported from the US. Restaurants, street food stalls and supper clubs serving up the trend are listed and thus implicitly recommended, irrespective of the actual quality … Continue reading
The Picky Glutton 
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