How do you PR a new restaurant? Having a really famous TV-chef as a backer isn’t a bad start: that Rick Stein is investing in one of his ex-employees at this Chiswick newcomer has drummed up a lot of interest from day one. Given Stein’s involvement, you might perhaps expect a seafood place, and one […]
Where do you lunch your editor? Should you – say, like us – find yourself writing a restaurant column for a daily business newspaper, and have the pleasure and honour of taking your editor out for lunch, where do you go? That was the question. Not somewhere too flashy – obviously, expenses must be kept […]
Some restaurants are just really worth knowing about. Not because they’re necessarily the brightest or the best – more that they’re in a handy location and reliably good enough. (They mustn’t be TOO madly popular either: no good if they’re always booked out.) Cocoon is such a place. On the location front, it’s difficult to […]
Does the old City still exist? A City full of chaps? The sort of City where chaps wear suits? The sort of City where chaps wearing suits can order a few glasses of port after lunch, with no one batting an eye-lid? When you go up the stairs to this cramped and bustling dining room […]
The area round Aldgate – gateway to the exotic East End – seems to be opening up as a new frontier for classy City lunching. It was the Missouri Grill (opposite the tube) that showed it could be done. Later this autumn is to see the opening of an offshoot of Covent’s Garden’s Christopher’s. And […]
British people who’ve been to France – most people, that is – are very familiar with the idea of a proper French brasserie. We’ve seen dozens of ’em, in Paris and in almost any other French city of any size. And in New York too. Englishman Keith McNally has made Big Apple legends of such […]
Some restaurant locations have a spirit all of their own, apparently independent of their owner. And most restaurant-owners have a style that shines through in all of their various locations. The latest incarnation of Cecconi’s, in Mayfair – now owned by the Soho House man, Nick Jones – is therefore something of a double-whammy: both […]
Great buildings and great restaurants can go together. New York’s famous Seagram Building designed by Mies van der Rohe, for example, has housed one of the world’s classic restaurants – The Four Seasons – since 1959. It is still at the heart of Manhattan’s media power scene today. London’s Gherkin is a great building, and […]
One of the London’s odder facets is the dearth of restaurants specialising in traditional British scoff. You’re more likely to get risotto in your classic central London pub nowadays than steak & oyster pie. Two years ago, St John – one of the few places serving exciting and genuine British food – launched this spin-off […]
Grand hotels are supposed to be timeless and unchanging. Not the Dorchester, though, which always seems to be spending money like water, re-jigging and re-doing, in a never-ending quest for’ well, who knows? The hotel used to have the good-but-extremely-dull Chinese restaurant, The Dorchester Oriental, which closed last year. This is its replacement, but in […]
