People always assume that restaurants are ‘about’ the food. Business rendezvous are in fact rarely about the food, but, for obvious reasons, restaurateurs prefer to ‘play the game’, and pretend they are. One of the main ways restaurateurs hint that restaurants are ‘about’ the food is by making the menu prices reflect the cost of […]
Fancy jacking in corporate life and striking out on your own? Brothers Chris and Jeff Galvin did just that. They’ve left their safe – and good – jobs, as head chefs at The Wolseley and L’Escargot respectively to set up this ‘bistrot de luxe’ in the anonymous environs of Baker Street. The premises that were […]
Funny lot, foreigners: in a nice way, of course. London’s indigenous restaurateurs often come up with rather ‘safe’ restaurants. ‘Elegant’, ‘understated’, perhaps even ‘cool’? But if you’re looking for a touch of ‘joie de vivre’ enlivened with a soupçon of ‘je ne sais quoi’ or even the surreal? You often have to look across the […]
Vietnamese cooking has yet to hit the big time in London. This is still mainly a world of ‘ethnic’ East End cafés. There is a ‘smart’ Vietnamese – Fitzrovia’s Bam Bou – but it’s very much ‘evolved’, offering a cuisine reflecting colonial French influences. It’s no criticism to say it’s probably as known for its […]
Big Name chefs are pretty keen to put their names on things these days: chocolates, frying pans, even supermarkets’ Less so restaurants, and for good reason. If any old product with a chef’s name on it turns out to be unremarkable, who’s really going to care? But if it’s their ‘core’ business? Gary Rhodes knows […]
It’s curious how few kosher restaurants there are in London. Once-famous Blooms, near Aldgate, threw in the towel in the late ’90s, as did the wonderfully quirky Kosher Luncheon Club, nearby. For a while there were no kosher restaurants in the City, until this venture – also near Aldgate – opened two years ago. It […]
As the wise and good man who distributes our guides is fond of observing: there is a very thin line between creating a smash hit and a dead loss. This observation pops into my head as I eat at this new City-fringe gastropub (a summer opening from the team behind Exmouth market’s well-regarded Easton). Though […]
Maurizio Vilona’s new Mayfair restaurant is authentic to a fault. A real fault. The austere and slightly gloomy design of his new premises screams I-T-A-L-Y, in a bad way. You can have too much understatement. The oddly ‘foreign’ feel of this small and poorly-proportioned room – exacerbated on my visit by throbbing air conditioning – […]
Covent Garden: at the heart of London, but still a lousy place to eat. In this dessert, the Café des Amis has long been a safe, if dull, choice, especially before or after a performance at the nearby Royal Opera House. This is, in fact, two places. The basement wine bar is possibly of most […]
It’s old rich people who keep top restaurants going. Right? Not on the basis of a visit to Mayfair’s new £80-a-head Nobu Berkeley, where your reviewing team (average age 42) were very amongst the more senior citizens present. Are we just getting on a bit? Did that explain why the noisy ‘cavern’ of a bar/holding […]
