We’d always wanted to visit this trendy Clerkenwell eating place-cum-cocktail bar. It opened to raves (in some quarters) a couple of years back, and subsequently there was even talk of expansion. Then it unexpectedly bit the dust. Well, these rather intriguingly long and thin premises are now open again. They were, however, totally deserted the […]
Our guest at today’s meal – a critic for another publication – had eaten not once but twice at the new Malaysian restaurant in the West End’s outrageously fashionable Sanderson Hotel. He levelled with us: we were neither beautiful nor rich enough to eat there. Also, the food was no better than when the place […]
Just a few months ago, we reviewed Brera – a trendy and upmarket new venture, just off Oxford Street, backed by one of London’s longest-established Italian catering dynasties (the Spaghetti House people). Inauspiciously, news of its unexpected closure reached us the very day we visited Caricatura, which could be described in precisely similar terms. This […]
Lunchtime crowding shows this Bloomsbury newcomer has quickly made a name for itself: perhaps because it offers a satisfying – if basic – midday fill-up for just a fiver. But it’s not just economical locals who are making a song and dance about it. A number of press luminaries have hailed this ordinary-looking Indian as […]
Conran Restaurants is dead. Long live D&D London. That’s the clear message broadcast by London’s largest quality restaurant group since its recent (partial) MBO. What’s most interesting is that the two Ds concerned -Des Gunewardena and David Loewi – have even been explicitly distancing themselves from the conveyor-belt style with which, they now admit, the […]
From the upper deck of our City AM limousine, we saw an impressive place we’d not previously noticed. Once a grand banking hall, it looked – with its fancy lighting, smartly-dressed tables and a menu outside – for all the world like the sort of place readers ought to know about. So we hopped off, […]
Organic’ isn’t necessarily the same as ‘green’. The two concepts so often go hand in hand, though, that there’s something discordant about first impressions of this Pimlico palace to organicism, given that it’s so ostentatiously marbled, and so wantonly brightly-lit. Backed as the place is by the helicopter-loving (JC) Bamford family, however, it’s no great […]
An advertisement poorly written on a blackboard – of the sort you might see outside a boozer on a sink estate – forms one’s first impression of this City newcomer. Well, the Barbican may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s certainly no sink estate. Indeed – unusually for the City – this is […]
Don’t you hate it when you arrive at a restaurant, and feel you’ve invaded some sort of private party? That’s rather how we felt the Saturday lunchtime we visited this new Chelsea Italian. The only other table populated when we arrived was full of espresso-drinking friends-of-the-management doing extravagantly Italian things, like tossing their long blonde […]
It must be hard being Gordon Ramsay. Filming in California one minute. Establishing a flagship NYC restaurant the next. And all the while: maintaining standards at his London restaurant empire; servicing a demanding media profile, on both side of the Pond; and even running the odd marathon. Oh, and now establishing a gastropub empire too, […]
