A 16-seat restaurant serving a ten-course meal at a single evening sitting will open this autumn in Shoreditch’s Blue Mountain School. Chef Theo Clench (right in photo), formerly of Akoko and Portland, will head the kitchen at Cycene, cooking a seasonal menu influenced by Australasia with an emphasis on seafood. Among the signature dishes he […]
Soho’s legendary Groucho Club, a magnet for hell-raisers since Oliver Reed and Ken Russell (pictured) attended the opening party in 1985, has been acquired by the Artfarm hospitality group for a reported £40 million. Owned by Swiss art dealers Manuela and Iwan Wirth, Artfarm began as a museum café at the country offshoot of their […]
This week’s Review of the Reviews is somewhat shorter than usual as we are busy finalising the London guide for 2023! We’ll be back to normal in a few weeks… This is what the national and local restaurant critics were writing about in the week ending 7 August 2022. ***** The Evening Standard After being […]
No sooner have Boris and Carrie Johnson belatedly celebrated their nuptials with a South African braai on the Bamfords’ Daylesford Park estate than a South African-style steakhouse opens in Mayfair. Meat & Wine Co, which launches next Monday, 8 August, in Curzon Street, is the brainchild of Bradley Michael, a former personal training instructor in […]
The Wolseley’s outlet at Bicester Village shopping centre is closing down in a blow to Minor International, the Thai-based company that took over Corbin & King in April and renamed it The Wolseley Hospitality Group (TWHG). In a curtly expressed press release, TWHG said the closure would take place by next Wednesday, 10 August at […]
The chef, restaurateur and writer Alastair Little, one of the giants of modern British cuisine, died this week at the age of 72. Jeremy Lee of Quo Vadis led the tributes, saying: “Alastair Little was a godfather of modern British cooking and a champion of keeping it simple. His cooking was just incredible x peerlesss. […]
Mexican-American actor Danny Trejo is planning to open a flagship taco restaurant in central London, followed by a succession of delivery-only ghost kitchens to open every three months. He has raised £775,000 of a £1million target in a crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs. The 78-year-old Trejo is a reformed junkie gangster who spent much of his […]
Italian-Brazilian chef Rafael Cagali, whose Da Terra in Bethnal Green is the top-ranking London restaurant in the current Harden’s guide, is to open a second venture at the same address. Elis will take over the site of the Corner Room restaurant in the Town Hall Hotel, in Bethnal Green’s beautifully restored former town hall, which […]
Here’s our regular summary of what the national and local restaurant critics have been writing about in the week ending 31 July 2022. ***** The Guardian “Delicate, imaginative and painstaking cookery….this is a place that deserves to prosper.” Grace Dent visited Maidenhead, but not on the new Elizabeth Line, which won’t arrive there until 2023; […]
Twin brother restaurateurs Alberto and Arian Zandi will open a restaurant called Riviera – inspired by the cuisine of the South of France – in St James’s this autumn. It will be the Zandi’s fourth restaurant and their most prominent, occupying the striking Modernist building next to The Economist magazine that was formerly occupied by […]
