Former Royal Navy chef Lee Calver and his partner Chloe Lillicrap have opened a ‘relaxed fine-dining’ restaurant in Plymouth. The restaurant, Thirty One, has taken over the site of the well-known Rock Salt Cafe and Brasserie, which closed last year. Lee spent seven years in the Navy and cooked his way through upmarket hotel kitchens […]
Veteran Holland Park restaurant Julie’s, which closed down a year ago, is to be brought back to life next year as a neighbourhood brasserie. The new owner is Cordon Bleu-trained Tara MacBain, who lives nearby and is a former regular. Julie’s was famous as a louche hotspot in the Seventies, drawing a celebrity clientele from […]
A new competitively priced fish restaurant in Hammersmith could be the first of several across London if it is well received. Faber is the culmination of an East End lockdown seafood project from Matt Ward and Anthony Pender. The new restaurant takes its name from Zeus Faber, the Latin for John Dory, and its menu […]
Here’s a jumbo edition of our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the two weeks up to 15th October 2023; we’ve been busy writing UK Restaurants 2024! ***** The Guardian Last week, Grace Dent was in Edinburgh and ate a life-changing lunch at Tantra, “far and away the oddest restaurant […]
Dishoom is to open its latest branch next week – an all-day bar-café called Permit Room in Brighton, which officially launches on Wednesday 1 November, with a soft opening until then. It is the tenth branch of the chain which started out in London in 2010, but the first to be branded under a separate […]
Tech billionaire Larry Ellison has stepped in to revive the Eagle and Child, the Oxford pub famous as the preferred watering-hole of J.R.R. Tolkein, creator of The Lord of the Rings. The 17th-century pub has been closed since the Covid shutdown of 2020, and was reportedly being lined up for conversion into a hotel until […]
Upscale South African all-day café Tashas opens its first European branch next month, in the Battersea Power Station development overlooking the River Thames. Natasha Sideris launched the original Tashas in Johannesburg in 2005, and now has 15 branches across South Africa and another six in the UEA. The brand prides itself on snazzy interior design […]
Modern Greek restaurant Ampéli has closed down and its Fitzrovia site has been taken over by a Ukrainian-owned Spanish restaurant, Boca a Boca. Ampéli was opened in 2020 by photographer Jenny Pagnoni, taking inspiration from modern wine-focused restaurants in Athens, and won plenty of press support from the FT, Guardian, Standard and Independent – and from […]
Radical chef Michael O’Hare is to re-brand his theatrical Leeds restaurant The Man Behind The Curtain, relaunching it next year under a new guise as the surf shack-themed Psycho Sandbar. He opened The Man Behind The Curtain in 2014, winning huge acclaim (and Leeds’s only star from the tyre folk) and a name for himself […]
Chef and writer Dipna Anand, from the dynasty behind Southall’s famous Indian restaurant Brilliant, is to open a 150-cover venue in Milton Keynes next month. Dipna Anand Kitchen & Bar is in the new Unity Place development, and will have its own in-house micro-brewery operated by TOAST Ale. The venture is in association with the […]
