Casamia is to close for good this summer, with chef-proprietor Peter Sanchez-Iglesias (pictured) saying the avant-garde restaurant is no longer financially viable. A leading light of Bristol’s emergence as a gastronomic heavyweight, Casamia was rated the best in the country as recently as the 2019 edition of Harden’s Best UK Restaurants, and the high-profile closure […]

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Bristol-based East African street food stall Jikoni is to open its first bricks-and-mortar site next month in a cobbled courtyard in St Paul’s. Iman Salat and James Hillier have served dishes from Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania for two years at pop-ups and supper clubs around Bristol and Bath. Formerly known as Pear Cafe, tiny […]

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The UK’s top 100 restaurants are revealed in Harden’s Best UK Restaurants 2018 published today – the country’s most comprehensive restaurant guide available in bookshops, with approximately twice the number of entries as The Good Food Guide. The guide hails London’s The Araki as the country’s best restaurant. The experience is “world class” and, at £385-a-head, […]

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Cargo 2, the second phase of the multi-restaurant (with a bit of retail) development using smartly reconstituted shipping containers at Bristol’s Wapping Wharf, is to open on May 26. Headliners are led by Spuntino, the first offshoot of the Italian-American small-plates specialist in London’s Soho, which will feature a US diner-style interior. Local acts are well represented, […]

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⦿ Jay Rayner of The Observer reviewed The Other Naughty Piglet, a branch of Brixton’s Naughty Piglets inside Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new theatre in Victoria, The Other Place, where he found “a kind of modern British cooking with wallops of umami”. “Sometimes the cleverness is textural. A pile of white crab meat sits atop a heap of […]

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⦿ Marina O’Loughlin of the Guardian reviewed Popolo 8/10 in Shoreditch,”run with utter grace by Jonathan Lawson, [an] ex-Theo Randall chef”. “The main flavour here is Italian classics, flawlessly realised… and dishes that straddle cuisines. Some appear to be the result of a particularly febrile imagination: cool, thick labneh studded with a hectic combination of crisp-shelled fried […]

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