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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Bristol’s Sanchez Brothers opened Andalusian-inspired Paco Tapas this week, completing their trio of adjacent dockside venues a few minutes’ walk from the city centre. Casamia, the family’s fine-dining establishment, was no 4 on the Sunday Times/Harden’s Top 100 Restaurants list last year, winning praise from the Harden’s Survey for its “fabulous tasting plates”. It moved from suburban […]

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⦿ Jay Rayner of The Observer hit the jackpot with a visit to Riley’s Fish Shack, “two full side-access shipping containers fitted out steampunk-style” overlooking St Edward’s Bay in Tynemouth, near Newcastle, which he declared “the eating experience of the year”. “It is the pristine quality of fish cookery you always hope to find in one of those fancy, raised […]

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