In Savile Row of all places, it seems fair to judge by appearances. At this Conran group Italian, the multi-various staff uniforms suggest that it requires a hierarchy of seven grades of operative to bring you lunch. It may therefore fairly be claimed as an organisational triumph that the service works at all. Unsurprisingly, however, […]
Is that ‘ee’ or ‘ea’?’ The location overlooking Smithfield’s famously carnivorous market might make you assume the latter, but the former better describes the purpose behind this nifty new venue. In case you miss the pun, though, the place’s logo is a cow. An inconspicuous street frontage lends the external appearance of a fairly small, […]
Food-with-a-conscience is at the heart of this wholesome new diner-concept, now housed in a large basement, down the hill from St Paul’s. It is ‘new’ in the sense that the popular first branch, in the West End, was apparently deemed too small to display the backers’ vision properly. We still can’t work out, though, whether […]
What’s in a name? Within this particular name, the Nico punningly concerned (Ladenis) is – as readers aged over 40 will recognise – the first really talented London chef to realise the PR potential of throwing customers out of his restaurants. (We particularly cherish our recollection of visits chez Nico, who invariably rumbled us, and […]
What goes around comes around, or, to put it another way, there’s not much new under the sun. The classic Gallic brasserie is hardly a new and revolutionary idea, but (as we have noted before in these pages), it’s a format which – compared not just to Paris, but also to New York – has […]
There’s a toytown quality to the grid of freshly-scrubbed warehouses you find just over Tower Bridge. Nice, but somehow not entirely real – the area gives the appearance of being a model community for shiny young people, whose lives are on their way to somewhere else. In the heart of the grid sits this two-level […]
It’s Friday lunch time. Judging by the number of posh motors in the Hambleton Hall car park, quite a few people are starting the weekend early. Hambleton Hall overlooks Rutland Water, the largest man-made lake in Western Europe. (It’s good hiking, sailing, fishing and riding territory.) The house is actually older than the water, explaining […]
Rowley’s original branch is something of a West End institution. It occupies what was once the original Wall’s butchers shop, in Jermyn Street. Steaks, however – not sausages – are the house speciality. It now has this offshoot, in the Mayfair premises that were once called Deca. The new venture is elegant and soothing, in […]
Where would you take England’s greatest living ex-Prime Minister for lunch the day after her 80th birthday party? Admittedly, this is not a question one faces all that often, but the answer presented itself when – half way through our meal – Lady Thatcher made her entrance into this grand and very English dining room […]
There are many restaurants and bars overlooking Canary Wharf from West India Quay. Their large open-air terraces were full of happy punters, the sunny lunchtime I visited. Except, sods law dictated, for the dining room of this new Marriott hotel – one of the proud runners-up in Time Out’s recent Alfresco Tables Dining Award. It […]
