Hidden away in a cute Marylebone back street, an airy brasserie – with notably comfortable bar – that tries to disown the parentage of the hotel to which it is connected; a relatively straightforward menu is offered, trumpeting its use of the quality ingedients available locally, but realisation on our visit just missed the mark. […]
An elegant and refined, if perhaps rather anonymous, addition to the Gordon Ramsay empire, on the former Mayfair site of Zen Central (RIP); Angela Hartnett’s Italian-influenced menu is the highlight of an impressive across-the-board performance. Gordon Ramsay is so omnipresent in the media nowadays that it’s easy to forget that the number of undoubted ‘hit’ […]
Instantly popular, a very large warehouse-style bar/restaurant, in a newly-created pedestrian street, behind Tate Modern; our early days visit suggested that its popularity has nothing to do with its cuisine. One of the – generally nice – surprises in the dull life of the restaurant reviewer is stumbling across a whole new street of dining possibilities. […]
From the famous Spanish food importers – a sibling to their Borough tapas bar, with an expensive Continental look; its tapas dishes show promise, but they’re neither cheap nor wholly consistent; (a perch at the bar is a good option here). It’s nice to see how the other half lives. The other half in this […]
Down Brick Lane way, but don’t feel like curry? – head for this handy new Thai canteen. With the global economy about to implode – we visited a couple of weeks before this review was published! – it seemed a good time to head for the City to catch up with an old chum, nowadays […]
Rather obscurely located behind Shad Thames, a large and contemporary (but essentially conventional) Indian restaurant of a high standard; it offers very good all-round value, particularly at lunch. As an all-round package, you really won’t find better value in London at the moment than the £7.95 two-course menu on offer at this new South Bank […]
Very large, light and airy, a first-floor Gallic brasserie, within Spitalfields Market; the food is fine and the wine list impressive, but prices are quite high, and the formula doesn’t really ‘click’. Our quest for a proper Gallic brasserie in London goes on. In fact, this new attempt at the genre – of which we […]
Modestly revamped, this lake-view Barbican restaurant offers an interesting menu in a room still rather redolent of the ’70s; while the cooking is of good quality, the bravely English menu perhaps lacks the general appeal that you’d expect for the dining facility of a cultural centre. There’s a lot of refurbishment going on at the […]
Offshoot of a the mega-popular Pimlico Ottoman, an east-City spot that makes an particularly suitable venue for a recession-busting lunch. In Pimlico, the restaurant-land that time forgot, the original branch of Kazan has been something of a ‘sleeper’ – it opened without much of a bang, but it has become the premier (only?) restaurant locally […]
