In Manchester’s nascent trendy restaurant quarter, a large, comfortable and conveniently-located pan-Asian basement bar/restaurant, whose rag-bag charms include striking décor, very good sushi and a great mango soufflé. All Manchester restaurants are, spiritually, bars. In a city where the headline industry is football, it seems there’s simply no mileage in offering a straight-down-the-line central fine […]
A basically-furnished Battersea bistro/wine bar offshoot of West End hit Terroirs, offering Gallic bistro fare realised to a solid standard; the daily-changing menu, however, struck as as irritatingly esoteric. So apologetic is the name of this new Battersea wine bar, and so self-effacing its façade, that it’s very easy to miss it. But we were […]
Madly successful with the Notting Hill set, this café-outpost of a media friendly Antiopodean chef packs ’em in at all hours; we enjoyed the food on our early-days visit, but how standards will withstand the pressures in the longer term it is difficult to say. What makes a restaurant an ‘It’ restaurant? Whatever it is, […]
The famous mussels from Brussels pitch up in the heart of Theatreland; the result is a rather formulaic chain outlet, enlivened only by the friendly staff, and the high quality of the star menu item. Big in Belgium, even bigger in France, this pre-eminent moules/frites chain recently opened its London-début outlet, on a prominent Theatreland […]
On a fashionably-located ‘graveyard’ site, on a first floor in Knighsbridge, the capital’s only Azerbaijani restaurant of any grandeur; our pleasant visit notwithstanding, we have difficulty seeing how the formula will attract a broad local following. Okay, we admit it. It was primarily a sense of morbid curiosity which drew us to this first-floor dining […]
Much improved by a general ‘loosening up’, an eminent dining room offers unusually intriguing and tasty dishes in a setting of almost Scandinavian understatement; the set lunch (as so often in Chelsea) is a bargain well worth seeking out. What a great job you have! Well, how hard can it be drifting round restaurants, and […]
A clubby, tightly-packed Mayfair sibling to Le Caprice and so on, attracting the glitzy clientele you might expect; the cooking, however, isn’t yet up to the standards of its nearest sibling, Scotts, though prices are quite reasonable, considering. A stars and stripes – as well as a union flag – announces the location of this […]
The latest addition to the fashionable Arjun Waney stable, this Mayfair Mediterranean offers upmarket comfort fare of a high standard; the tightly-packed basement is more atmospheric than the somewhat stately ground floor dining room. Arjun Waney may not be a name quite as known to the fashionable crowds as Richard Caring has become in recent […]
A prototype for the latest extension of the Jamie Oliver franchise, this Brit-themed bistro is more of a wow than you might expect. The world fall into two camps. The much larger camp is composed of those who rush to restaurants because they’ve seen the chef on TV. The much smaller – and, on the […]
From Corbin and King, a swish, Midtown brasserie, which has the hallmarks of an instant in-crowd classic, even if its looks are less stunning than its stablemate, the Wolseley. What’s in a name? Restaurant-maesters, Corbin & King’s new Aldwych opening apparently follows in the footsteps of a turn-of-the century Gallic automobile marque (Delaunay-Belleville). But whereas […]
