A plain and simple – and noisy and tightly-packed – Soho bistro, offering simple and generally decent food, plus cracking wines, at reasonable prices. We happened to have booked for lunch at this Soho newcomer on the day it received a bit of a ‘rave’ in the Evening Standard, so expectations were high. We arrived […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
