A top-quality Galvin brothers ‘bistro de luxe’-style operation, in a wonderful Shoreditch building whose scale and location arguably call for something a little less traditional; for City suits, though, it looks set to be a ‘wow’. Chris and Jeff Galvin are heroes of the restaurant scene. The quality and value of the Gallic bistro fare […]
On a Kensington site that’s had a somewhat chequered history of late, a smart but somewhat subdued bistro offering food English dishes of very high quality, under the auspices of Square chef Philip Howard. Philip Howard is one of those blameless chefs who beavers away doing what chefs are supposed to do – for younger […]
A smart and pleasant – if not hugely atmospheric – Italian, offering a good all-round formula, at prices which fully reflect its Mayfair location; the establishment seems most evidently suitable as a lunchtime destination. We’ve lost count of the number of times we tried – unsuccessfully – to to get into Babbo. Not this new […]
A worthy offshoot of the Thos. Cubitt, this large Pimlico/Belgravia fringe newcomer is a similarly smart and useful bistro-cum-boozer; a first-week inspection found it already doing good business. Belgravia was long a pretty deadbeat place to eat, but it’s improved a lot in recent years, in part thanks to the young team that first established […]
No image yet available At last, a good, reasonably-priced all-rounder, in the heart of Westminster – this new oriental (a relaunch of Atami, which was Japanese) may well become the linchpin of what’s still a very under-powered local dining scene. Like its buzzier neighbour Pimlico, Westminster – not the City thereof, but the smaller area […]
From a major Oriental operator, a competent but, on our visit, almost deserted Japanese restaurant, decorated in nightclub style, five floors above Regent Street. Intrigued by our recent visit to the neighbouring Spanish restaurant, aqua nueva, we felt the need to hot-foot back across town to see how the neighbouring Japanese restaurant had turned out. […]
The grand-yet-dull dining room of the Hyde Park hotel, recently taken over by Rome’s starry Heinz Beck; there were flashes of greatness on our visit, but not enough to outweigh the otherwise dreary hotel fare. It would be fair to say that – while London’s restaurants have got better and better in recent years – […]
Mark Hix’s very central new restaurant – on the former Soho site of Aaya (RIP), two minutes from Piccadilly Circus – offers his trademark English food, produced to a very high quality; given the rather unforgiving nature of the brightly-lit space, however, the food and wine prices struck us as rather high. Even with his […]
A smash hit in the making, this NYC-Downtown-chic Italian offers perfectly judged tapas/small-plate dishes in an atmosphere of old-style Soho conviviality. We keep reading that this much-lauded Soho newcomer – fronted by Russell Norman, once a bigwig at the Caprice group – is some sort of Venetian snack bar (or, to impress you with our […]
