A surprisingly charming Russian restaurant, in a kitschly-decorated townhouse; service is exemplary, but the cuisine displays the traditional tendency to heaviness, and prices fully reflect the Knightsbridge location. So, you arrive at a new Knightsbridge restaurant to find your guest in one corner of the room and a splendidly-attired Russian Orthodox priest in the other. […]
A convivial Bermondsey bar/restaurant from ex-Brindisa supremo José Pizarro, offering interesting tapas-style dishes; it’s quickly become very popular. A sunny day in Bermondsey. We walk in to find a decent-size, woody but comfortable restaurant – formerly the Bermondsey Kitchen – devoid of custom but somehow still filled with cheer. And within a minute, three good […]
A handily-located West End offshoot of the Cinnamon Club mini-empire, offering robust Indian-inspired dishes in a somewhat basic contemporary-style bistro setting. The charming Vivek Singh is one of those ‘ethnic’ restaurateurs who’ve helped make that term pretty much redundant for savvy Londoners. Say ‘Cinnamon Club’ to anyone in the know, and the image that comes […]
On a mezzanine overlooking the fruit and veg section of the Knightsbridge department store, an unsurprisingly pricey café/brasserie, where the quality does broadly measure up to the prices. We wouldn’t normally review a restaurant on the mezzanine of a department store, however grand, but the Galvins are acknowledged treasures of London’s foodie firmament, so we […]
On the former site of Marylebone’s Café Luc (RIP), a chic Italian restaurant of some ambition – on our early-days visit, there was no hint that the ambition was being realised to any extent which might justify the prices. Café Luc, the predecessor of this Italian newcomer on this Marylebone site, was a foreign-owned restaurant […]
In the heart of Soho, a welcoming Peruvian bar/restaurant, specialising in the cured fish speciality of its homeland; though perhaps no bargain, it struck us as a welcoming and innovative all-rounder. Perhaps understandably in the circumstances of our booking, but unsought by us, they wouldn’t let us pay for our meal at this new Soho […]
Top tip for Eurostar travellers, this all-day restaurant tries to be all things to all men’ and largely succeeds. We Brits don’t have high expectations of restaurants next to railway stations, presumably because there is no recent tradition of termini-proximate restaurants being any good at all. (It wasn’t always so: the sign of Overton’s – […]
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 […]
