With summer increasingly upon us, fancy a trip to the country for lunch? No time? How about a trip to the Middle Temple Garden then? If it weren’t – and this is where reality intrudes – for the traffic noise from the Embankment, you could almost be in an English country garden (or at least […]
Kit Kemp – who, with her husband Tim, owns Firmdale Hotels – has created some of London’s best contemporary hotel interiors. They may sometimes seem a touch self-indulgent, but they are often witty: beautiful even. (Her decoration of a ballroom-style chamber at the new Haymarket Hotel – now one of the most elegant rooms in […]
In the Good Old Days of the Twentieth Century, people earned their money in the Square Mile, and spent it Up West. Nowadays, however, the old order has broken down. You find City-type firms in Mayfair, and Mayfair-type shops in the City. At the Royal Exchange, for instance, there’s now a concentration of jewellers with […]
We’d always wanted to visit this trendy Clerkenwell eating place-cum-cocktail bar. It opened to raves (in some quarters) a couple of years back, and subsequently there was even talk of expansion. Then it unexpectedly bit the dust. Well, these rather intriguingly long and thin premises are now open again. They were, however, totally deserted the […]
There’s been much musing in the foodie world of late about the word ‘gastropub’. Has the term – which only came into existence in the mid-’90s – become so devalued as to be worthless? It is certainly over-used. But perhaps all words need to go through a misuse stage, before people work out whether they […]
Just a few months ago, we reviewed Brera – a trendy and upmarket new venture, just off Oxford Street, backed by one of London’s longest-established Italian catering dynasties (the Spaghetti House people). Inauspiciously, news of its unexpected closure reached us the very day we visited Caricatura, which could be described in precisely similar terms. This […]
Our guest at today’s meal – a critic for another publication – had eaten not once but twice at the new Malaysian restaurant in the West End’s outrageously fashionable Sanderson Hotel. He levelled with us: we were neither beautiful nor rich enough to eat there. Also, the food was no better than when the place […]
Lunchtime crowding shows this Bloomsbury newcomer has quickly made a name for itself: perhaps because it offers a satisfying – if basic – midday fill-up for just a fiver. But it’s not just economical locals who are making a song and dance about it. A number of press luminaries have hailed this ordinary-looking Indian as […]
Conran Restaurants is dead. Long live D&D London. That’s the clear message broadcast by London’s largest quality restaurant group since its recent (partial) MBO. What’s most interesting is that the two Ds concerned -Des Gunewardena and David Loewi – have even been explicitly distancing themselves from the conveyor-belt style with which, they now admit, the […]
From the upper deck of our City AM limousine, we saw an impressive place we’d not previously noticed. Once a grand banking hall, it looked – with its fancy lighting, smartly-dressed tables and a menu outside – for all the world like the sort of place readers ought to know about. So we hopped off, […]
