Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the last ten years, you’ll know Gordon Ramsay has built up London’s most impressive portfolio of top-end restaurants. Most of them are former ‘Savoy’ group hotel dining rooms. Their style is grand contemporary French, their quality is often impressive, but they tend to lack charisma. A whole constellation […]
Mews of Mayfair. The very name is presumably supposed to reek of sophistication, an impression intensified on entering the first floor dining room, which has the sort of very light décor which – in a house – you might be invited to enjoy only after taking your shoes off. We didn’t find it especially welcoming, […]
There are compensations to being a restaurant critic. One of them is that you have to explore nooks and crannies of the capital you might never otherwise seek out. Canonbury, for example, is a very nice place to get lost in. Once, with some difficulty, we’d finally located, the subject of this review, its appearance […]
On inspection, the Farringdon newcomer we had originally intended to review today just looked too horrible. So we diverted instead to this nearby hang out – the new(ish) off-shoot of Camden Town’s long-serving Caribbean ‘Restaurant & Rhum Shack’. Not, to be honest, with high hopes, but it did at least look welcoming. And in the […]
Sebastian Snow is a true veteran of the west London restaurant scene. In 1994, he launched “Snows on the Green’ (on Brook Green), which – in those admittedly less competitive days – generated much press interest. He then made an ill-fated expansion into Barnes (the short-lived “Snows on the Pond’), heralding a period of decline. […]
In the late-’90s, mega-scale restaurants such as Mezzo and Quaglino’s were taken as proof that London was becoming the centre of the culinary world. But funnily enough, none of those spaces ever made you want to say ‘wow’. ‘Wow!’ is a word that easily springs to mind as you enter this vast newcomer, in the […]
According to its mission statement, this Covent Garden basement has recently been re-launched by some ‘friends’ – all with backgrounds in bars and booze – as a place where customers can enjoy ‘interesting and exciting’ wines in a ‘relaxed and convivial atmosphere’. Hard to argue with that (or, indeed, with their reasonably-priced selection of less […]
London’s ethnic mix is endlessly confusing. Everyone knows that Southwark has large Black African and Black Caribbean populations. But did you know it’s one of the city’s top Chinese hot-spots? (London’s only ward in to have more than 5% Chinese population, is turns out, is nearby Millwall in Tower Hamlets.) The lunchtime population at this […]
