Food-with-a-conscience is at the heart of this wholesome new diner-concept, now housed in a large basement, down the hill from St Paul’s. It is ‘new’ in the sense that the popular first branch, in the West End, was apparently deemed too small to display the backers’ vision properly. We still can’t work out, though, whether […]
What’s in a name? Within this particular name, the Nico punningly concerned (Ladenis) is – as readers aged over 40 will recognise – the first really talented London chef to realise the PR potential of throwing customers out of his restaurants. (We particularly cherish our recollection of visits chez Nico, who invariably rumbled us, and […]
There’s a toytown quality to the grid of freshly-scrubbed warehouses you find just over Tower Bridge. Nice, but somehow not entirely real – the area gives the appearance of being a model community for shiny young people, whose lives are on their way to somewhere else. In the heart of the grid sits this two-level […]
It’s Friday lunch time. Judging by the number of posh motors in the Hambleton Hall car park, quite a few people are starting the weekend early. Hambleton Hall overlooks Rutland Water, the largest man-made lake in Western Europe. (It’s good hiking, sailing, fishing and riding territory.) The house is actually older than the water, explaining […]
Rowley’s original branch is something of a West End institution. It occupies what was once the original Wall’s butchers shop, in Jermyn Street. Steaks, however – not sausages – are the house speciality. It now has this offshoot, in the Mayfair premises that were once called Deca. The new venture is elegant and soothing, in […]
Where would you take England’s greatest living ex-Prime Minister for lunch the day after her 80th birthday party? Admittedly, this is not a question one faces all that often, but the answer presented itself when – half way through our meal – Lady Thatcher made her entrance into this grand and very English dining room […]
There are many restaurants and bars overlooking Canary Wharf from West India Quay. Their large open-air terraces were full of happy punters, the sunny lunchtime I visited. Except, sods law dictated, for the dining room of this new Marriott hotel – one of the proud runners-up in Time Out’s recent Alfresco Tables Dining Award. It […]
Dine? ‘Lunch’ might be a more appropriate name for this new restaurant on the edge of the City. (‘Eat’, of course, is already taken.) Presumably the person – committee? – who chose the name did so because they thought it seemed very ‘elemental’, very ‘designed’, and very ‘now’. Dine is none of the above. It […]
