Even in Paris, many bistros really do serve up ‘cuisine grand-mère’. In England, however, what restaurant would ever think of serving food like granny’s? It would surely be the quickest way to bankruptcy. That is the view the owners of this brand new restaurant – in the pleasant new development around Spitalfields – have set […]
-Please note that this restaurant has now closed as of 19/07/07- The Hon Christopher Gilmour is as copper-bottomed an English gent as you could hope to find. It’s, therefore, perhaps curious that he is the capital’s only multiple operator of quality American-inspired restaurants (the result, apparently, of a decade spent in his youth over the […]
Rebecca Mascarenhas a great London innovator-survivor. Her Sonny’s, in Barnes, may be credited as a mid-’80s fore-runner of the ’90s London restaurant revolution. The name of that establishment may mean little to those who get lost outside Zone 1, but Sonny’s has consistently been hailed by residents of the SWs numbered 13-19 as one of […]
Starting with Le Caprice in 1981, Jeremy King and Christopher Corbin built up one of London’s most impressive restaurant empires of recent times. By the time they finally exited in 2002 – several million pounds richer – the group included no fewer than three of the five most popular restaurants in town (The Ivy, Le […]
Vincent Labeyrie and Pascal Aussignac, the duo behind the fabled Club Gascon, recently relaunched their elegant food shop spin-off (overlooking Smithfield Market) as a bistro. As with their other London ventures, inspiration is taken from the earthy cuisine of South West France. The team originally billed this re-launch as a fairly straightforward bistro, and you […]
In Savile Row of all places, it seems fair to judge by appearances. At this Conran group Italian, the multi-various staff uniforms suggest that it requires a hierarchy of seven grades of operative to bring you lunch. It may therefore fairly be claimed as an organisational triumph that the service works at all. Unsurprisingly, however, […]
Is that ‘ee’ or ‘ea’?’ The location overlooking Smithfield’s famously carnivorous market might make you assume the latter, but the former better describes the purpose behind this nifty new venue. In case you miss the pun, though, the place’s logo is a cow. An inconspicuous street frontage lends the external appearance of a fairly small, […]
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 […]
