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 […]
Plain and simple steak ‘n’ chips – arguably France’s top contribution to world gastronomy – is done very well indeed at this Marylebone newcomer. Don’t go expecting anything else, though- so far as main courses go, that’s all there is. There aren’t any starters, either, unless you include a small lettuce and walnut salad (compris). […]
