Does the old City still exist? A City full of chaps? The sort of City where chaps wear suits? The sort of City where chaps wearing suits can order a few glasses of port after lunch, with no one batting an eye-lid? When you go up the stairs to this cramped and bustling dining room […]
Some restaurant locations have a spirit all of their own, apparently independent of their owner. And most restaurant-owners have a style that shines through in all of their various locations. The latest incarnation of Cecconi’s, in Mayfair – now owned by the Soho House man, Nick Jones – is therefore something of a double-whammy: both […]
Great buildings and great restaurants can go together. New York’s famous Seagram Building designed by Mies van der Rohe, for example, has housed one of the world’s classic restaurants – The Four Seasons – since 1959. It is still at the heart of Manhattan’s media power scene today. London’s Gherkin is a great building, and […]
One of the London’s odder facets is the dearth of restaurants specialising in traditional British scoff. You’re more likely to get risotto in your classic central London pub nowadays than steak & oyster pie. Two years ago, St John – one of the few places serving exciting and genuine British food – launched this spin-off […]
Grand hotels are supposed to be timeless and unchanging. Not the Dorchester, though, which always seems to be spending money like water, re-jigging and re-doing, in a never-ending quest for’ well, who knows? The hotel used to have the good-but-extremely-dull Chinese restaurant, The Dorchester Oriental, which closed last year. This is its replacement, but in […]
People always assume that restaurants are ‘about’ the food. Business rendezvous are in fact rarely about the food, but, for obvious reasons, restaurateurs prefer to ‘play the game’, and pretend they are. One of the main ways restaurateurs hint that restaurants are ‘about’ the food is by making the menu prices reflect the cost of […]
Fancy jacking in corporate life and striking out on your own? Brothers Chris and Jeff Galvin did just that. They’ve left their safe – and good – jobs, as head chefs at The Wolseley and L’Escargot respectively to set up this ‘bistrot de luxe’ in the anonymous environs of Baker Street. The premises that were […]
Funny lot, foreigners: in a nice way, of course. London’s indigenous restaurateurs often come up with rather ‘safe’ restaurants. ‘Elegant’, ‘understated’, perhaps even ‘cool’? But if you’re looking for a touch of ‘joie de vivre’ enlivened with a soupçon of ‘je ne sais quoi’ or even the surreal? You often have to look across the […]
