On the former site of Marylebone’s Café Luc (RIP), a chic Italian restaurant of some ambition – on our early-days visit, there was no hint that the ambition was being realised to any extent which might justify the prices. Café Luc, the predecessor of this Italian newcomer on this Marylebone site, was a foreign-owned restaurant […]
In the heart of Soho, a welcoming Peruvian bar/restaurant, specialising in the cured fish speciality of its homeland; though perhaps no bargain, it struck us as a welcoming and innovative all-rounder. Perhaps understandably in the circumstances of our booking, but unsought by us, they wouldn’t let us pay for our meal at this new Soho […]
Top tip for Eurostar travellers, this all-day restaurant tries to be all things to all men’ and largely succeeds. We Brits don’t have high expectations of restaurants next to railway stations, presumably because there is no recent tradition of termini-proximate restaurants being any good at all. (It wasn’t always so: the sign of Overton’s – […]
A plain and simple – and noisy and tightly-packed – Soho bistro, offering simple and generally decent food, plus cracking wines, at reasonable prices. We happened to have booked for lunch at this Soho newcomer on the day it received a bit of a ‘rave’ in the Evening Standard, so expectations were high. We arrived […]
A basically-furnished Battersea bistro/wine bar offshoot of West End hit Terroirs, offering Gallic bistro fare realised to a solid standard; the daily-changing menu, however, struck as as irritatingly esoteric. So apologetic is the name of this new Battersea wine bar, and so self-effacing its façade, that it’s very easy to miss it. But we were […]
In Manchester’s nascent trendy restaurant quarter, a large, comfortable and conveniently-located pan-Asian basement bar/restaurant, whose rag-bag charms include striking décor, very good sushi and a great mango soufflé. All Manchester restaurants are, spiritually, bars. In a city where the headline industry is football, it seems there’s simply no mileage in offering a straight-down-the-line central fine […]
Madly successful with the Notting Hill set, this café-outpost of a media friendly Antiopodean chef packs ’em in at all hours; we enjoyed the food on our early-days visit, but how standards will withstand the pressures in the longer term it is difficult to say. What makes a restaurant an ‘It’ restaurant? Whatever it is, […]
The famous mussels from Brussels pitch up in the heart of Theatreland; the result is a rather formulaic chain outlet, enlivened only by the friendly staff, and the high quality of the star menu item. Big in Belgium, even bigger in France, this pre-eminent moules/frites chain recently opened its London-début outlet, on a prominent Theatreland […]
Much improved by a general ‘loosening up’, an eminent dining room offers unusually intriguing and tasty dishes in a setting of almost Scandinavian understatement; the set lunch (as so often in Chelsea) is a bargain well worth seeking out. What a great job you have! Well, how hard can it be drifting round restaurants, and […]
On a fashionably-located ‘graveyard’ site, on a first floor in Knighsbridge, the capital’s only Azerbaijani restaurant of any grandeur; our pleasant visit notwithstanding, we have difficulty seeing how the formula will attract a broad local following. Okay, we admit it. It was primarily a sense of morbid curiosity which drew us to this first-floor dining […]
