A comfortable but uninspired-looking Bayswater ‘tapas’ bar – it’s more a bistro, really – where the food is both more ambitious and less Spanish than you might expect. Initial impressions of this new Notting Hill/Bayswater fringe tapas bar were not especially encouraging. The restaurant was empty when we arrived for lunch. Even so, service was […]
A pleasant but ordinary-looking Dartmouth Park boozer where the cracking British cooking has quickly made quite a ‘name’. Thanks not least to having an appreciative Times reviewer (Giles Coren) living almost literally on its doorstep, this plain but attractive boozer has quickly established itself as quite a north London destination. The crowds, however – the […]
In an obscure bit of Shoreditch, a Conran-designed English caff whose simple charms have already made it very popular. Odd, isn’t it? Sir Terence Conran has always made a big deal of his Francophile tendencies, yet many people – including us – think this defiantly English Shoreditch café is one of his best places yet. […]
Hidden away in Shoreditch, a classy basement dining room (and cocktail bar) from Sir Terence Conran; solicitous staff help make it a charming destination, but the cuisine, while well realised, signally lacks ambition. By the standards of Sir Terence Conran, this new Shoreditch dining room is quite wacky. Hidden-away in a basement, it is of […]
Comfortably decorated in style imitating the coffee bars of the ‘swinging Sixties’, this Little India basement restaurant offers food that’s perfectly acceptable, but not obviously better than at many neighbouring establishments. The Noon family has a bit of a name for its curries (available in supermarkets everywhere). So far as we know, however, this is […]
A stylish second member of Alan Yau’s attempt to re-create a chain as successful as his first, Wagamama, has become; it’s drearily located, though, and leaves us unconvinced that the formula will be able to maintain the ‘destination’ status to which it apparently aspires. Gosh, what a ghastly position for a restaurant with any pretensions […]
In the impressive new King’s Place arts-and-office building, a good-all-round British brasserie, occupying a bright canalside site. Only the French ever really seem to have had particular success at elevating the big-city, semi-formal dining experience they call a brasserie to anything resembling an art form, It’s such a useful, all-purpose concept, we’ve often wondered why […]
An instant smash-hit, this convivial Parisian-inspired steakhouse, on the site of the old Stock Exchange building, offers an excellent all-round fixed-price formula. Rarely have the massed ranks of Britain’s finest national restaurant critics talked such unadulterated tripe as they did on the launch of London’s original outpost of a Parisian steakhouse, back in 2005. Very […]
A large and spacious Bayswater operation, pitched half-way between brasserie and gastropub, offering good-quality food and notably pleasant service; a month after opening, the formula was still settling in, but we suspect they will get there in the end. The major junction where Notting Hill indisputably becomes Bayswater has seen a lot of restaurant action […]
Physically little changed from its days as Mosaico, the third successive Italian restaurant to occupy this Mayfair basement site remains a pricey place for what it is, and still seems mainly to attract a clubby band of regulars. Our visits to new incarnations of this Mayfair basement restaurant – recently re-branded as an offshoot of […]
