Twenty years ago, you would have been most unlikely to find a City restaurant with décor such as you might have found in Mayfair. No restaurant was allowed to set up among the money-factories if it had any feeling of West End chic or – heaven forbid – any aspect that might be thought slightly […]
It’s stressful choosing a restaurant for friends. If you write about restaurants for a living, then mates are not generally especially forgiving when you take them somewhere that’s rubbish. This Indian café on Hammersmith’s scruffy main drag certainly doesn’t impress visually. With its tiny shop-conversion premises, I could see the thought bubbles over my guests’ […]
Damned in this column last October, the Mayfair offshoot of Rowley’s steakhouse closed a few months later. The site has now been taken over by multiple restaurateur Claudio Pulze. He came to public attention a dozen or so years ago for his involvement in A-Z Restaurants. (The ‘Z’ is Zafferano, still one of London’s better […]
Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the last ten years, you’ll know Gordon Ramsay has built up London’s most impressive portfolio of top-end restaurants. Most of them are former ‘Savoy’ group hotel dining rooms. Their style is grand contemporary French, their quality is often impressive, but they tend to lack charisma. A whole constellation […]
Mews of Mayfair. The very name is presumably supposed to reek of sophistication, an impression intensified on entering the first floor dining room, which has the sort of very light décor which – in a house – you might be invited to enjoy only after taking your shoes off. We didn’t find it especially welcoming, […]
There are compensations to being a restaurant critic. One of them is that you have to explore nooks and crannies of the capital you might never otherwise seek out. Canonbury, for example, is a very nice place to get lost in. Once, with some difficulty, we’d finally located, the subject of this review, its appearance […]
On inspection, the Farringdon newcomer we had originally intended to review today just looked too horrible. So we diverted instead to this nearby hang out – the new(ish) off-shoot of Camden Town’s long-serving Caribbean ‘Restaurant & Rhum Shack’. Not, to be honest, with high hopes, but it did at least look welcoming. And in the […]
Sebastian Snow is a true veteran of the west London restaurant scene. In 1994, he launched “Snows on the Green’ (on Brook Green), which – in those admittedly less competitive days – generated much press interest. He then made an ill-fated expansion into Barnes (the short-lived “Snows on the Pond’), heralding a period of decline. […]
