Starting with Le Caprice in 1981, Jeremy King and Christopher Corbin built up one of London’s most impressive restaurant empires of recent times. By the time they finally exited in 2002 – several million pounds richer – the group included no fewer than three of the five most popular restaurants in town (The Ivy, Le […]
Vincent Labeyrie and Pascal Aussignac, the duo behind the fabled Club Gascon, recently relaunched their elegant food shop spin-off (overlooking Smithfield Market) as a bistro. As with their other London ventures, inspiration is taken from the earthy cuisine of South West France. The team originally billed this re-launch as a fairly straightforward bistro, and you […]
In Savile Row of all places, it seems fair to judge by appearances. At this Conran group Italian, the multi-various staff uniforms suggest that it requires a hierarchy of seven grades of operative to bring you lunch. It may therefore fairly be claimed as an organisational triumph that the service works at all. Unsurprisingly, however, […]
Is that ‘ee’ or ‘ea’?’Âť The location overlooking Smithfield’s famously carnivorous market might make you assume the latter, but the former better describes the purpose behind this nifty new venue. In case you miss the pun, though, the place’s logo is a cow. An inconspicuous street frontage lends the external appearance of a fairly small, […]
Food-with-a-conscience is at the heart of this wholesome new diner-concept, now housed in a large basement, down the hill from St Paul’s. It is ‘new’ in the sense that the popular first branch, in the West End, was apparently deemed too small to display the backers’ vision properly. We still can’t work out, though, whether […]
What’s in a name? Within this particular name, the Nico punningly concerned (Ladenis) is – as readers aged over 40 will recognise – the first really talented London chef to realise the PR potential of throwing customers out of his restaurants. (We particularly cherish our recollection of visits chez Nico, who invariably rumbled us, and […]
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 […]
