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 […]
Vietnamese cooking has yet to hit the big time in London. This is still mainly a world of ‘ethnic’ East End cafés. There is a ‘smart’ Vietnamese – Fitzrovia’s Bam Bou – but it’s very much ‘evolved’, offering a cuisine reflecting colonial French influences. It’s no criticism to say it’s probably as known for its […]
Big Name chefs are pretty keen to put their names on things these days: chocolates, frying pans, even supermarkets’ Less so restaurants, and for good reason. If any old product with a chef’s name on it turns out to be unremarkable, who’s really going to care? But if it’s their ‘core’ business? Gary Rhodes knows […]
It’s curious how few kosher restaurants there are in London. Once-famous Blooms, near Aldgate, threw in the towel in the late ’90s, as did the wonderfully quirky Kosher Luncheon Club, nearby. For a while there were no kosher restaurants in the City, until this venture – also near Aldgate – opened two years ago. It […]
Maurizio Vilona’s new Mayfair restaurant is authentic to a fault. A real fault. The austere and slightly gloomy design of his new premises screams I-T-A-L-Y, in a bad way. You can have too much understatement. The oddly ‘foreign’ feel of this small and poorly-proportioned room – exacerbated on my visit by throbbing air conditioning – […]
