The UK’s top 100 restaurants are revealed in Harden’s Best UK Restaurants 2018 published today – the country’s most comprehensive restaurant guide available in bookshops, with approximately twice the number of entries as The Good Food Guide. The guide hails London’s The Araki as the country’s best restaurant. The experience is “world class” and, at £385-a-head, […]

Continue reading


Simon Rogan returned to London this week to launch Aulis, an eight-seater chef’s table which mirrors his development kitchen Aulis at the restaurateur’s flagship Cartmel restaurant-with-rooms L’Enclume. Readers may also remember Aulis was the name of the development kitchen and chef’s table at Fera at Claridge’s. Plans are also still underway to relaunch Roganic – […]

Continue reading


 Simon Rogan has announced he will leave Fera, the restaurant he set up at Claridge’s in Mayfair three years ago, at the end of April. The restaurant’s current team will continue operating under head chef Matt Starling, a Rogan protégé. Meanwhile, Rogan is looking for permanent London premises to rehouse a revival of Roganic, the temporary restaurant […]

Continue reading


⦿ The Observer’s Jay Rayner reviewed Chop Chop in Edinburgh, which confirmed his view that dumplings are the ultimate comfort food – “While you are eating dumplings nothing bad can happen.” Opened in 2006 by Jian Wang, from Dongbei in northeast China, Chop Chop excels in its dumplings, although its other dishes were more variable […]

Continue reading


Moor Hall, the long-awaited new restaurant near Liverpool from Simon Rogan’s former right-hand man Mark Birchall, is now open for bookings from March 1 and may be serving meals before then. Birchall, who spent nine years at L’Enclume, Rogan’s ground-breaking gastro destination in Cumbria, has had to be patient while Moor Hall, a historic Grade II* property with […]

Continue reading