Well it’s time to say a fond farewell to 2015, and what a year it’s been. The possibility of a pop-up that allows diners to pet foxes, a cereal café causing a riot, celebrity chef spats, and endless controversy as restaurant after restaurant was accused of unfair practices over tipping and service charges. From scathing […]
Last week The Times’s Giles Coren was drooling over his keyboard at the very thought of another meal at Brad McDonald’s new Deep South-influenced Soho haunt Shotgun. This week his colleague AA Gill over at the Sunday Times takes said shotgun and fires both barrels at the place in his Table Talk column… “The first […]
We kick off this week’s review of the reviews with a corker. Everyone should read Marina O’Laughlin’s scathing dissection of NYC interloper Hotel Chantelle in the Guardian, if only to hear the phrase ‘le wanquerie’, from the woman who brought us ‘Mayfair Wankpits’. From the food, to the service, to the very reason behind the […]
AA Gill is back at the Sunday Times’s Table Talk column with a bang as he reviews London’s hottest new opening – Richard Caring’s improbably named Sexy Fish. He finds its a tale of two restaurants; the ostentatious room itself which ‘comes on like one of Ron Burgundy’s pick-up lines’, and then there’s the food […]
This week saw a double helping of reviews for Richard Caring’s latest Mayfair venture, the lavishly appointed and ludicrously (yet somehow brilliantly) named Sexy Fish. Both the Evening Standard’s Grace Dent and the Telegraph’s Joseph Connolly paid the Berkeley Square newcomer a visit, and opinion was very much divided. Grace, being the meeja dahling that […]
In July this year Luke Mackay announced plans to open the Hour Glass pub on Brompton Road with hopes of recruiting a ‘GM with bonhomie’ and ‘a chef who isn’t a dick’. Tall order, but The Evening Standard’s Fay Maschler believes the Mackay (the man behind Brompton Food Market in Thurloe Place) has found it in […]
Alan Pickett’s (sort-of) eponymous solo venture Piquet in Fitzrovia gets a double dose of restaurant reviews as both the Standard’s Fay Maschler and Tracey MacLeod of the Independent pop by to try the chef’s Gallic-influenced British dishes. The Indy’s critic finds the service surprisingly stiff and the venue strangely deserted. Fortunately the food also receives […]
AA Gill’s Table Talk column in the Sunday Times is back after a summer hiatus and we discover he’s been in Italy all this time – lucky him. Perhaps the holiday has brought out his softer side as he gifts the reborn Locanda Locatelli at the Hyatt Regency hotel a rare five out of five […]
If the hipster-driven dude food revolution was prompted by the 2008 recession then, according to Giles Coren at The Times, the arrival of Sackville’s in Mayfair (an opulently expensive ode to beef and truffles) is a sure sign the hard times are well and truly over… “There would be exposed brick, bespoke cocktails and an […]
The Evening Standard’s Grace Dent seeks out Shoreditch’s latest smokehouse venture, Rök, concerned that it may be a another tedious, cavernous, edgy-by-numbers barbecue joint, which – she says – it absolutely is not. “Rök is small — 40 seats — and elegantly formed, dispatching gorgeous, highly devourable sharing plates of exquisite British produce with a Nordic […]
