A theatrical live-fire restaurant with an open kitchen launched in Spitalfields this week, a few minutes’ walk from Liverpool Street station – a first dining venue from publican and music festival entrepreneur Rob Star of Electric Star pubs. Firestarter shares an entrance on Middlesex Street with its stablemate The Star by Liverpool Street pub/bar next door, […]
Two well-known London restaurants closed temporarily this week following fires in their kitchen extraction systems – Som Saa in Spitalfields and Straker’s in Notting Hill. Straker’s will reopen as soon as possible, initially as a cold bar, following a fire that damaged parts of both the kitchen and restaurant. No injuries were reported. “We’re still investigating […]
A new ‘wine pub’ and restaurant with ten wines on tap (and just a couple of beers) opens in Spitalfields Market next week. Alfi’s ‘draught’ options range from an organic biodynamic Riesling and an orange wine to several fizzies including a pet nat. The operation is being launched by Ben Hodges and Alex Lewis in […]
A new Franco-Irish brasserie has launched in Old Spitalfields Market. 65A Spitalfields officially opens next Tuesday, 12 September, but diners can sample it today with food at a 30% discount during the soft launch. The restaurant is owned by Irish-born entrepreneur and publican Patrick Frawley, with executive chef Maura Baxter running the kitchen. It takes […]
Chelsea winger Hakim Ziyech is the latest high-profile footballer to invest some of his earnings in a restaurant – a halal-friendly Mexican joint called Taco Taco that launches this month in Spitalfields. After his starring role for Morocco in the World Cup last year, Ziyech – like everybody else at Chelsea – had a less successful domestic season, […]
A sister bar and restaurant to Hackney hangout Wringer & Mangle will open a stone’s throw from Old Spitalfields Market on 11 September. The original launched two years ago in London Fields in a disused former laundry. Wringer & Mangle Spitalfields is spread over two floors offering dining upstairs, a lunchtime deli counter and cocktails […]
When our reporters praise Bray’s Hind’s Head it is because the picturesque pub is “thankfully not over-Hestoned” but The Sunday Times’s Lisa Markwell has the opposite problem – she can’t find any evidence of Blumenthal’s pseudo-scientific cooking at all, nor the influence of his trusty lieutenant Ashley Palmer-Watts – and it leaves her disappointed… “I […]
