My ten best openings last year (and why London needs them)
I've just been asked by someone to put forward a list of my favourite new restaurant openings of the last year, so I decided to compile my own list for a blog post. Its amazing to look back and see all...
View ArticleIs your latest restaurant just today's X factor hit?
The selling of Gay Hussar has got me (and a few others I see) thinking. Yet another crumbling old haunt, supposedly loved, but forgotten, and eventually forced to close.'Use them or lose them' we hear....
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The Rum Kitchen
I hate rum. I've hated it since drinking Malibu & coke as a teenager, with it's gorgeously chic white bottle, the sunset palm tree logo, it was the coolest thing to sit in a park and drink while...
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The BBQ Diner Rip-Off Kit
Why, those chaps in that there London have been having some cool ideas. I know, you want to try it for yourself in your own town. It's ripe for it, right? You've got your 'concept' already? Got a...
View ArticleLondon restaurant cuisines rated by coolness
London might be the 'best place in the world to sample the world's cusines', but what surely matters most are not which are the best, but which are the coolest. Food is of course fashion, and what you...
View Article5 Comments that should be banned from restaurant reviews
The online comments section. That brilliant accident of newspapers on the internet. Most columnists either stubbornly and rather aloofly ignore them, or dive in, hurt and touchy about this pants-down...
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LANES OF LONDON
Gosh it's been a while since I've reviewed a restaurant. Frankly, I'm not nearly enough of a food trainspotter - trying to think of a portmanteau - 'grainspotter'? - to form an opinion that anyone...
View ArticleHow simple is your restaurant?
Lately, not a day seems to go past without hearing about how restaurants are climbing over each other to be more simple. Rejecting anything that might be considered 'fancy', and instead stripping...
View ArticleWanky review expressions
What is it about food reviews and the wanky expressions?The minute we get all 'citizen journalist' and write stuff down, we seem to turn into rather over-the-top versions of Barbara Cartland, dictating...
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Rip off Restaurants
Someone cleverer than me once said 'no idea is original' and they are probably right. Every creative idea we have is influenced by something else. In fashion the rip-offs take days to transfer from hot...
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L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon
Prelude: Man takes a little squirrel-hair brush and begins to lightly brush the corners of a rectangular plate with some kind of flash gold coloured paint.Once, one of the most exciting things you...
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Cinnamon Soho
Last year, I did a round up of Soho lunches under 10 pounds which featured Dozo, Made in Italy, Forty Dean Street, Amico Bio, Bistro 1, Amalfi, Stockpot, Duck soup, Mele e pere, @Siam and Cookhouse...
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Food World Cup
Make the World cup more interesting with my 'Food World Cup' sweepstake kit. All the teams, in their groups, but in their 'favourite' foods.
View ArticleWhat's powering deformality in restaurants?
Recently I attended one of those industry workshops with a well known discount bookings company, and on the agenda was a talk from someone from Michelin Guide. Ooh I thought, how interesting. What...
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Tredwell's - Sharing Wareing
Cripes, all this relaxed accessibility. All this casualness. All this sharing. I’m surprised anyone ever actually makes it out of bed, let alone into a restaurant. We’re all too busy being casual and...
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Say Hello to 'UKIP Diner'
I sometimes forget we live in a little bubble of cosmopolitan sophistication. Central London restaurants are packed to the gills every night with forward-thinking, fashionable, liberal, creative...
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Elena's L'Etoile
I was once taken to a restaurant in Nice, called La Petite Maison. If anyone hasn’t been, I urge you to go at your first opportunity. It serves classic Provençal cooking at extortionate prices by a...
View ArticleHow hip is your chain?
What do you do when you’re not cool anymore? No self respecting foodie scenester would be seen dead in them now they’re rolled out and servicing the suburbs and featuring on everyone’s Facebook feed...
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NY Fold
For a few years now we’ve all been told that whatever we know about pizza is all wrong, and what we should all be eating is floppy, spongy crusts, with watery undercooked cheese tops and blackened...
View ArticleHow sleazy is your speakeasy?
So where are you having drinks these days? Pubs are for losers. Bars? Are you from Essex? No, we all know that the only place to drink in London these days are speakeasies. Little back room dens of...
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Burger Top Trumps
Well what with a couple of little burger places opening this week it seems to be London Burger Week so I thought I'd celebrate with a special edition of Top Trumps with all your favourite burgers.Yeah...
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Soho Diner
I hardly ever review places. Firstly, I'm extremely lazy, secondly, I really don't know anything insightful about food, other than how best to get it stylishly from the plate into my face, and thirdly,...
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Bi Bim Bap
If restaurants were people, Bi Bim Bap would be a fashion blogger. Inward pointing toes, rabbit in headlights face and primary colours everywhere, selfieing (is that a word?) herself all the...
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Herman Ze German - Old Compton St
I've spent many a summer's holiday winding up new found German friends with the went-down-with-the-ark joke of: (clears throat)Me (in comic Gestapo accent): 'You Germans make the verst sausages in the...
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