Restaurants
Your problems solved
Q. We moved recently and new neighbours invited us to join them for dinner at a nearby restaurant. I planned…
Cool and underground
The Keeper’s House sits in the basement of Burlington House, a restaurant in disguise. It is quite different from the…
Concept
‘It was nothing special, but it was a pub,’ said my husband, looking up from his copy of Bar magazine…
Nicholas the miraculous
Miracles are not ceased. A few years ago, a kindly educational therapist took pity on John Prescott and set out…
Soho in Somerset
It is summer and the listless metropolitan thinks of grass. It cannot afford to stay at Durslade Farmhouse, Somerset, a…
Barometer
London’s other mayor How many people could name the capital’s other mayor, the Lord Mayor of London? The office, officially…
Lost in Piccadilly
Batman owned the Criterion in The Dark Knight, but could he do anything about British Telecom? Savini at Criterion, an…
Diary
Killing time in a Heathrow first-class lounge, I notice how many men adopt an unmistakable ‘first-class lounge’ persona. They stand…
Marco Pierre, why?
Wheeler’s is such a dreadful restaurant that I wonder if Marco Pierre White even knows his name is on it.…
Easy to swallow
Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of…
Italian cuts
Sartoria is a pale grey restaurant on Savile Row. As evidence that this is London’s destination street — if menswear…
Past Caring
Le Caprice is a monochrome patch of the 1980s behind the Ritz Hotel, in the part of St James’s that…
That sinking feeling
The Feng Shang Princess is a floating Chinese restaurant on the Regent’s Canal in north London, which flows from Little…
Center Parcs Longleat – a stealth socialist utopia on Lord Bath’s estate
Center Parcs Longleat is a holiday village in a forest in Wiltshire, on Lord Bath’s estate, so you can never…
Sexy Fish: not so much a restaurant as a museum of London’s rich
Sexy Fish is a ludicrous restaurant with a ludicrous name in a ludicrous town. It is the latest venture from…
Redecorate the restaurant, but you can’t redecorate the clientele
Forty-five Jermyn St lives in the left-hand buttock of Fortnum & Mason (F&M), a shop whose acronym is slightly too…
The Pit of hipsterdom
Penny is an all-day café in the former Pit Bar in the basement of the Old Vic, a famous and…
I went to Pedro’s Tex Mex Cantina to claim my racist sombrero
Pedro’s Tex-Mex Cantina is a fantastical shack near a ring road in Norwich. It was recently asked to stop handing…
Manchester has marvellous wines, and it’s not finished yet
It will seem an ungrateful comment after the lunch which I am about to describe, but Manchester has some way…
High steaks
Smith & Wollensky is a restaurant from The Shining: a terrifying American steak joint by the Thames, four months old,…
Foodies without the faff
I cannot review the Gay Hussar every time the Labour party behaves like a self-harming teenager (‘I don’t want to…
Comic relief
Mum’s, or to use its full title, Mum’s Great Comfort Food, is a restaurant in Edinburgh designed to soothe itinerant…
Something fishy
Selfridges is skilled at making things that are not hideous (women) look hideous (women dressed as Bungle from Rainbow or…
Trattoria tour
The Gatto Nero — or ‘Black Cat’ — is in Burano, a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. It is…
Chelsea carnivores
The Maze Grill is on a sinister street in Chelsea, between a small Tesco — a boutique Tesco? — and…
