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Red Rooster at The Curtain review – the botched Shoreditch soul food transplant
Live music and a celebrity chef amount to a hill of beans I try to avoid mentioning celebrity chefs when writing about their restaurants. Apart from trying to avoid the cult of personality that most...
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Plaquemine Lock review – Creole and Cajun pub food on the Regent’s Canal
The gastropub cousin to Bocca di Lupo Most new restaurants launch in a blaze of publicity glory with press releases spamming inboxes, repetitively woolly social media chatter, oversubscribed launch...
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Old Tree Daiwan Bee review – the other Taiwanese restaurant on Rupert Street
Xu’s cheaper and more homely neighbour By accident or design, the sumptuously superlative Xu isn’t the only Taiwanese restaurant on Rupert Street. The West End’s most unlikely restaurant side street is...
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Diwana Bhel Poori review – Euston vegetarian Indian group dining
Cheap as chips and almost as good Trying to find a restaurant for a large group of people is a royal pain in the unmentionables. Cramming a baker’s dozen around a table can be a logistical feat akin to...
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Darjeeling Express review – Kingly Court Indian has inner beauty
Judging a restaurant on more than how good it looks on Instagram An opinion column published on the newly launched London version of Eater caused a small stir among the capital’s restaurant watchers....
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The Wigmore review – Michel Roux Jr’s Regent Street gastropub
The Langham’s second hotel bar in all but name I review relatively few gastropubs, not because I have any objection to them but due to a pair of far more prosaic reasons. For starters, many of the most...
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Core by Clare Smyth review – fine dining where meat isn’t the main course
Not nearly as cliched as you might think at first glance Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A fine dining restaurant with a much-vaunted chef at the helm has opened in leafy, wealthy zone 1 West...
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Magpie review – Modernist food served ‘Dim Sum’-style in Mayfair
The Pidgin sequel takes flight but doesn’t quite soar I once wrote that it’s rare for a restaurant to relocate inwards from the suburbs to the centre of town, rather than other way around. Recent...
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Temper City review – meat temple sequel takes on curry and poultry
It’s both different from the original Soho Temper and reassuringly similar too I try not to write too much about the industry goings-on in London’s restaurant scene. Such gossipy navel-gazing is often...
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Bad Sports review – tacos so good, it’s unsportsmanlike
Hoxton tacos worth travelling across town for The phrase ‘Hoxton restaurant’ has become a joke to many. Whatever it may once have meant, prosaically or otherwise, it has now become a byword for...
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El Muro review – Mexican food comes to Muswell Hill. Sort of.
It’s better than Tex-Mex. Just. Reviewing restaurants means I meander all over London, seeing firsthand the disparate boroughs, villages and neighbourhoods that make up this sprawling metropolis of...
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Hoppers review – Sri Lankan restaurant sequel finally takes reservations in...
Oxford Street’s eating options get a kick in the pants The little patch of shops and restaurants adjacent to Selfridges known as St. Christopher’s Place used to be one of London’s dining out black...
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Miss P’s Barbecue review – proper BBQ comes to Croydon
Disclosure: I backed this restaurant’s crowdfunding effort on Kickstarter (in the range of £50-£100). Update 17/10/17 – corrected details about the pulled pork and fixed some typos. Unlike some other...
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Coal Rooms Peckham review – a train station restaurant that isn’t a dreary chain
Plus a beast of a bacon sandwich Salvaging, reusing and repurposing old fittings and furnishings to adorn new restaurants is nothing new; it’s been an ongoing trend in the English-speaking world for at...
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Ella Canta review – hotel restaurant brings modern Mexico to Mayfair
Mexico City celeb chef opens outpost in the badlands of Park Lane If you’ve told me a few years ago that a Mexican restaurant, backed by famed chilango celeb chef Martha Ortiz, would open within the...
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Gilly’s Fry Bar review – the chippy that wants to be a tempura restaurant
Finsbury Park doesn’t need more battered fried food I have a confession to make. It’s a deeply unpopular, long-held opinion that will not endear me to many of you. It’ll be even more controversial than...
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Breddos Tacos Soho review – brilliance served with a side of incompetence
Raffish Clerkenwell Mexican sprouts second branch in Soho Update: 8/02/2018 – added new opening hours A great many things flow through my mind when I’m being ignored at a restaurant, once I become...
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Gul and Sepoy review – prince and pauper Indian dining in Spitalfields
Look beyond the marketing spin at this Gunpowder threequel As the end of the year approaches, so does the anniversary of this website and so my feeble mind inevitably ponders all that it has...
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Kashmir, Putney review – menu handholding that doesn’t infantilise the diner
Southwest London doesn’t know how lucky it really is Menus may look like an innocuous list of dishes and prices to most people. But, unless they’ve been written on the fly by a sleep-deprived...
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Yen review – the soba ‘specialists’ that also serve sushi, sashimi and donburi
A head-scratching double take on The Strand Bringing an under-appreciated cuisine or dish to foreign shores is an effort fraught with all sorts of logistical, culinary and financial difficulties....
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