Food
Rich pickings: Alex Dilling at Hotel Café Royal reviewed
Alex Dilling at the Hotel Café Royal is a minute restaurant above Regent Street, which has the type of British…
Beyond satire: Richard Caring’s Bacchanalia reviewed
Bacchanalia is the new restaurant from Richard Caring – I sense he would like me to call it a ‘landmark’…
The best Ukrainian restaurant you will find: Mriya reviewed
Mriya lives at the end of Old Brompton Road where South Kensington turns into Earl’s Court and, as if by…
Another wasteland lost: Battersea Power Station reviewed
The rude fingers of Battersea are repointed, and barely rude at all. The power station by Giles Gilbert Scott and…
Theme of despair: Drop’N Chicken at Chessington reviewed
Chessington World of Adventures sits in a bowl near the A3. I went in the 1970s when it was a…
Echoes of John Lewis: Piazza at Royal Opera House reviewed
The Piazza is not a piazza – a realisation which is always irritating – but a restaurant in the eaves…
If Blairism were a carvery: the Impeccable Pig reviewed
Labour is 30 points ahead, and in honour of this I review the Impeccable Pig in Sedgefield (Cedd’s field), a…
Fine food in a sinister Weimar wine cellar: Bardo St James’s Restaurant reviewed
Bardo St James’s Restaurant – a name which reads like a map – is a vast new Italian restaurant in…
What Soho House has got right: Electric Diner reviewed
Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior…
Among the best puddings I’ve ever eaten: Richoux reviewed
Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in…
A great chef at his best: Lisboeta reviewed
In 2014, Nuno Mendes, a chef from Lisbon by way of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchens and his own Viajante in Bethnal…
Escaping the memory of Liz Truss: Noci reviewed
Sometimes this column has a guest reviewer: a dining companion. It was Liz Truss in late summer 2011, for the…
Civilisation in a sausage: River Restaurant at the Savoy reviewed
When the Tory party set itself on fire last week a restaurateur told me: ‘Don’t worry, Tanya, we’ll still be…
Pub food, Disney-style: the George reviewed
The George, Fitzrovia, was Saki’s local, and a pub for men talking about cars when Great Portland Street was called…
More spectacle than food: Ave Mario reviewed
Ave Mario looks like Clown Town, a soft-play centre in Finchley with a ball pit so large you could drown…
Where to take Jubilee tea: Fortnum & Mason reviewed
I went to a garden party at Buckingham Palace once. It is coloured in my memory like childhood. There are…
The perfect restaurant for the Labour party: Arcade reviewed
I should know better than to visit restaurants assembled as if from disparate bricks, like thrift-shop Duplo: but the ever-credulous…
A cake shop from the time of the Profumo affair: Maison Bertaux reviewed
Amid the bronze cladding of Soho, with its pop-up, suck-down restaurants – the Cadbury’s Creme Egg Café was a nadir…
The Harrods disadvantage: Em Sherif reviewed
I am never bored with Harrods, only disgusted, and it is disgust of the most animated and exciting kind. It…
£120 steak that looks like a M&S meal deal: The Maine reviewed
Last week Chris Corbin and Jeremy King lost controlof the restaurant group they founded: Corbin & King, which made theWolseley,…
The best lamb in London: Blacklock reviewed
Blacklock is the fourth restaurant of that name – there are others in Soho, Shoreditch and the City of London.…
Food ruined by an existential crisis: Fallow reviewed
I was going to be jolly this week, for variety and denial, but I changed my mind. Instead, I wonder…
A victim of its own mythology: Langan’s Brasserie reviewed
Langan’s, a brasserie off Piccadilly with curling orange neon signage calling its name, is under new management after it fell…
Pass on Piggy’s, head to Hide: central London breakfasts reviewed
The centre could not hold, at least for Piggy’s. The drama of being the only greasy spoon in the West…
A ghost at the feast: The LaLee at the Cadogan hotel, reviewed
The Cadogan hotel, Chelsea, is where Oscar Wilde was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, in Room 118,…
