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McQueen | McQueen
Not realising that the restaurant has its own entrance on Tabernacle Street, we entered through the bar which, on a Thursday night, was - as I believe the kids say these days - going off. The decor, which carries through to the restaurant, is a bit blingy but perfectly inoffensive - parquet floors, Chesterfield sofas, slate walls, gilt-framed black-and-white pictures of the venue's inspiration, the eternally-cool Steve McQueen - and succeeds in making the space feel razzy without tipping over into tacky. The louche, sexily-lit room would, my pal Nic and I agreed, be ideal for a date, perhaps with someone who wasn't publicly your partner...
Brigade | Brigade Bar & Bistro
A social enterprise offering six-month apprenticeships to people who have experienced or are at risk of homelessness, Brigade supports the Beyond Food Foundation which helps apprentices into careers in catering and hospitality...
Balthazar | Balthazar
Balthazar, a huge brasserie occupying the site of the old Theatre Museum just off the piazza in Covent Garden, is a near-carbon copy of the original Balthazar in New York. Why it was thought that what London really needed in 2013 was its own branch of a restaurant that was very fashionable when it opened in 1997 but nowadays is, by most accounts, strictly one for 'out-of-towners' is beyond me, but so are cooking rice and why people find Ricky Gervais funny - I don't pretend to understand everything...
Brasserie Chavot | Brasserie Chavot
"I knew you would," a friend replied when I tweeted after dinner about how much I'd loved Brasserie Chavot, "it's very you." And it's true; Eric Chavot's new, eponymous brasserie on Conduit Street is very me, encapsulating pretty much everything I love in a restaurant in one very polished package. Take the stunner of a room...
Mr Kong | Mr Kong, Chinatown
Restaurants in London's Chinatown, indeed in the Chinatowns of most world cities, tend to fall into one of two broad categories. There are those aimed squarely (one might say cynically) at tourists, of the all-you-can-eat buffet and menus-with-pictures variety, and those intended for Chinese diners, where the food is the real deal but gweilo visitors are positively discouraged and any bold enough to cross the threshold receive the frostiest of welcomes. What a delight then to find that Mr Kong on Lisle Street...
Winter Garden at the Landmark | Champagne Brunch at The Landmark
Best of all are the occasional really great commissions that come along, the kind that leave you cackling Muttley-style and wondering aloud "This is work?" as you fire off your invoice. The kind that saw me dispatched recently by les Deux Messieurs, the luxury travel guide for which I am the gloriously-titled Editor-At-Large, to The Landmark Hotel in Marylebone to experience their unlimited Champagne brunch. Now if you're a pedant like me you'll be asking which it is that's unlimited, the Champagne or the brunch. And like me, you'll be delighted to know that it's both...
The Dead Dolls Club | The Dead Dolls Club
And yet something grabbed me about the menu at The Dead Dolls Club, a cute little place in Haggerston (it's the new Dalston - possibly) where the food is provided by The Foragers, a collective who, their website says, 'believe in collecting, preserving, and rummaging through hedgerows like a child in a sweet shop, but respectfully and gratefully making something simply found into something spectacular'. Which sounded nice. So taking with me a young East London-dwelling trendy, Matt Bramford, so as not to feel too conspicuous in my late-thirties uncoolness, I went along to see if The Foragers could make me eat my ranty words. Food & drink at The Dead Dolls Club, Dalston by Matt Bramford I'll say this much for them: they're certainly turning out some bloody good food. The 'Grazing Menu' of small plates is concise at just seven dishes and three sides, and if what we ate wasn't quite 'spectacular' it was at least near impossible to fault...
Shoryu Ramen | Shoryu Ramen
've lost count of the number of places I've walked into recently - shops being by far the worst offenders, but a fair number of restaurants and offices too - where no-one's said "Hello!" or otherwise acknowledged my presence. So the cheery, traditional, "Irasshaimase!" from the staff and beating of a drum on entering Shoryu, London's latest ramen joint on Lower Regent Street, endeared me to the place before even a mouthful of food passed my lips. But oh, the food...it's wonderful. Just brilliant. So much so, in fact, that after an impressive first visit I returned twice in the space of a week. The room's nothing special - tightly-packed, functional (trans: hard) seating; bright lights, an apparently Spirographed mural - and the Lower Regent Street location, horrible, but these are minor considerations next to the combined allure of the warmth of welcome and the sheer quality of the ramen...
Dock Kitchen | Dock Kitchen
Few restaurants can boast as impressive a setting as Dock Kitchen. Overlooking the Grand Union Canal, in a smartly restored Victorian wharf, globetrotting chef Stevie Parle's Ladbroke Grove base doubles as a showroom for furniture and lighting designer Tom Dixon, whose studio is downstairs. Restaurant/showroom hybrids might be nothing new - Chair in Westbourne Grove (chairs, obvs) and Firevault in Marylebone (designer fireplaces, believe it or not), both now closed, got there first - but nowhere does it with quite such urbane modernity as here...
Barrafina | Barrafina
Barrafina is such a clever name. Opened in 2006 by London's most dashing sibling restaurateurs Sam and Eddie Hart, 'Barrafina' alludes to its being a more casual tapas bar off-shoot of the brothers' estimable first restaurant Fino, as well as translating neatly, and highly appropriately, as 'Excellent Bar'. London might, now, be spoiled for high-end tapas joints - and given my love of that cuisine this can only be A Good Thing - but Barrafina was the first to show that there was more to Spanish small plates than champiñones al ajillo and patatas bravas (although the latter do appear on Barrafina's menu and are, like everything, exemplary)...
Hawksmoor Air Street | Hawksmoor Air Street
I love steak. If in the final hours prior to my expiring I retain any capacity to choose and masticate then I am certain to include a great big slab of beef, bleu, in my last meal. But I very rarely order it in restaurants, or go to steakhouses, because of what is known in my family as The Pam Principle™. My mother, Pam, never orders in a restaurant anything which she might reasonably expect to make at home, believing that it's wasteful to pay someone to do something you can do yourself. I have an excellent local butcher (Moen & Son of Clapham, if you're interested) and a heavy griddle pan, and as such I cook steak - really, really good steak - exactly how I like it, often and well...
Wishbone | Wishbone
Back in August when I wrote a piece for The Telegraph about the emerging trend for up-market chicken shops, I felt safe in including Wishbone in Brixton even though it hadn't opened yet. For one thing, I'd been to a menu-testing (yes, I know, it's a hard life) at co-owner Scott Collins' MEATLiquor earlier in the year and thought everything was pretty much spot on, and figured that if the food was as good as it was in beta it would only get better with time...
Edwin's French Wine Bar and Restaurant | Edwin
You have to admire - or envy - Edwin Chan. After a long and incredibly successful career in advertising, culminating in his founding his own global agency, Chan handed over the day-to-day running of the business to his partners and decided to pursue his passions of French food and wine. This saw him open an eponymous brasserie and wine bar in Lyon in 2007 and in October of this year, one in London...
Mele e Pere | Mele e Pere
The neon sign and display of glass apples and pears at Mele e Pere, Soho I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the brainstorming session where they came up with the name Mele e Pere. "Well it's going to be an Italian restaurant, so let's give it an Italian name!" some young marketing wonk with heavy-rimmed glasses and a choppy hairdo would have intoned with the gravity usually reserved for decoding the human genome...
El Pirata | El Pirata, Mayfair
With the exceptions of 'literally' and 'gourmet', I can think of few words more liberally abused than 'tapas'. With the not-unwelcome advent a few years ago of the 'small plates' concept came an entirely unwelcome side-effect, the rebranding of small plates of any cuisine as 'tapas'. Thus we have seen 'Italian tapas' (actually cicheti), 'Asian tapas' (at the appallingly-named Tapasia, among others), even Norfolk tapas (for which I have at least to give the guys at The Pigs 10/10 for originality). When a while ago I received a press release vaunting a restaurant's new 'Spanish tapas' offering my Tautology Klaxon went off so violently that my ears have only just stopped ringing...
Soif | Soif
It always rather irks me, when reading about a restaurant outside of Zone 1, to see it described condescendingly as a 'good local restaurant', as if to reach it would require a journey worthy of Gulliver and that the preparation of decent food is somehow dependent on the possession of a W1 postcode. To those of us who live in Zone 2 (or - horrors - even further afield) it's the central London gaffs that need travelling to; our local restaurants are just our restaurants, ta very much, and many of them are very good indeed...
Disiac | Disiac, Soho
Disiac Restaurant, 6 Greek Street, Soho, London New restaurants open in London at such a whirlwind rate that, if it's not your actual job to do so, it's almost impossible to keep up. I subscribe - as should you, if you have any interest in these things - to Catherine and Gavin Hanly's definitive Hot Dinners e-newsletter, and keep an eye on, among others, the excellent blog of lifestyle concierge company Bon Vivant, but very often even reasonably high-profile openings pass me by...
Brasserie Zédel | Brasserie Zédel
Anyone who, like me, was living in London in the 1990s will remember Atlantic Bar & Grill. Owned by the then-coolest cat in town, Oliver Peyton - the Russell Norman of his day, now better known for his role as a judge on Great British Menu - Atlantic, with its snappy bouncers and seemingly untraversable velvet rope, was for a time at least the place to see and be seen...
Tuttons | Tuttons, Covent Garden
Until fairly recently, Covent Garden was something of a culinary wasteland, its restaurant scene not having kept up with an ever-improving retail landscape. Bar one or two decent places - Joe Allen, Clos Maggiore - options for eating out in WC2 were mostly limited to terrible tourist traps and what might charitably be called 'better chains'...
Tonkotsu | Tonkotsu, Soho
It's the smell that gets you first. Rounding the corner of Old Compton Street into Dean Street, the intense, rich aroma emanating from Tonkotsu like a vapour grabs you in its tractor beam, winds its way into your dilated nostrils and demands that, like a Bisto Kid, you track this heaven scent to its source...
Reform Social and Grill at The Mandeville Hotel | Reform Social & Grill, Marylebone
About three or four years ago, restaurants offering robust, butch British fare in clubby surroundings (gentlemen's rather than night) were the height of fashion, Dean Street Townhouse being the first and I would still argue the best of the bunch. It was a fashion I was very happy with, this being exactly the kind of food I like to eat and the kind of place I like to eat it in.Fashions change however, with each new restaurant opening now seemingly contending to be more niche and novel than the last, so just as I was thinking we'd all moved on to places serving only hot dogs and champagne or authentic pork-bone ramen, it came as a not-unpleasant surprise to hear about somewhere as resolutely - one might say wilfully - old-school as Reform Social & Grill...
Ora | Ora
Location, location, location are, as every estate agent and Channel 4 property show addict knows, the three critical factors in determining the desirability of a property. The same cannot be said for restaurants, which can thrive in the oddest places - both under and atop multi-storey car-parks, for example - yet fail in seemingly sure-fire sites.Ora is a fantastic smart Thai restaurant cursed with an abysmal location (location, location)...
Asia de Cuba at St Martins Lane Hotel | Asia de Cuba
It's a funny place, Asia de Cuba. The restaurants of high-end hotels tend to be safe bet, haute cuisine affairs offering the finest of fine dining at reassuringly expensive prices to a pampered international clientèle. But there's nothing safe or familiar about Asia de Cuba at London's perennially-popular St Martin's Lane Hotel; in cuisine, decor and - that dread word - concept, it's quite unlike anywhere else. And I love it...
Café Boheme | Café Boheme, Soho
Café Boheme is, like the sex shops of Walker's Court and strip joints of Rupert Street, a stalwart of the Soho scene. For twenty years it's stood on the corner of Old Compton and Greek Streets, apparently open all hours, its pavement tables always occupied - one of the hottest spots on a street where people-watching is a competitive sport...
Dabbous | Dabbous
When, just a couple of weeks after Dabbous opened earlier this year, the Evening Standard's Fay Maschler - the doyenne of restaurant reviewers - gave it an almost-unprecedented five stars, the effect was instantaneous. Word spread like wildfire (après Fay, le déluge) and by the end of the week rumours abounded that the next available table at Dabbous was sometime in early 2013...
Cinnamon Soho | Cinnamon Soho
One of the very first restaurants I wrote about when I started this blog was The Cinnamon Club, chef Vivek Singh's magnificent haute Indian in Westminster. Since then I've eaten out countless times and that meal still stands out in my mind as being one of the best.Expectations were understandably high then when I went along to try out Cinnamon Soho, the second, newly-opened casual offshoot of the SW1 original (the first, which I've not been to, is Cinnamon Kitchen in the City)...
The Delaunay | The Delaunay
From the reverence afforded in some quarters to restaurateurs Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, you'd think that they'd done far more for London's dining scene than open one successful restaurant - The Wolseley - in the past ten years. But up until late 2011, when The Delaunay opened on Aldwych, that was indeed the sum of their achievements, St Alban - an ill-fated attempt to replicate The Ivy, which they once owned - having lasted barely three years...
The Lawn Bistro | The Lawn Bistro, Wimbledon
Say 'Wimbledon' and the first thing that springs to most minds is usually either tennis or The Wombles, or to those of a more literary bent, Nigel Williams' brilliant trilogy of SW19-based novels. It's safe to say that one thing Wimbledon is not closely associated with is great restaurants; save for a couple of local gems...
East Street Restaurant | East Street
One of the downsides - if you can call it that - to eating out as often as I do is that things that to the occasional diner would be unique and exciting can become ubiquitous and uninspiring. Beetroot and goats' curd, anything in Kilner jars or miniature Staub casseroles, venison tartare; been there, done that, dropped it down every t-shirt.I've been spoiled, too, when it comes to the food of the Far East, enjoying everything from amazing Vietnamese to terrific Thai and jaw-dropping Japanese without even having to leave London. Better still, I've experienced restaurants that offer a variety of Eastern cuisines under one roof allowing for exploration and experimentation in the course of one meal. So, if I didn't find East Street, a recently-opened restaurant on Rathbone Place offering the chance to 'travel across East Asia by plate', particularly exciting, it's through absolutely no fault on their part...
Dishoom | Dishoom, Covent Garden
'Dishoom' is a wonderful onomatopoeic word derived from Bollywood films and meaning the sound made 'when a hero lands a good punch, or when a bullet flies through the air'. It also, more colloquially, can mean 'mojo' or to bring it right up-to-date, 'swagger'. To say that a man has 'dishoom' is high praise indeed; to name your restaurant such displays a certain elevated confidence.Fortunately for the three brothers behind Dishoom - 'a Bombay café in London' - it's confidence that has paid off, because this is a very good restaurant indeed...
Yauatcha | Yauatcha
Although it was purely a coincidence that I arranged to have lunch at Yauatcha on the day when all of nearby Chinatown was celebrating Chinese New Year, it felt rather fitting that I should be eating there on a day when all thoughts were on new beginnings. I'd been to Soho's swankiest dim sum restaurant before, on a couple of occasions, but due to no fault of theirs always left with a sense of melancholy; I won't labour the point but let's just say unrequited romance was involved and I'd come to feel that Yauatcha and I were jinxed. This time I was with my purely-platonic pal Eliot, so there was no danger of me leaving with a heavy heart, and could appraise the experience rather less partially than on my previous visits...
34 | 34, Mayfair
For those of us, and we are many, who follow the movements of London's lively restaurant scene with the devotion of a celebrity's stalker, the last few months have offered particularly rich pickings. From former food-trucks graduating to permanent premises to world-famous chefs popping up for blink-and-you'll-miss-'em residencies in department stores, the pace and variety of new openings has been thrilling and dizzying...
Mishkin's | Mishkin
For anyone operating a restaurant specialising in the cuisine of a particular country or culture, being considered 'authentic' by experts and ex-pats can be both a blessing and a burden. While a reputation for the truest tapas, realest rendang or most verisimilitudinous Vietnamese usually results in a clamour for tables and healthy profits, get things wrong and your faux French or ersatz Asian will make you the object of every food snob's opprobrium.Only a restaurateur with the supreme confidence and chutzpah of Russell Norman would dare to open a restaurant as wilfully, joyously inauthentic as Mishkin's, described on its website as 'a kind-of Jewish deli with cocktails'...
Le Relais de Venise L'Entrecote | Le Relais de Venise
Living, as we are privileged to do, in a democracy, choice is held to be totemic of everything that is good in our society. Who we vote for, where we live, what we do for a living, who we have sex with - or not - are all inviolably our choices; their protection is enshrined in law and if we should ever feel that our freedoms are being restricted we have the choice to take to the streets, airwaves or ballot box to make our dissatisfaction known...
Sumosan | Sumosan, Mayfair
Coming on for two-and-half-years ago, in one of my very first blog posts, I stated with the sniffy hubris of a know-it-all newcomer that the subject, Automat, occupied 'the site of Oliver Peyton's late, unlamented Coast'. I thought it sounded terribly clever to be so in-the-know, and it's an affectation that's stayed with me down the years - most of my posts make some reference to where a restaurant is (over and above its London district) and what if anything it used to be.Thank goodness then that the three or so readers I had back in 2009 either didn't notice or knew even less than I thought I did about restaurant premises, because blow me down if I didn't realise, upon arriving for a dinner date at Sumosan, that it in fact occupies 'the site of Oliver Peyton's late, unlamented Coast' and that Automat was, and always had been, on the next street along...