Food and Drink

Student Dane Nash's diet is totally bananas - he eats up to 150 of the fruit A WEEK. The 21-year-old starts every day with a smoothie made of TWELVE nanas and downs up to 10 more throughout the day. He gets 80 per cent of his calorie intake from the tropical fruit, with most of the rest coming from spinach - of which he consumes more than 2lbs per day. Dane follows a strict 'raw vegan' diet - only uncooked...

OK, so who switched winter on? Following two months of what promised to be a glorious summer normality has returned to the shores of Britain bringing with it wind-swept and rain-drenched mugginess that has sufficiently clouded our memories of deck chairs in the garden and strawberries and cream in the fridge. Ain't it always the way. If my memory serves me well, the first few weeks of August are generally the days in which Britain decides to take a rest...

A new lunch membership service is about to revolutionise lunch in London after enjoying huge success in the US. Through MealPal hundreds of restaurants across London are now offering one dish per day to subscribing members which they can choose to reserve ready to pick up at lunchtime. Using the website or mobile app, users browse meals available at restaurants near them, filter meals by cuisine and portion size, and preorder the night before or in the morning, choosing a...

Outside Nine Lives, the newest project from Sweet&Chilli, the bar’s only real tell-tale sign of existence is a tallied number nine logo. Adorned across a vintage leather jacket, on the bar's website, the logo looks as though plucked from a Dead Kennedys or Black Flag album cover. It's so punk, in fact, it’s surprising that BrewDog haven’t yet bullied the group into submission. On a backstreet close to London Bridge station, Nine Lives has a sense of Prohibition mystery, tucked underground...

Islington pie and mash shop M Manze is set to close later this year, after 106 years of trading. On announcing the closure last week, owner Tim Nicholls blamed increasing business rates as the reason for the iconic Chapel Market pie shop’s closure – something that has bereft the city of so many beloved pie shops over the past 20 years. M Manze is set to continue trading until Christmas, before the space is inevitably taken over by another coffee...

An Indian restaurant in London has created the World's hottest cocktail - but who will be brave enough to try it? Made using a secret recipe that includes the Naga Chilli 500,000 Scoville Vodka, The Naga Chilli Cocktail is guaranteed to blow the head off of any brave drinker. Those who have tasted the fiery concoction report burning gums, hallucinating sensations, extreme sweating, stinging eyes and fainting. One drinker describes their experience: “It bites deep into my mouth, gums, tongue...

Have you ever been to a Welsh restaurant, in London? Under the fatal chasm of British food, Welsh cuisine is so often overlooked: a shame given the excellent readily available produce. In the new One Tower Bridge development, Pembrokeshire-born Tom Simmons’ eponymous restaurant isn’t so much a Welsh restaurant (there are absolutely no gimmicks here), but has a prominent focus on produce sourced from Wales. The first restaurant to open in the new One Tower Bridge development, the family-run space...

With plenty of exciting restaurant openings constantly taking place across the Capital, we pick London’s best new restaurant openings taking place over the coming month.   Joe Allen – Covent Garden Joe Allen, the iconic restaurant in the heart of London’s West End will move to a new home this Summer, just 25 metres down the road, on Burleigh Street. First opened in 1977, Joe Allen, with its exposed brickwork, wood paneling and long wood-clad bar, is an almost exact replica of...

When The Frog E1 opened last summer, I was quick to declare it one of the year’s best openings. One of the absolute best restaurants in east London, in fact. Sadly, so many brilliant restaurants fail to live up to the initial ‘hype’ and ultimately slump into a routine of serving terrible food with slow service, even though booking a table remains harder than Trigonometry. 365 days later, many of these places eventually fail, closing their doors to make space...