Restaurants

Forget arid roast turkey, prosaic Christmas pudding and sprouts boiled to the point of complete submission. This year, so many of London’s incomparably diverse restaurants have created special, unique Christmas dinners. From classic German goose with dumplings to Indian spiced goose breast; Australasian-inspired fusion to South African Braai – we pick the best international Christmas dinners to eat in London this year. Hammer & Tongs Available until 23rd December, Farringdon restaurant Hammer & Tongs has launched a South African braai...

London definitely doesn’t suffer from a lack of Vietnamese cuisine offerings - and thanks to my previous living quarters in Hoxton, I’ve sampled a lion’s share. That said, London still hasn’t reached saturation, so far as Vietnamese food is concerned. A healthy walk from Kings Cross station, CoBa is the brainchild of Damon Bui and MJ Gadhavi. Built on the success of their supper club, Table for 10, and Damon’s Vietnamese-Australian upbringing, the restaurant offers a menu lifted directly from...

A delicacy synonymous with Japanese cuisine, fugu (pufferfish) is highly-prized, but potentially more deadly than cyanide. Each fish has enough tetrodotoxin (one of the world’s most powerful neutrotoxins) to kill 30 adults, so it’s hardly surprising it’s banned across the EU. In Japan, only rigorously trained chefs are licensed to prepare fugu, but the fish has still killed more than 20 Japanese diners since 2000. If improperly prepared, the fish’s tetrodotoxin begins to attack the central nervous system immediately after...

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.    The Good Egg – Soho  Following the success of their Stoke Newington restaurant, and successfully crowd-funding £500,000, chefs Joel Braham, Alex Coppard and Oded Mizrachi have launched The Good Egg in Soho. In Kingly Court, off Carnaby Street, the restaurant draws on the Jewish café-culture of Montreal combined with Tel-Aviv’s street-food scene, with a menu that...

Classic British cooking is having a moment. For every ill-contrived Modern-British foam, ‘essence’ or poncey restaurant ‘concept’, there’s a smoked fish trolley, tableside flambé station, or dedicated ‘pie room’ commanding respect in some sprauncy corner of central London. And so they should. British food has a dreadful reputation, at best, but when overlooking bland roast dinners and the unspeakable things our grandparents did with offal, there’s something endearing about the undiluted glamour that engulfs restaurants such as Scott’s, Bentley’s, relative...

Just a couple of weeks after its official launch, The Sunday Times published an article declaring the Sunday roast at The Coal Shed in London to be one of the city’s best. Part of the upscale new One Tower Bridge development, which also homes Tom Simmons Tower Bridge and a new offshoot of The Ivy, The Coal Shed is the London counterpart of its sister restaurant of the same name, and The Salt Room, each operating in Brighton. Restaurateur Razak...

There’s no such thing as a perfect restaurant. There are good restaurants and bad restaurants – truly exceptional ones, even; but perfection is impossible to grasp with each dining experience being so subjective. Many meat-enthusiasts believe Hawksmoor is the perfect meat restaurant, for instance. They’re entitled to their opinions, of course, yet my personal idea of perfection doesn’t include eating carelessly-cooked steaks, suffered in an atmosphere beleaguered by toxic masculinity. The menu at Flank – a new addition to Old...

Against all odds, South London is firmly the place to be in 2017. Once criminally best known as the setting for Only Fools & Horses (actually filmed in West London and Bristol), or as an area plagued with violence – Peckham has topped The Sunday Times’ list of the best places in London to live, this year. At long last, SE15 is cool again, but hasn’t (yet) been developed to the sterile peaks of Shoreditch and Dalston, even though so...

To celebrate their first Christmas since opening, award-winning restaurant Hammer & Tongs, in Farringdon, has announced plans to launch a special South African Braai menu – an African style of cooking that uses an open fire, generally fuelled by wood. Slow-cooked entirely over Sicklewood and Blackthorne, on an open fire, the menu will offer guests the chance to enjoy two courses for £20, or three courses for £25. With the possibility of accommodating groups from two to 80, the restaurant’s...