Restaurants

One of the first things you should consider when pairing wine with food is whether to mirror or contrast the bottle with the dish. For some people the like-for-like flavours of say, chardonnay and lobster make the perfect duo, whereas others opt to contrast with the crisp and bold flavours of champagne. Either are absolutely fine to do, but one of the big no-nos is to juxtapose great with humble or humble with great, and it's a sin Darwin Brasserie is...

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...

Unlike so many other South East Asian cuisines, I’d be surprised if I weren’t the only Londoner unfamiliar with Burmese food until recently. According to Dan Anton, co-owner of Lahpet in London Fields, this is likely due to the relative lack of Burmese nationals anywhere outside of Burma (or Myanmar). Leaving complex political situations aside, if (like me) you are uninitiated, you’ve been missing out. Located in the railway arches of London Fields, at the edge of the park itself,...

Battersea’s new neighbourhood Mexican, Cartel, specialises in hand-pressed tacos, tequila and mezcal. Reassessing all of the moments in life I’d rather forget, tequila has played an integral role in nearly all of them. Teenage recollections of bottom-shelf bottles adorned with synthetic Sombreros, lime wedges and salt almost inspire me to give up the booze, for good. Over the past six years, in fact, tequila has been incremental in the ruination of so many perfectly good shirts, shoes, livers and friendships....

Of the few restaurants I actively choose to visit again and again, few are as charming as The Hinds Head in Bray. With less bells and whistles than The Fat Duck (or Dinner in Knightsbridge) but ritzier than The Crown, each within spitting distance of one another, The Hinds Head is the embodiment of the quintessentially British ‘gastro-pub’, before Gordon Ramsay helped to make the ‘gastro’ prefix seem as desirable as queuing around the block for dinner, in torrential rain....

By Chris Moss  With two major city-centre retail developments completed over the past few years to compliment its historic arcades and renowned Briggate shopping street Leeds is quickly becoming the shopping capital of the north. Following the opening of the "outside-in" Trinity shopping centre which boasts 120 shops, restaurants, bars and a cinema the newly-erected Victoria Gate was opened late last year which is Dubai-esque in stature. The glittering arcade draws on digital wizardry and the city’s rich textile past and brings...

Of all the earth’s gifts, there are few foods that aren’t instantly enhanced by the addition of sesame. So it’s hardly surprising that the prawn toast at duck duck goose, with its thick layer of prawn mousse and vaster area to be coated with toasted sesame seeds, is so implausibly transcendent. A stone’s throw from Brixton’s mainline train station, duck, duck, goose is just one of the restaurants situated within Pop Brixton. Opened in 2015, Pop Brixton is a community...