Restaurants

Two years on, it’s still the most unremittingly vile thing ever to have passed my lips. Served at the London pop-up of a Spanish Chef with a Milky Way of Michelin stars – what looked like a white chocolate-covered Fox’s shortcake round instead harboured raw sturgeon, crowned with a hillock of caviar. The combination of saccharine white chocolate and fish, alone, would have been bad enough, yet the sturgeon was sloppy and fusty, with a hum of waste management centres...

My absolute favourite thing about London, is the number of different types of food available to experience. As a result, we Londoners are able to travel the world, without ever needing to leave the city. Señor Ceviche, for instance, is particular venue which allows us to sample distinctive national dishes from Peru. The brain child of Harry Edmeades, the restaurant originally started life as a pop-up and now has two permanent locations: one in Kingly Court and another just opened...

Like most things in life, the simplest restaurant dishes are generally the endearingly memorable. So it's hardly surprising that the ingenuous bone marrow salad at St John in Clerkenwell has been on the menu, unchanged, for the past 23 years. In turn, when presenting paying customers with something so simple, it's crucial that each element (no matter how trivial) is as near perfect as possible. Most of London's absolute worst dishes, in fact, are over complicated marriages of ingredients that...

As recently as five or six ago, Mayfair was once London’s least accessible area, exclusively reserved for those either “in the know”, or with a spinal stenosis surgeon on speed dial, to compensate for lifting heavy wallets or Dover Street Market shopping bags. Nowadays, this part of the city has become far more inviting, particularly for young people with creative professions. Take a closer look - past the seventeen year olds tearing around Berkeley Square in Daddy’s gold-wrap Range Rover,...

Once known and loved as the city’s most ineffably debaucherous neighbourhood, Soho is now London’s rightful home of the ‘No-Reservations’ policy. Now, most of the area’s restaurants are impossible to visit during a realistic dinner time, without forcing guests to queue around the block. As a result, eating out in Soho has somehow become less fun than standing on a packed Piccadilly Line tube all the way from Heathrow to Cockfosters. With three successful restaurants already operating across London (Kensington,...

Away from the hustle and bustle of Soho, Mayfair and Shoreditch, Ceru opened at the end of last year, offering a taste of the Levant in a neighbourhood space near South Kensington tube station. “Born from a love of food, drink and sunshine”, Ceru began life as a project from husband and wife team Barry and Patricia Hilton, inspired by numerous travels around the various countries that form the Levant. Striving to provide an insight into the region’s rich food...

With plenty of exciting restaurant openings constantly taking place across the Capital, we pick the best new restaurants and bars arriving in London over the coming month. Calcutta Street – Brixton Following the huge success of her first restaurant, opened in Fitzrovia last Summer, Shrimoyee Chakraborty has launched a second branch of her Calcutta Street, taking over a space in the heart of Brixton. Bringing Calcutta Street south of the river, the new restaurant is promised to have a completely different atmosphere...

Within his 1952 opus, The Old Man and the Sea - the final novel to be published during his lifetime – Ernest Hemingway wrote: “But thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more able and more noble.” Of all the pearls of wisdom imparted throughout the writer’s collective novels, short stories and journalism, this still stands tall as one of the most valuable in terms of food. Because, let’s be honest, the...

At the beginning of the year, I wholeheartedly believed that genuinely brilliant high-end Italian restaurants in London did not exist. Before visiting Margot for dinner, in January, each of my previous experiences had ranged from the morbidly mediocre to the astoundingly atrocious. Peculiarly though, the city is still home to so many upmarket 'Italian' temples of bad taste. Restaurants that charge dizzying prices for food that's barely worthy of being served at Zizzi. Even more bizarre is the rapturous popularity...