Restaurants

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...

Most Londoners, I’m sure, would say we know all there is to know about Italian food. Who hasn’t had a ‘real’ Italian pizza in their life? Well, Enoteca Turi in Pimlico is on a mission to prove us wrong. Nestled just a short walk from Sloane Square station, this neighbourhood restaurant prides itself on bringing regional ingredients to our plates. Over the past 26 years, husband and wife team Giuseppe and Pamela Turi have been building their portfolio of regional...

When 108 Garage opened last October, the tiny restaurant soon became the object of rapturous acclaim. It seemed that, before the paint had even dried, the country’s most esteemed restaurant critics were professing the restaurant to practically serve the best food since the invention of sliced bread, despite the furniture. Needless to say, the matter of booking at table at a reasonable dinner time is still no mean feat. In the shadow of Erno Goldfinger’s iconic Trellick Tower, tucked away...

According to the people of Tripadvisor, Green Pea is London’s best Irish restaurant - a bistro and wine bar in an East Greenwich pub, just a stone’s throw from my home. Trumping the likes of iconic Irish Pub Waxy O’Connor’s, Green Pea is also joined by various branches of O’Neils (the chain pub) also within the top five. It would be unfair to criticise the TripAdvisor users’ choices – I mean how many people can be entirely mistaken in waxing...