Restaurants

With plenty of exciting restaurant openings constantly taking place across the Capital, we pick the best new restaurants arriving in London over the coming month. MEATliquor - Queensway Since starting life as a food truck, MEATliquor has become one of London’s, if not the UK’s, best-loved comfort food institutions. The restaurant’s first permanent site opened behind Oxford Street in 2011, and 10 more venues have since opened across London, Brighton, Bristol and Leeds. This month, the twelfth site is set to open...

After what feels like years of waiting, I’ve found a number of genuinely brilliant restaurants close to my home. So when I’m (often) asked for restaurant recommendations, I constantly find myself waxing lyrical about these local treasures. With that comes a price, nonetheless: the only thing worse than an accusation of being biased is the whinging replies of: “Greenwich, oh that’s much too far.” “Zone 2? No way, I’ll need to bring my passport!” Or even worse, “Sorry, darling. We...

Switch on E4 on any given Monday night and ten minutes of Made in Chelsea will give you a rough idea of the veritable number of establishments this part of South West London has to offer. Glamorous clubs, private members bars and palace-like cafes serving high teas from shiny trinkets are accommodation enough to host an hour’s worth of bitching and whining. But far from being an isolated neighbourhood for the privileged few Chelsea is now awash with quirky cafes,...

As we approach the middle of 2017, the list of objects attainable with change from just one polymer fiver is slimmer than ever. A bottle of supermarket brand Prosecco, or a day’s bus pass might return a mere handful of shrapnel. That same note will be enough to pay for an average of just 4.27 litres of petrol. If you’re very lucky, that same plastic portrait of Sir Winton Churchill might even stretch to cover a pint of Continental lager...

By Maggie Majstrova, @foodstrova For weeks now, on my way to and from one of my client’s offices, I’ve been passing The Brookmill – its windows shuttered, its façade hidden by scaffolding. These are the unmistakable signs of refurbishment that fill me with equal measures of excitement and dread. How will it turn out? Will it be somewhere fabulous, or somewhere utterly horrendous? Before Christmas, The Brookmill finally re-opened, premiering the final result. It's a 19th Century Victorian corner pub,...

In addition to having become a pioneering figure in London’s ‘pop-up’ movement, Stevie Parle is a chef renowned for both his innovative take on ‘Modern-European’ food, as well as selecting a string of relatively obscure sites to open restaurants. The chef’s first permanent restaurant - Dock Kitchen, for instance, was opened in 2009 inside a converted Victorian Wharf building on the Grand Union Canal in Ladbroke Grove, renovated as part of an urban generation project. Five years later, Rotorino was...

Flicking through photographs of London’s skyline just before the turn of the millennium, it’s now impossible to overlook the colossal number of skyscrapers that have popped-up over the past seventeen years. A clear sign that London is a city dead-set on keeping up appearances with the likes of New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai. These buildings are structures of power, of wealth, of luxury – so it’s hardly surprising that so many high-end, high-rise restaurants have opened across the capital....

When I first started writing about restaurants, the whole concept of posting food photographs on Instagram irritated me beyond belief. I'd rant obstinately about the whole concept until the sloshed, fondled Wagyu cows came home. Most jobs, however, make it completely necessary to leave certain beliefs at the door. Hate it or love it, social media sites are the future. Instagram in particular has become so food-focused that (as a food writer) it's impossible to avoid getting involved. And with...

It would be quite fair to say that the discovery of poke (pronounced ‘poh-kay’, not like that thing your weird Uncle keeps doing on Facebook) is relatively fresh here in London. Until around 18 months ago, the Hawaiian dish would only have been known to the most food-savvy of city dwellers, but quite thankfully that’s beginning to change. Literally meaning “section”, or “to slice or cut”, poke is a Hawaiian salad, of sorts, traditionally focussing on cubes of raw fish...