Restaurants

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food Russian cuisine is woefully underrepresented in London and, as a result, is generally under-appreciated amongst city dwellers. While the city’s restaurant scene is arguably one of the globe’s finest, embracing a vast melting pot of cultures - with so many restaurants now focusing on regionality, as well as nationality, we’re still not spoilt for choice when it comes to Russian food. Even London’s most prominent Russian restaurateurs rarely open ventures within the city that...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food One of Russia’s most celebrated Chefs, Alexei Zimin is generally credited with having changed the way that Russians eat. As well as editing Russia’s most prominent food magazine – Eda, the chef opened the wildly successful Ragout restaurant in 2010, before opening a cooking school of the same name, having trained at London’s Le Cordon Bleu, and within the kitchens of restaurants from chefs that include Raymond Blanc and Michel Guérard. In addition, Zimin...

  By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food While there are few vaster pleasures than great pizza, there are even fewer things worse than really, offensively terrible pizza: and with a plague of bad ‘pizzerias’ constantly opening across the city, the former is becoming increasingly difficult to unearth, persistently subjecting us to the latter on far too many occasions. Soggy, shop-bought dough bases wetter than a mid-June weekend, heavily-sweetened tomato sauce, and cheese that resembles the plastic used to manufacture paddling...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food It’s no secret that airport dining has never been saluted with any real positive acclaim. A number of benefactors contribute to the less than superb reputation, though the most prominent is, perhaps, the often necessary rush throughout the period of time between passing through customs and boarding the plane. Increasingly strict security regulations (no liquids over 100ml, no shoes, no smiling, etc.) that are as time consuming as they are intrusive are partially to...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food Technology is taking over the world. At the end of last year, a brand new restaurant – eatsa - opened in San Francisco, serving quick efficient lunches without the use of any human servers, merely employing one member of concierge staff to oversee the venue, and a number of off-site chefs to prepare the food. The rest of the work within the restaurant was delegated to in store iPads, or iPhone apps. Also forward...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food With plenty of exciting restaurant openings constantly taking place across the Capital, here’s our pick of the best new restaurants arriving in London over the coming month. Tate Modern Restaurant – Bankside Later this month, the iconic Tate Modern’s new refurbishment will be unveiled, with the opening of the brand new 10-storey Switch House building. And with the structural addition, it’s unsurprising that a brand new 150-cover fine dining restaurant is also set to open in accordance, as...

My expectations weren’t sky high - the transformation of a village pub in the Surrey Hills doesn’t spark the same buzz as, say, the launch of a Bolivian-Balti fusion pop-up in Bermondsey. But having said that, Matt Edmonds - former Head Chef of Searcys at the Gherkin - is the new Head Chef here, and that did grab my attention, and would surely convince my city-centric husband to accompany me for dinner. Not a chance. Why would he drive 45...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food Ask everybody that you know about their ideal Full English breakfast, and it’s almost guaranteed that no two answers will match. The main reason for this is the colossal number of variables that all contribute to the perfect breakfast, entirely based on personal preference. Tea or coffee? Fried, poached, scrambled, or boiled eggs? Ketchup or brown sauce? Bubble and squeak, hash browns, or even (oddly) chips? Sausages, bacon, or black pudding? Or, indeed all...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food At the start of 2012, a young chef named Ollie Dabbous opened his first solo restaurant, having previously worked in the kitchens of Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, and Texture. Following some rave reviews alongside a swathe of excitement, the small Fitzrovia restaurant became an almost instant success, with tables virtually impossible to book - whereas four years later, in the present day, London’s foodie elite would be queuing the entire length of...