Food and Drink

Around this time three Fridays ago I stood in awe of the number of flavoursome and innovative beers on display at the Craft Beer Rising Festival, which showcased some 170 breweries and over 700 beers. The "rise" of craft beer has indeed been somewhat remarkable. In a matter of ten years or so we have banished bland beers from our bars and replaced them with local producers which almost unanimously harness a knack for creating good beer. Goodbye the amber nectar, farewell my...

Have you ever been to a high-rise restaurant so bad, so incomprehensibly grim, that you’ve genuinely considered jumping from the top floor, if only to spite them? Madison, owned by D&D London, is a rooftop restaurant and bar on the top of the One New Change shopping centre in the heart of the city, boasting astonishing views of nearby St Paul’s Cathedral. It is less of a restaurant than a place to grab an after work drink and bite to...

Year Round BBQ BBQ was always a strictly summer thing here in the UK, a nice sunny day, head out to buy some charcoal from a garage, a few sausages and burgers, have a few beers, burn the sausages, all good... But times are changing quickly... many people have been massively influenced by shows like Man V Food, and others on Food Network, and have hankered after cooking their own briskets, ribs and pulled pork. There has been a massive...

Brewed: Amsterdam, Netherlands Strength: 6% ABV Heavily inspired by the often forgotten history of Dutch brewing, using herbs, spices and fruits brought home by Dutch sailors, Lowlander Beer use botanicals during the brewing process of all of their beers. Named after the literal meaning of The Netherlands (‘Low Lands’), the brewery source all of their botanicals, herbs and spices from Jacob Hooy, the oldest spice store in Amsterdam and intend to ‘create great tasting beers which are full of both character and...

With St Patrick’s Day falling on a Friday (17th March) this year, the weekend will be filled with all manner of fun events taking place across London. Of course, there’s the annual parade, which will take place in Central London on Sunday, plus the city’s fair share of Irish pubs to spend the weekend supping ice cold pints of Guinness. From specially curated Irish menus to Irish craft beer tasting, we’ve rounded-up our pick of London’s best restaurants and bars...

In a similar vein to Marco Pierre White, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey – Marcus Wareing has become a TV chef personality whose equal parts loved and loathed. Over the past three years, the chef has perhaps become best known as the second toughest judge on MasterChef: The Professionals, but he’s also the name behind three London restaurants. At one end of the spectrum, Marcus at The Berkeley in Knightsbridge is the chef’s two Michelin-starred mother ship, offering one of...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been succumbed with an irrational fear of snails. It’s embarrassing. More common, less hilarious fears (spiders, snakes, rats, death) have never phased me, but something about those lettuce-munching bogies in crash helmets would always plague me with fear. As somebody who dedicates such a portion of my life to writing about restaurants, I appreciate that it’s crucial for me to eat just about everything. So much so that over the past...

So you’ve made the decision to invest in fine wine; you don’t like the abstract nature of the numbers in the stock market, and you’re partial to the grape itself, so it seemed like a natural decision. Well, a few words of caution before you go head-first into the wild world of wine for profit. You should not treat fine wine investment as a source of guaranteed profit. Of course, you want to make money from it, but it is,...

Just in time for the spring, Mr Fogg’s in Mayfair has teamed up with Old Forester – America’s first bottled bourbon – to create a bespoke cocktail, ‘Old Kentucky Spiced’. A heavily-themed bar that’s based around the adventures of Phileas J. Fogg, the protagonist of Jules Verne’s classic ‘Around The World in 80 Days’, the team at Mr Fogg’s have created the cocktail, which will be available for a limited time. The drink has a whisky base of Old Forester...