Food
First draught
I am not sure the vast Bierschenke bierkeller in Covent Garden is successful, even if it is skilful: I worry…
Museum pizzas
As the government withers this column falls to ennui and visits Pizza Express. As David Cameron, who left the world…
Roar of approval
The Red Lion, East Chisenbury, is in the Pewsey Vale on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Wiltshire’s strangeness surpasses even…
Strangeness and charm
The restaurant 2 Fore Street lives on Mousehole harbour, near gift shops: the post office and general store have closed,…
No mucking about
The Pilchard Inn sits at the entrance to Burgh Island, a minute tidal island off the coast of south Devon.…
Alice in gastroland
The Alice lives in a ground-floor room of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, which venerates the fantastical and the savage,…
Fat of the land
Lady Bamford’s Cotswold fairy-land Daylesford Farm has sprouted leaves. It is no longer a farm shop, which should be a…
Court with appeal
The Sessions Arts Club is a restaurant inside the Old Session House in Clerkenwell, a pale George III building where…
Express joy
Darjeeling Express lives at the top of Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street, which was once the world-famous embodiment of…
Call that Nice?
Mister Nice is not so much a restaurant as a pre-dawn thought flung into the drag between Piccadilly Circus and…
Tea junction
The Cédric Grolet at the Berkeley lives in the shiniest hotel in Knightsbridge, though I prefer the Mandarin Oriental, because…
Culinary art
The Mount St Restaurant lives above the Audley Public House on Mount Street, ‘a traditional neighbourhood pub, carefully restored, and…
Icon of the Blair years
Restaurant and dog years are similar, and so the Wolseley, which is 20 this year, seems as if it has…
Great Scott’s
Scott’s, Richmond, is a fish, champagne and oyster bar, and a new branch of Scott’s, Mayfair. The original Scott’s was…
Rich pickings
Alex Dilling at the Hotel Café Royal is a minute restaurant above Regent Street, which has the type of British…
Beyond satire
Bacchanalia is the new restaurant from Richard Caring – I sense he would like me to call it a ‘landmark’…
A Ukrainian victory
Mriya lives at the end of Old Brompton Road where South Kensington turns into Earl’s Court and, as if by…
Power vacuum
The rude fingers of Battersea are repointed, and barely rude at all. The power station by Giles Gilbert Scott and…
Theme of despair
Chessington World of Adventures sits in a bowl near the A3. I went in the 1970s when it was a…
All muted
The Piazza is not a piazza – a realisation which is always irritating – but a restaurant in the eaves…
Pig heaven
Labour is 30 points ahead, and in honour of this I review the Impeccable Pig in Sedgefield (Cedd’s field), a…
Italian underworld
Bardo St James’s Restaurant – a name which reads like a map – is a vast new Italian restaurant in…
Fine diner
Electric Diner is from the Soho House group, which has done terrible things to private clubs, luckless farmhouses, domestic interior…
Hot cakes
Cakeism is offering the voters everything they desire, knowing you will never give it to them because you live in…
A personal best
In 2014, Nuno Mendes, a chef from Lisbon by way of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchens and his own Viajante in Bethnal…
