Matthew

Author's details

Date registered: 11 September 2011

Latest posts

  1. Review: Laxsa, Soho — 7 May 2025
  2. Review: The Horse Guards, Petworth — 26 April 2025
  3. Review: Chet’s, Shepherd’s Bush — 19 April 2025
  4. Review: Mamapen, Soho — 15 April 2025
  5. Review: The White Horses, Rottingdean — 5 April 2025

Most commented posts

  1. TripAdvisor gives me indigestion — 13 comments
  2. Spicy beetroot soup — 11 comments
  3. Review: Noma, Copenhagen — 10 comments
  4. Spaghetti alla carbonara, essentially — 10 comments
  5. A gourmet and his gout — 9 comments

Author's posts listings

Review: Svea, Cheltenham

Svea is to Scandinavian cuisine what Rules is to British cuisine – a dose of the traditional. I like the dining room. It’s on the ground floor of a quirky Victorian building just around the corner from the High Street, and is decorated in classically soothing Scandinavian colours with the occasional Swedish flag to remind …

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I don’t usually review the service…

I don’t often say much about service in my restaurant reviews. Why not? Because I believe the element of chance in good vs not-so-good service is so great that whatever I say in my review, your experience will probably be different. I’ve found this to be true plenty of times: I’ve enjoyed great meals and …

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Review: Silo, Brighton

Allow me to rave a bit about Brighton’s North Laine. I can go shopping for something inspiring in a half dozen different places – maybe Cheltenham, Birmingham, Gloucester, Bath, Oxford, Stow – and then eventually I happen to visit Brighton and take a wander through the North Laines and the Lanes, and I find exactly …

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Dinner with Thomasina Miers

Sounds jolly intimate, but in fact this was a Cheltenham Literature Festival event, held in a rather splendid Spiegeltent, and we totted up and figured out that the number of covers was around 270. The evening consisted of a three-course chilli-inspired dinner with an interview with Thomasina between main and dessert. The audience turned out …

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Review: Number Seven, Cheltenham

I have an irrational dislike of bars, restaurants and cafes who oh-so-cleverly name themselves after the house number they happen to occupy. Gosh! What clever! How imagination! Simple yet style! There’s a whole bunch of them in Cheltenham alone; Hotel 131, 288 Bar & Wok, 81 The Prom, and the cleverly named Number 7. Because …

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