Category Archive: London

Places in London and suburbs

Review: Rovi, Fitzrovia

Beef and offal kofta is a lovely meaty sausage with that slight iron-y tang from whatever bits and bobs have gone into it. Beautifully grilled. On the menu it’s described as “beef and offal kofta, smashed cucumber” which is a hilarious piece of the menu writer’s art. You can just imagine the chef vigorously taking …

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Review: Oliviera, Richmond

They didn’t help their cause at Oliviera by having some fairly useless front of house on our visit. Not only did we have to resort to wild arm-waving after 20 minutes of waiting to order (despite the place being half-empty) but she also had no idea how to deal with an actual complaint. Maureen’s main …

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Review: Tsunami, Clapham

Quick one this. Tsunami is a Japanese restaurant in Clapham. It’s fairly good value, but not if you really love great Japanese food. It’s also a big barn of a place and with the background music roaring and everyone raising their volume to compensate, it ain’t very bloody zen at all. Gyoza were okay, nice …

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Review: Pique Nique, Bermondsey

Some restaurants try too hard. I always remember going to L’Artisan in Cheltenham, a place trying outRAGEously hard to be French, and seeing that one of the waitresses had a little label that identified her as “French trainee”. I genuinely couldn’t tell whether she was a trainee who happened to be French, or a trainee …

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Review: Barrafina, Charing Cross

One more blog in my ongoing series: “so are they still any good?” This time we’re at Barrafina, which we got into easily by the simple expedient of getting there before 6pm. Mind you, we only just made it; fifteen minutes later there was a queue. So, the queue is still there, but are they …

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