Not everything about our three courses at The Beacon was perfect, or likely to be particularly memorable. But I’m not too bothered because it was an absolute bloody pleasure to sit by the open fire and just soak up the (completely concocted and utterly brilliant) atmosphere of this majestic Victorian pub on the outskirts of …
Should I spend the intro waffling about Gary Usher, the owner of the Sticky Walnut who has crowd-funded four more well-loved bistros around the north-west of England on a wave of social media street cred and chutzpah? Nah, I’d rather talk about Chester. You need to come and chill for a weekend in this city. …
Chicken is almost always at the bottom of my menu choices. It’s just… chicken. I sometimes get the feeling chefs put it on the menu with a big implicit label: “For Nervous Diners! The Safe Option!” because it tends to get put on a plate with some fairly boring accompaniments too. Then of course sometimes …
I could not stop laughing at the goldfish dumplings. An awful lot of effort had gone into artfully crafting something so beautifully naff. And I just didn’t get the dish either. The little goldfish had minced prawn inside them, which was a bit boring, and were accompanied by a piece of seared foie gras. Why? …
There’s a helluva lot of care and attention that goes into fine dining – even informal fine dining – that you only notice when it’s absent. When our dessert showed up at Copper and Ink, with two cubes of chiffon cake, there was plenty of jealous comparing going on; lucky me, my cubes were nearly …