Category Archive: Restaurant Reviews

Restaurant reviews

Review: The Sportsman, Kent

The eerily drab Kent coast on a moist, cold November day with the last few leaves dropping from the trees. It’s gloriously Dickensian. The Thames estuary is a huge grey blanket the same colour as the sky and you can’t see across to the other side. The Sportsman doesn’t look like much from the outside; …

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Review: Spring, Somerset House

We never tried Skye Gyngell’s beloved lunch spot at Petersham Nurseries, despite living in Richmond for three years. I could never make the dishes as written on the menu match up to the prices next to them and had the distinct impression that this was more a place to be seen to be seen, a …

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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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