There’s a type of restaurant. It takes a classic local cuisine, recreates it in a bijou corner of London in a comfortable dining room that looks like the chocolate-box version of the old local restaurants where the cuisine originated, perfects the classic dishes, then doubles the pricetag and tops it with a winelist hefty with …
Visit Windsor on almost any day of the year and you’ll find a town awash with tourists from across the globe, visitor numbers out of all proportion with the modest-sized town centre. So you’d expect most of the restaurants to be horrid affairs with glitzy frontages and gimmicks, serving up over-priced rubbish to people who …
Bistro Union has been on our “oughta visit” list for five years. It’s in that weird zone: 25 minutes walk away, making it feel like a neighbourhood restaurant and thus not worthy of a special trip, yet too far to walk if we just want to pop out for a bite to eat near home. …
Everyone knows Brasserie Zedel, right? Everyone in London, anyway. This review is probably more useful to you rustic provincials. You know who you are. Folks for whom the centre of London is somewhere around Picadilly Circus or Leicester Square, because that’s where you invariably pop up out of the tube on those odd occasions when …
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 …
