Coming back from a long enough trip abroad (this time, a six week jaunt around northern Spain) gives you the chance to look at what’s back home with a somewhat fresh gaze. At least, if you try hard enough. The English pub really is perhaps the most distinctive piece of our human landscape, very different …
Needing lunch, we settled on noodles at Liu Xiaomian, which has been cooking in the basement of the Jackalope pub in a quiet Marylebone mews for a few years now. This really isn’t one of the modern, polished, faux-street-food restaurants that have been springing up all over the trendy corners of London recently (most of …
When the April rain and cold finally clears away and you get your first really warm, sun-soaked day of the year. Well, it’s nice to sit outside a country pub and enjoy a good meal al fresco. Which is just what we did on the way back from Devon at The Three Horseshoes in the …
Reader, I expected Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy to walk in through the door at any moment. Or perhaps to find them already seated around a table with friends in the Gun Room. The Freemasons at Wiswell is the most country inn EVER. It’s like a Tardis, with an unimposing plain frontage in a small …
The Pig’s Head is a great gastropub conversion of a huge old tavern in Clapham Old Town, with a high glass-domed ceiling and plenty of scrubbed wood, dried flowers and jars of preserved and pickled on shelves. They have a strong focus on meat (though their veg dishes are great by my reckoning) and have …