I offered to take my friend Toby out for dinner. At first he took up the invitation with enthusiasm but this excitement soon waned after he Googled the restaurant to discover it was vegetarian. No meat on the premises. 'Guess I'd better get my bacon fix beforehand,' he jibed before our outing. Knowing Toby was a big fan of all things meat - turkey, bacon, steak and I even recall him talking about eating chicken feet on one occasion - I had purposely left out the minor fact that we were venturing to a herbivore's paradise. The Gate restaurant - which started in Hammersmith, London, and...
Read more →cocktail 9
Paul Greening, the master forager and culinary brain box behind Aqua Kyoto has done it again. Using ingredients found scattered around the UK, he has composed a menu unlike any other with flavours and textures unexplored previously.
Read more →An absolute gem caught in-between the gnashers of Soho’s steadily more samey streets...
Read more →Brunch has never been so big, but because of this the hungover rabble, mums and toddlers come in flocks, queuing for miles to get their hands on what this trendy meal time has to offer. The most unimaginative you will find snaking out of the doors of The Breakfast Club, in their slutty ripped jeans, uniform Nikes, always gagging for instagrammable avo’s.
Read more →Most of the time its the voiced pauses that mean more than the sentence itself; its the 'oo's' and the 'ahhs' that give us a visceral and instinctual feelings about the subject matter in hand. One venue that has been making us 'ooo' and 'ahh' and definitely 'mm' is The Balcon in Pall Mall.
Read more →You’re all familiar with the wallet-gouging, tourist-fleecing disgrace that is afternoon tea in a number of London’s more storied hotels and department stores. Fifty quid a head for indigestion and seventy for heartburn, if you decide to throw in a sad, room temperature flute of own-brand Champagne. It’s not traditional, it’s a shameless clip joint routine, all white-gloves, golf club etiquette (blazers, anyone?) and meanness. Here at the Punch Room, we really feel that it should be allowed to fade into the twilight, along with the last episode of Downton Abbey. There’s no point complaining a...
Read more →Valentine’s Dinner at The Richmond 14th February 2016
Read more →Le Bab - not a middle-class term of endearment - is a brand new restaurant in Soho's Kingly Court. Perched up high on the 2nd floor, Le Bab are sure fire set to revolutionise and change London's opinion of kebabs. The thought-leaders and cooking demons from Le Bab's team were previously at Le Gavroche and have said they are 'reinvigorating kebabs with provenance, seasonality and technique'. With none of that end-of-the-night kebab shop swagger, we entered the slick, setting. It was modern and very relaxed and housed a lively mixture of daters and pals alike. The succinct menu of...
Read more →Go the whole hog!
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