There are rare restaurants where you know that everything is going to be all right the moment you walk in. There’s something about the manner of the greeting, calm, warm, confident. There’s something about the way the place is decked out – not too smart, not too flashy, accommodating. There’s a comfortable chair to settle […]

There was the great man, Rene Redzepi, standing at the door of Noma, surrounded by what appeared to be a battalion of Noma staff. ‘We’ve met before’, I said, grasping him firmly by the mitt. ‘I know,’ he said.’ You bought me a pint.’ I goggled. And then I remembered. Some years I interviewed Rene […]

Suddenly they’re everywhere. After years of rigorous suppression in favour of Italian/Spanish/Modern European/Contemporary British/Ersatz Japanese-effect pastiches, French brasseries and bistros (or is it bistrots?) are back in force. In the last fewish months the Brasserie Zedel and Cafe Colbert, Balthazar and Little Pollen Street have all opened and been packing in the customers. Most, I […]

Dorego’s, there’s nowhere quite like it. Never has been, I dare say. One of a kind, a sort of a bar, a sort of a restaurant, seedy, louche, easy-paced, open-hearted, democratic, with the beauty of the truly idiosyncratic, sui generis, although that’s not a phrase that you’re likely to hear in Dorego’s. It looks out […]

It’s always a pleasure to catch up with an old friend, particularly when you find they’ve hardly changed in, oooo, it must be forty years or so. Simpson’s Tavern, aka Simpson’s of Cornhill is one of the places to which various friends of mine, who had gone into that Slough of Despond, The City, and […]

Mark Hix’s Tramshed is a beast in every sense of the word – vast space (it really was a shed for trams); vaulting glass ceiling; bar the length of the room; 130 covers; Damien Hurst art installation of a cow in formaldehyde with a cockerel perched on its back rises up like the golden calf […]