Restaurants

We all recall when Thai food was the ‘thing of the moment’ a few years ago. I even remember my local pub at the time serving Thai food rather than classic pub grub, so it’s hard to imagine that any of us are strangers to Pad Thai. Thai Square has been bringing Thai food to the UK for the last 21 years. After opening its first restaurant in 1996, the group now boasts 13 restaurants, each still promising authentic, balanced...

How many ducks must needlessly suffer to sate Dan Doherty’s ego? Following the colossal success of Duck & Waffle a ‘local’ version of London’s highest restaurant has recently opened behind Piccadilly Circus. If the ‘local’ tag is anything to go by – this new space is specially targeted at the fourteen people wealthy enough to boast a Westminster postcode. Looming over the square mile - on the 40th floor of Heron Tower - the original Duck & Waffle’s panoramic views...

Until recently, I felt like the only person in London with an Instagram account, still yet to visit The Ned. Quite honestly, I could have probably lived without a trip to Soho House’s new landed cruise ship, if not for the torrent of social media photographs from a tribe of pretty people with unexciting jobs and unlimited access to the rooftop infinity pool. Suddenly I'd become affronted with serious fear of missing out, so decided to visit for dinner with a...

A vast melting pot of cultures, London is filled with an eclectic mixture of restaurants experimenting with various national cuisines – some classic, others contemporary. Within the past five years, Peruvian food has become hugely popular across the city, with a continuous stream of exciting new restaurant openings. One particular Latin American dish to have found international acclaim – ceviche - typically features raw fish cured with citrus juice and spiced with chilli peppers or ají (a pungent chilli generally...

Two years on, it’s still the most unremittingly vile thing ever to have passed my lips. Served at the London pop-up of a Spanish Chef with a Milky Way of Michelin stars – what looked like a white chocolate-covered Fox’s shortcake round instead harboured raw sturgeon, crowned with a hillock of caviar. The combination of saccharine white chocolate and fish, alone, would have been bad enough, yet the sturgeon was sloppy and fusty, with a hum of waste management centres...

My absolute favourite thing about London, is the number of different types of food available to experience. As a result, we Londoners are able to travel the world, without ever needing to leave the city. Señor Ceviche, for instance, is particular venue which allows us to sample distinctive national dishes from Peru. The brain child of Harry Edmeades, the restaurant originally started life as a pop-up and now has two permanent locations: one in Kingly Court and another just opened...

Like most things in life, the simplest restaurant dishes are generally the endearingly memorable. So it's hardly surprising that the ingenuous bone marrow salad at St John in Clerkenwell has been on the menu, unchanged, for the past 23 years. In turn, when presenting paying customers with something so simple, it's crucial that each element (no matter how trivial) is as near perfect as possible. Most of London's absolute worst dishes, in fact, are over complicated marriages of ingredients that...

As recently as five or six ago, Mayfair was once London’s least accessible area, exclusively reserved for those either “in the know”, or with a spinal stenosis surgeon on speed dial, to compensate for lifting heavy wallets or Dover Street Market shopping bags. Nowadays, this part of the city has become far more inviting, particularly for young people with creative professions. Take a closer look - past the seventeen year olds tearing around Berkeley Square in Daddy’s gold-wrap Range Rover,...

Once known and loved as the city’s most ineffably debaucherous neighbourhood, Soho is now London’s rightful home of the ‘No-Reservations’ policy. Now, most of the area’s restaurants are impossible to visit during a realistic dinner time, without forcing guests to queue around the block. As a result, eating out in Soho has somehow become less fun than standing on a packed Piccadilly Line tube all the way from Heathrow to Cockfosters. With three successful restaurants already operating across London (Kensington,...