Restaurants

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food When opening a new restaurant, there are many important factors to take in to consideration. However, no restaurant is able to open and survive without a name. Some withhold interesting stories based around heritage, history or the food itself, others are less adventurous and named after addresses, while others are often eponymous – named after the chef or owner. On the other hand, some restaurants are even named after passions of the restaurateur, combining...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food Strength: 6.5% ABV Brewed: Ellon, Scotland Tired of a market dominated by industrially brewed lagers and ales, the team behind BrewDog set up the world’s first crowd-funded brewery in 2007. Now operating from a site in Ellon, just north of Aberdeen, a community of over 35000 investors own shares in the business, with shares still available. And what’s more, the brewery that’s made for the people, by the people is still constantly striving to encourage passion for craft...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food Call me sentimentalist, call me old fashioned – but like others, I’m sure, turkey (the bird) is something that I do not generally associate with the month of July. Generally reserved for Christmas time, often sentenced to hours withering at the bottom of a hot oven, turkey has gained a negative reputation for being dry and generally unexciting - unless you are a child and enjoy eating food that has been cut into the shape of...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food With so many restaurants specialising in American-inspired barbecue having opened across the city within the past five years, Bodean's is facing an uphill battle to remain relevant. First launched in 2012, Bodean’s was, in fact, one of the first restaurants of this ilk to arrive in London, set up as the brainchild of restaurateur Andre Blais, obsessed with the food of Kansas City. The first restaurant was opened on Soho’s Poland Street, and now, some 14...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food Although the food of China has been popular in the UK for many years, it is only more recently that the tired stereotype of Anglicised Chinese cuisine has began to positively evolve. For a very long time, alas, there has been an ignorant British belief that the globe’s most populous nation has little more to offer than chow mein, special fried rice, and sweet and sour pork that’s to be drowned in incandescent orange...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, TLE_Food With plenty of exciting restaurant openings constantly taking place across the Capital, here’s our pick of the best new restaurants arriving in London over the coming month. Bao – Fitzrovia One of last year’s hottest new openings, Soho’s Bao still demands queues around the block during peak lunch and dinner hours. Having began life as a still ridiculously popular street food stall in East London’s Netil Street Market, Bao arrived in Soho last summer with a tiny 32-cover permanent...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food Russian cuisine is woefully underrepresented in London and, as a result, is generally under-appreciated amongst city dwellers. While the city’s restaurant scene is arguably one of the globe’s finest, embracing a vast melting pot of cultures - with so many restaurants now focusing on regionality, as well as nationality, we’re still not spoilt for choice when it comes to Russian food. Even London’s most prominent Russian restaurateurs rarely open ventures within the city that...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food One of Russia’s most celebrated Chefs, Alexei Zimin is generally credited with having changed the way that Russians eat. As well as editing Russia’s most prominent food magazine – Eda, the chef opened the wildly successful Ragout restaurant in 2010, before opening a cooking school of the same name, having trained at London’s Le Cordon Bleu, and within the kitchens of restaurants from chefs that include Raymond Blanc and Michel Guérard. In addition, Zimin...

  By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food While there are few vaster pleasures than great pizza, there are even fewer things worse than really, offensively terrible pizza: and with a plague of bad ‘pizzerias’ constantly opening across the city, the former is becoming increasingly difficult to unearth, persistently subjecting us to the latter on far too many occasions. Soggy, shop-bought dough bases wetter than a mid-June weekend, heavily-sweetened tomato sauce, and cheese that resembles the plastic used to manufacture paddling...