Restaurants

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food With an increase in restaurants that focus on communal dining and sharing plates, Forge & Co. has recently launched a new ‘Modern Grill’ at its Shoreditch High Street restaurant. Along with the new menu launch, head chef Timothy Brindley has recently joined the team, having previously worked at Tom’s Kitchen and The Ivy. Inside, the restaurant’s décor is unsurprisingly contemporary and the atmosphere is resplendently casual – a breath of fresh air juxtaposed to...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food With hundreds of restaurants situated within London’s square mile, it seems that all of these institutions, especially the most grandiose, fall at drastically contrasting ends of the quality continuum. Be it a prominent building housed restaurant that crows an abundance of undiluted pretension and grossly underwhelming cooking, or the type that’s so brilliant we wish to return each and every night, if only our bank balances would accommodate such extravagance. It’s only very rarely...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food As far as household designer brands are concerned, few pride themselves on being so quintessentially British as Burberry. At the culmination of the 21st century, it's no secret that the brand’s signature plaid did suffer from becoming a Prole Drift staple in accordance with the birth of Chav culture, and as a result tawdry imitations of scarves, baseball caps and all sorts of tasteless reproductions soon became available on just about every British market...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food “Are you aware of our concept here?” our waitress asks as my heart begins to sink, during a mid-week lunch trip to Blanchette in Soho. “Our menu is mainly made up of French tapas dishes,” she explains. French tapas? Is there really such a thing? As far as restaurant concepts go, anything overly extravagant or contemporary is generally something that’s never appealed to this writer, having been paced through the rigmarole of many an...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food Famous for its bustling restaurant and street food scene, Shoreditch has been sadly devoid of wholesome, reasonably priced Spanish food – until now. Having opened earlier this year, the Shoreditch branch of Tapas Revolution is the third from chef Omar Allibhoy, and the first stand-alone spot, with restaurants already open in Westfield Shepherd’s Bush and Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent. Striving to continue the mission of bringing his own interpretation of tapas bars to...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food If the opening of higher-end restaurants from city lunch break outlets such as Pret A Manger and PAUL, over the past year or so, are anything to go by, it looks as though this increasingly popular step will become a huge food trend for 2016. In which case, it’s probably just a matter of time before EAT, itsu and Wasabi begin to introduce an a la carte menu, waiting staff and a dinner service....

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food It comes as no surprise that five of the six new pubs included in Michelin’s Eating Out In Pubs Guide for 2016 are in West London. While most classic London pub ideals are based on those in the East end, but when it comes to great 21st century London pubs, plenty have been cropping up in the West over the past couple of years, and now there’s a brand new contendor to rival such...

By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food Just seconds from Mayfair’s Grosvenor Square, sandwiched between Oxford Street and Berkely Square, Avista holds one of the most prestigious dining destinations in central London. Opened as a rustic yet contemporary Italian restaurant a few years ago, the a la carte menu is now particularly contemporary, matched with an impressive wine list of mainly Italian fine wines. Many of the area’s higher-end Italian restaurants are remarkably pretentious, but thankfully this is not the case...

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. Big Easy Bar.B.Q & Lobstershack – Canary Wharf Opening new restaurant that’s "reminiscent of a turn of the century dock-side warehouse with all the intrigue and excitement of goods shipped from Southern states of America and the rest of the world", Big Easy Bar.B.Q & Lobstershack will be arriving at Canary...