An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Burlington Arcade on Piccadilly has a caff down from Charbonnel et Walker, where you can buy a box of chocolates as big as a cow, though I never have. Perhaps the time is now? I am being facetious of course: it is Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud, who oversees the Maison de Haute Pâtisserie at
When we describe something – or someone – as an ‘acquired taste’, it is rarely a compliment. If we say it of Sharon, for example, it means that she is a bit of a pain in the neck. It’s the same with food: olives, anchovies and oysters are some of the finest foodstuffs on God’s earth but sometimes, in order to truly enjoy them, you have to first quiet your inner doubts by tuning out all the reasons
Dissonance is necessary around Easter. Fluffy lambs and chicks are everywhere: on cards and decorations, in countless chocolate forms and adorning every Easter-adjacent craft, toy or activity. But, of course, we also traditionally serve roasted lamb or chicken on Easter Sunday. In some part, this is simply seasonality. We associate gambolling lambs and new chicks
As I spent much of January in dry dock in Tommy’s hospital (‘dry’ being doubly appropriate), other avocations were needed. One friend said that it sounded as if I had spent much of the time gazing at the glories of Barry and Pugin, reading poetry or teasing pretty nurses: all pleasant activities. But there was
Bottomless brunch: it sounds disreputable, to start with. There’s the suggestion of indecency; that lower garments are optional, perhaps on the part of the poor waiting staff, like those ‘Butlers in the Buff’. And ‘brunch’ is surely the louchest of meals, invented purely so that people could roll into a restaurant after a long lie-in
Men who cook Spanish omelettes look a bit gay. Or at least that is how American film executives reacted to Harry Palmer cooking in The Ipcress File. The cable said: ‘Dump Michael Caine’s spectacles and make the girl cook the meal. He is coming across as a homosexual.’ This was 1964, when London was the cultural centre of the
When you think about Simpson’s in the Strand (never Simpson’s on the Strand), it is impossible to consider the 198-year-old restaurant without remembering its literary antecedents. P.G. Wodehouse praised it as ‘a restful temple of food’ in his 1910 novel Psmith in the City. It has popped up in everything from Sherlock Holmes to Howards
There’s an inherent pleasure in having something by heart. Poetry at school. Lines in plays. Song lyrics. The things that stick tend to be those that we had by rote when we were young. We get out of the habit, and our gears don’t move as smoothly. When I was at pâtisserie school, we were
Do you remember the Cereal Killer Café? The year was 2014: a time of sleeveless plaid shirts, Mr Pringle moustaches, man buns and undercuts. This was the era of proto vapes and misplaced millennial hope, of the indie band Vampire Weekend and trilby hats mistaken for fedoras. When the Cereal Killer Café opened in Brick
What do you consider the distinguishing marker of wealth in Britain today? Is it privately educating the kids? Is it the £60,000 Tesla parked out front with a black cable running to a gleaming box attached to the wall? Let me tell you what I think signifies real wealth today: it’s eating at Gail’s. Because you can’t have failed to have notice the conspicuous unaffordability of Britain’s fastest rising bakery – the one that began
The daffodils are out, and so, therefore, are the optimistic diners. A couple of rickety tables and wonky chairs are dragged out from their storage and plonked on a bit of uneven concrete on what passes as pavement in London. They are a strange breed, this first flush of outdoor diners who think a tiny
Anyone paying attention to the pumps at their local recently might have noticed something peculiar: a swathe of old-school logos. There’s the red triangle of Bass, the red right hand of Allsopp’s, the yellow bees and barrel of Boddingtons. Despite fighting long-term decline, cask ale is having a moment. At some of London’s trendiest new pubs, like
I am not in the habit of bringing viral TikTok recipes here. It is a safe space, away from digestive biscuits submerged in yoghurt masquerading as cheesecake, baked oats, or sugary instant coffee whipped up like foam (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, ignorance is bliss). No, here we are in the realm
Bradford, West Yorkshire, is not known as the curry capital of Britain for nothing. The city is home to more than 200 Asian restaurants. In the main, these are Kashmiri and Pakistani – driven by the city’s Pakistani-Muslim population which is one of the most concentrated in the country – and much of the local
At Gordon Ramsay’s launch party for his new Netflix show, Being Gordon Ramsay, influencers could be found in every corner of the room. Soon after getting another ‘lemongrass cha’ and walking past Victoria Beckham, I came face-to-face with Eating With Tod, a man whose wide-eyed hand rubbing and hyperbolic cries for enormous dinners has earned him 2.3 million followers
‘Earth has not anything to show more fair.’ I have always believed that the notion of a Dry January must have been launched on the world by von Sacher-Masoch: one of his more obscene fantasies. I would no more subject myself to it than to any of the other 11 months. They all deserve better.
I’ve long held firm to the adage that you can’t truly call yourself a local in the town, city or village you reside in until you’ve spent over half your life there. By my own calculation, I’ve just tipped over into becoming a Londoner: as of this year, I have spent 24 of my 47 years in the capital. Not only that, but I’m marrying into the clan too. My fiancée – whom I’ll be tying the knot with in the
The British hold a steamed pudding close to their hearts. Like a culinary hot-water bottle, it may not be terribly elegant but it’s hard not to feel comforted and delighted by its presence. Most, however, follow a similar formula: a sponge cake mixture that is steamed into ethereal lightness and topped with a gooey, drippy
Last week I was in a branch of Greggs, in the small market town in north Wiltshire where I live. Behind the sausage rolls, steak bakes, corned beef pasties and trays of vanilla slice was something that almost made me drop my Tesco meal deal in shock. A machine dispensing matcha lattes. Greggs, the last bastion of brown food in the
There are relatively few restaurants in London – or anywhere else, for that matter – that have made it to their centenary. There are even fewer that have been threatened with the closure of their premises in the precise year they are going to turn 100. And there are practically none so popular that news
Guinness Zero reminds me of the judge. I heard about him years ago. He was driving home from the golf club, seven G&Ts to the good. Or rather – he realised as he saw the flashing blue lights in his rear-view mirror – to the bad. This is it, he thought in horror, end of
I’ve long clung hold of one small crumb of comfort from my encroaching blindness. Namely that if and when my deteriorating vision (I have albinism and nystagmus) packs up completely, I can become one of those blokes who takes his guide dog to the pub and teaches it to drink beer from an ashtray. But I won’t be doing that at any branches of J.D. Wetherspoon as things stand. As
Many years ago, when entertaining my then girlfriend (now wife) for our first Valentine’s Day, I spent a considerable amount of time and effort preparing an authentic beef bourguignon. With more than one bottle poured in during the slow-cooking process, it did not offer the lightness one might desire on such an occasion. After pushing
It was the longest pub crawl of my life – visiting numerous boozers across 250 miles over ten days – in homage to one of Britain’s most infamous drinkers, Dylan Thomas. I’m not, I must qualify, a Thomas obsessive, as this enterprise might suggest. If exposed to Thomas at length, I find myself recalling Private Eye’s 1980s characterisation of Neil Kinnock: ‘The Welsh windbag.’ Although, in fairness, even Thomas himself described his own verse as ‘a
I’m in Mexico City and spoilt for choice as to where to go for a lunchtime taco. Taquerias are everywhere, each entrance best described as a hole in the wall: you step in from the street into a dark, cavernous stone vault and go past the bar, stocked with dozens of bottles of spirits and
The exterior of the Phoenix Palace is cream with golden letters like the napkin and the Laffer curve, and it is squeezed below an Art Deco mansion block in Baker Street. The street is self-effacing, stuck between the Marylebone Road and the Sherlock Holmes museum, which exists because London is, among other things, morbid. The
‘That’s not a pasty!’ my husband declares loftily, eyeing up what most definitely is a veritable clutch of cheese and onion pasties emerging from my oven. Handsome, puffed up, golden brown (the pasties, not the husband), filled with a cheese, potato and onion filling, contents threatening to splurge. The steam rises from them like in
Imagine going into an English pub and slapping a tenner down on the bar. ‘All I can drink, please,’ you say. ‘Certainly sir,’ says the barman. ‘You’ve got two hours.’ ‘Right then,’ you say. ‘I’ll start with a pint.’ Ten minutes later: ‘Whisky, please, no ice.’ Shortly afterwards: ‘I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary.’
I was in Scottsdale, Arizona and, to put it mildly, a little squiffy. Most folk go there to play golf (yawn) but I’d gone there to drink and, after a lengthy tequila masterclass in La Hacienda and several cocktails at Platform 18 (‘best US cocktail bar’ in the 2023 Spirited Awards, incidentally) in nearby Phoenix,
