IT IS CUSTOMARY for most websites to start with a short manifesto explaining just what kind of site you have stumbled across… but let’s not get too philosophical about this. I am in favour of hospitable restaurants; inventive chefs; local ingredients; eating fresh food; shopping carefully. I am against over elaborate presentation on the plate; dumbed down food television; blunt knives; and anybody who takes photographs of everything they eat. I don’t much like those dim sum chickens feet. I am a great fan of sweetbreads and pork scratchings. I think that beer gets a raw deal in the context of gastronomy. I usually side with comfort rather than style. This site is mainly about food and restaurants but it also touches on trends and books. I hope that it can be dipped into and that it reads like a magazine rather than a diary - I make a great effort to avoid just writing down where I have been and what I have eaten. Please feel free to use the “Contact” page to send brickbats, bouquets, corrections and comments. Welcome aboard, and as our American cousins would have it…Enjoy!

Hot Picks

IT IS A RARE OCCASION when all the resto-biz sideliners are whole heartedly in agreement. A lifetime’s sniping from cover can result in a certain sourness of outlook, but everyone who is anyone seems delighted by Jeremy Lee’s triumphant return to Soho. What’s more you can spot the Hart brothers (with whom Jeremy has gone into partnership at the re-energised Quo Vadis) because they are the ones with wide grins as they work the room shaking hands in what is now their busy and buzzy restaurant. During his sixteen year stint looking out at Tower Bridge Jeremy Lee’s cooking has always impressed, now it can be enjoyed in a great deal handier location. Read More...

Questions of Taste

HOWEVER HARD YOU TRY to buy fresh, buy local and buy interesting food, the dire economic climate lays its cold hand on your shopping list. You find yourself looking for Jacob’s ladder to stew slowly in a casserole; you experiment with beans and lentils; you opt for boring, wintertime vegetables rather than fancy stuff. And you don’t have to be Chancellor of the Exchequer to pinpoint the reason for this kind of shopping – times are tough so let’s save money. It all sounds perfectly logical, but then you look at the London restaurant scene and there is little evidence of belt tightening. Sure, London lives in a bubble and is insulated fom real life, but it looks like the fiddlers may be playing while the city starts to smoulder. Read More...