Mix it up: There’s more to coffee cocktails than the Espresso Martini September 16, 2015 Today, as you sip your morning coffee, take a moment to ponder London’s great institutions built under the influence of caffeine. During one of this nation’s many peaks – from the mid-1600s to the early 1700s – our streets were awash with thousands of coffee shops. These replaced taverns as the place to meet and [...]
Working Lunch: Ceviche Old St September 16, 2015 WHAT? Ceviche Old Street specialises, unsurprisingly enough, in the South American dish of ceviche. Its diverse bar serves up freshly prepared seafood in the classic Peruvian style using tiger’s milk, a sparky and citric marinade that has absolutely nothing to do with tigers. WHERE? A minute’s stroll from Old Street Tube and tucked inside the [...]
Lessons in wine: Don’t be intimidated by fine wine, it’s a fun journey September 15, 2015 Recently in this column we have waxed didactic on popular wine regions for drinking and investment, detailing facts about Bordeaux, Champagne, and Tuscany. But for readers who are new to fine wine and perhaps overwhelmed by the plethora of information, how and where does one start? The easiest answer, of course, is via client dinners [...]
Lobos has bite but good tapas doesn’t come cheap September 15, 2015 14 Borough High Street, SE1 9QG 020 7407 5361 FOOD ★★★★☆ VALUE ★★☆☆☆ ATMOSPHERE ★★★☆☆ Cost for two with wine: £120 Somewhere under London Bridge station, tucked beneath the tracks, is a winding tunnel of a tapas bar. It is the kind of space that further down the line in Bermondsey or Peckham would be full of [...]
Working Lunch: K10, Minster Court EC3 September 9, 2015 WHAT? K10 specialises in, ahem, kaiten-style Japanese cuisine – that’s conveyor belt sushi to you and me – using fresh ingredients and a good selection of booze to wrestle the serving format away from the likes of YO! Sushi, which has trampled all over its good name in recent years. WHERE? It’s tucked away [...]
Why Chile is perfectly suited to making delicious wine September 8, 2015 This week we attended a tasting run by one of Bordeaux’s leading negociants, CVBG. However, it surprisingly featured no Bordeaux wine, instead only Italian and Chilean. The Place de Bordeaux is the wine trading system originating in the middle ages which sells 70 per cent of Bordeaux’s wine by volume into 160 countries. What some [...]
Salt & Honey restaurant review: London’s modern European Bistro is the bees knees September 8, 2015 28 Sussex Pl, W2 2TH Tel: 020 7706 7900 FOOD ★★★★★ VALUE ★★★★★ ATMOSPHERE ★★★☆☆ Cost for two with wine: £100 The internet has done for the food scene what cheap international flights did for travel: it made it accessible. There are no secrets – a new restaurants barely needs to open its doors before an army of [...]
Working Lunch: Pizzabuzz, EC2 September 2, 2015 Melissa York on the best places to eat during office hours in the City and Canary Wharf . WHAT? A build-your-own pizza restaurant, where you can pick everything from the bread to the sauce base. You add ingredients in steps as you move along the bar – think Subway, but with gourmet ingredients. Choose [...]
Lotus restaurant review: The food is fine, but it’s not fine dining September 2, 2015 Lotus 17 Charing Cross, WC2H 0EP Tel: 0207 839 8797 FOOD ★★★☆☆ VALUE ★★★☆☆ ATMOSPHERE ★☆☆☆☆ Cost for two with wine: £120 The last five years have seen every restaurant in the country renounce their tablecloths. They’ve ripped the plaster off the walls to expose the jagged, crumbling brickwork beneath, because brickwork is real and plaster is a [...]
Lessons in wine: discover the sweet magic of Sauternes September 1, 2015 Most of us would rank Bordeaux among the great red wine-making regions of the world and, with around 450m bottles produced there each year, we’re certainly not short of a drop. However, there is also a substantial following for White Bordeaux; Sauvignon Blanc fans would be advised to divert their attention from New Zealand for [...]