Food

‘They do better spaghetti bolognese in Hampstead for a tenner’: The Lobby at The Peninsula, reviewed

The Peninsula is a new hotel at Hyde Park Corner. It is part of the trend for absurd expense: rooms start at £1,400 a night and express the kind of preening mono-chrome blandness that will be the London of the future. It is a building of great ugliness – I would type the names of planners who allowed it, but on these pages it is incitement to violence. It sits on its six-lane round-about between the Lanesborough hotel and a long peeling red-brick late Victorian terrace that once appeared in a Stephen Poliakoff film about how things always fall apart. This food knows nothing of beauty, delicacy or comfort: it’s

‘Well-priced and skilful’: Masala Zone, reviewed

There are cursed restaurants and cursed women, and this makes them no less interesting. One is Maxim’s in Paris, which knows it – it gaily sells ties in a charnel house decorated for the Masque of the Red Death – and another is the Criterion at Piccadilly Circus, which doesn’t. One day it might meet its destiny, which is to be an Angus Steakhouse (this might lift the curse, the Angus Steakhouse has its own magic) but it isn’t there yet. Restaurant after restaurant favours hope over experience here: Marco Pierre White (Mark White) passed through, spilling acronyms about. I suppose it serves it right for being in the neo-Byzantine

With Ewan Venters

37 min listen

Ewan Venters is the former chief executive of Fortnum & Mason and is now the CEO of Artfarm and Hauser & Wirth. Ewan is launching Artfarm’s first London venture combining food, drink and art which will also mark the revival of the historic Mayfair landmark, The Audley. Presented by Olivia Potts.Produced by Linden Kemkaran.

Back-room boys: Family Meal, by Bryan Washington, reviewed

There are meals galore in Bryan Washington’s latest novel: those that Cam and his lover Kai cook for one another; those that Cam’s childhood friend TJ cooks for his Thai boyfriend’s cousins; those that TJ’s Vietnamese father Jin cooked for his neighbours every weekend; and those that the now bulimic Cam vomits up after Kai’s murder. There is also sex galore. Each of the novel’s three narrators – Cam, Kai and TJ – engages in ‘random hook-ups’, with Cam in particular using them to dull his pain. Working in a Houston gay bar, he takes customers to a back-room every few hours. His partners include ‘delivery guys and lawyers and

Fine food in a fine restaurant: Origin City reviewed

Origin City is a good name for this restaurant, whether it knows it or not. It is at West Smithfield, the only surviving wholesale market in the City of London (I do not count Borough, which is a snack shack impersonating a greengrocers and is only spiritually in the City). Covent Garden sells face cream – Eliza Doolittle didn’t need it – and Billingsgate awoke one morning to find itself on the Isle of Dogs. Somehow the cows hung on in West Smithfield. We owe them a lot but I would say that, I am a restaurant critic. Somehow the cows hung on in West Smithfield. We owe them a

With Diana Henry

41 min listen

Diana Henry is a critically acclaimed, multi-award winning cook, food writer and author of 12 books including the classic cookbook ‘Roast Figs, Sugar Snow’, which has just been updated and re-released twenty years after it was first published. Diana also writes for newspapers and magazines, and presents food programmes on TV and radio. On this podcast Diana shares childhood memories of her mother’s baking, how ‘Little House on the Prairie‘ influenced her writing and when, on a French exchange trip, she learned how to make the perfect vinaigrette. Presented by Olivia Potts. Produced by Linden Kemkaran.

As gaudy as Versailles: The Duchess of Cornwall in Poundbury reviewed

Poundbury is the King’s idealised town in Dorchester, built on his land to his specifications: the town that sprung out of his head. (‘My dream,’ says Harry Enfield in The Windsors, ‘was always to build a mixed-used residential suburb on the outskirts of Dorchester.’) It is so fascinating that I dream, briefly, of moving in for the completeness of the vision – who doesn’t want to live inside art? – and the portrait of the British class system in housing. Here it is, at last, laid out like a textbook: journey’s end. We order via app and pay in advance: there is a shortage of what tabloids call flunkeys It

Why I’m addicted to Australian MasterChef

Why is Australian MasterChef so much better than the English version? You’d think, with a population less than a third of ours, the smaller talent pool would make the Antipodean edition look like thin gruel. But a bit like with the cricket and the rugby, size clearly isn’t everything. UK MasterChef now resembles one of those joyless austerity dishes you cobble together from crusty leftovers you found languishing in the fridge. But the Aussie one has had my entire family addicted and yearning for more for the past fortnight. I suppose it’s partly down to the way Australia sees itself. Probably this bears no resemblance to the way Australia actually

Bruton is suddenly the place to be – and I have a theory why: At the Chapel reviewed

At the Chapel, Bruton, is a restaurant and hotel in a former chapel in Bruton. This was once an ordinary town in Somerset, with a note in the Domesday Book, a ruined priory and a famous dovecote on a hill. Bruton is known for a flood in 1917 – it was the second-largest one-day rainfall measured in the UK – but another calamity was coming. In 2014 the art gallery Hauser & Wirth, with branches in London, Zurich and New York, decided it needed a premises in Bruton, and a restaurant called the Roth Bar and Grill. There is also an Instagram-friendly farmhouse to rent on this site. When I

Fish and chips: the fast food that made me

The last meal my parents had before I graced the world with my presence was fish and chips, so I like to think it forms part of my origin story. Growing up on the coast, fish and chips featured in all its forms: bags of chips clutched on windy beach walks; takeaway fish suppers brought home by Dad, steam escaping from cardboard boxes; and the ultimate luxury, a sit-in experience at Colmans, the South Shields king of fish and chip restaurants, accompanied by a slice of bread and butter and a cup of tea. I was built on fish and chips; salt and vinegar course through my blood. Battered fried

Tanya Gold

A Margherita in Tolkien’s Middle-earth: Pizza in the Courtyard at Sarehole Mill reviewed

Sarehole Mill is four miles south of the centre of Birmingham. If this were a fairy tale, and it should be, it would follow that Birmingham swallowed Sarehole a century ago, like a dragon and its prey. I like Birmingham: I like its optimism, its violence and its multiplex, which can match any American Midwest mall in competitive dystopia and idiocy. Birmingham has energy, and that swallowed Sarehole, but unfortunately for Birmingham, there was a writer who cared: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.Sarehole was his childhood palace, and now, more reluctantly I would imagine, his memorial pizzeria.  One moment you are on a tepid suburban bus route, the next in the

‘Thinks of the diner, not the chef’: Claridge’s Restaurant, reviewed

The BBC made a very odd documentary about the renovation of Claridge’s: The Mayfair Hotel Megabuild. They filmed, agog, as the hotel grew eight new storeys – three above, and five below – between 2014 and 2021 while staying open: guests slept and ate, unaware of ‘Narnia doors’ to the building site. (That Narnia is where guests aren’t indicates what Claridge’s employees cannot put into words without spontaneously combusting.) Labourers dug the basement by hand and impersonated the Artful Dodger when management toured. The BBC described the new penthouse at length without mentioning that it is gross, with a grand piano in a glass box on a terrace like a

Olivia Potts

Pavlova: the crumble of summer

Whenever I tell someone that I’m making a pavlova the response is the same: sheer joy. Even the most fervent pudding-denier struggles to resist a slice of pav. It makes sense – fragile, crisp meringue with a tender, mallowy centre, soft waves of cream and some kind of fruit is such a brilliant combination. You can turn whatever you have to hand into a glorious, celebratory pav You don’t often see pavlovas on restaurant menus. There’s a good reason for that. A little like a trifle, part of the joy of a pavlova is that it arrives at the table looking unruffled: fruit perched perkily on clouds of cream atop

Big Little Bavaria on Thames: Bierschenke bierkeller reviewed

I am not sure the vast Bierschenke bierkeller in Covent Garden is successful, even if it is skilful: I worry it is the wrong place for it. People go to Covent Garden to buy gym clothes, watch musical theatre and pick up men, not to find Wagner and pigs and the drumbeat of the earth: Covent Garden is more Kit Kat Club than Twilight of the Gods with sausage. I am not saying you must be into Götterdämmerung to enjoy this restaurant. It just helps. There is no atmosphere I can find, and I think this is deliberate: a beer hall is an existential void to fill  It used to

How chefs cut costs in the kitchen

My grandmother, and many like her, kept an account book for household spending. This was not the product of an overbearing marriage or mistrust on anyone’s behalf – it was simply how things were done at a time when habits had been formed during rationing after the second world war, and banking was manual and slow. I spent a lot of time observing her kitchen on childhood visits. It was where my lifelong obsession with cooking began, and I can still recall a sense of balance in how she shopped and cooked; she was fond of naughty treats and lavish cuts, but she kept a stock pot, knew her way

Against the grain: why the Japanese are losing their taste for rice

It would be an insult to call rice the staple food of Japan. For centuries it has been so much more than that. In Japan, rice has long been treated with a respect that borders on reverence. The emperor blesses the rice crop each year and in Shinto culture rice and rice-based sake are two of the most common ceremonial offerings to the gods. Rice has supernatural power: the red glutinous variety will protect you from evil and bring good luck. And it must be handled with great care: the worst thing you can do during a Japanese meal is plant your chopsticks in the rice – a symbol, if

If the choux fits: the secrets of perfect profiteroles

Choux pastry can inspire fear in even the most confident of cooks. There’s a good reason for it: it’s difficult to give a very precise recipe for choux pastry, as the amount of egg needed to create the correct texture depends on the flour you’ve used, how long the choux has rested, and how fast and how thoroughly you have cooked the choux mixture out. It’s the water content in the egg that primarily causes the choux to rise and puff in the oven into those distinctive domes or elegant eclairs: not enough and they will fall flat, but too much and the pastry will be too sloppy to pipe

The rise of the open-fire restaurant

Burn the formal white tablecloths and fling open the kitchen doors. The latest craze in restaurant culture is open-fire cooking – where chefs sweat it out over roaring flames in full view of their customers. And the simple, raw nature of this method of food preparation seems to have set diners’ imaginations alight.  ‘Cooking outside over flames is primal and in our DNA as human beings,’ says Andrew Clarke, co-founder of Acme Fire Cult – one such restaurant in Dalston, north London. ‘The smell of woodsmoke and animal fats hitting the hot coals stirs up something deep inside.’ For Tomos Parry, chef and co-owner of Brat – another open-fire restaurant

My culinary journeys: restaurants worth travelling for

Whenever it is suggested travelling south or north of the Thames to visit an ‘amazing’ restaurant I usually start conjuring up excuses. Across London seems a journey too far for food – but going across an ocean for it can be worthwhile. In NYC last year, I found myself with an evening off and, staying in the Lower East Side, made my way to the Bowery Meat Company. The menu was perfect: steak and seafood, excellent cocktails, and sides which included sublime creamed spinach and whipped potato that threatened to float off the plate. I usually eat oysters naked, but Bowery’s version – baked under a parmesan crust – was

A taste of 1997: Pizza Express reviewed

As the government withers this column falls to ennui and visits Pizza Express. As David Cameron, who left the world stage humming, said of Tony Blair: ‘He was the future once.’ So was David Cameron, and so was Pizza Express: I bet they meet often. It was founded in 1965 by Peter Boizot, who shipped a pizza oven from Naples and a chef from Sicily and opened in Wardour Street. That branch closed in 2020. Boizot grew up in Peterborough but lived in continental Europe for a decade, and he learnt three things: an Italian restaurant must be bright; good pizza must be slightly charred (burning food is underrated); children