Ameer Kotecha

One can see a city so differently over time. Visiting Oxford recently I noticed fine whisky shops and fashion stores which have always been there but which I barely registered as a student 15 years ago. There are new arrivals: some good, such as the handsome Jericho Cheese Company; others less so, such as the

In a social media age, certain ingredients – long esteemed by those in the know – suddenly burst on to the scene. One morning we woke up to all the supermarkets stocking Mutti tinned tomatoes. Ortiz sardines and Perello Gordal olives are now in the limelight. I wonder – given the current zeitgeist for all

It’s somewhat risky to make the case for lard for a publication whose cookery columnist is the author of a book on butter. But so be it. Because lard has generally been at best overlooked and at worst openly maligned, and that is madness. The cost of cooking oils has rocketed in the past couple

Recently in Spectator Life Rob Crossan laid bare ‘the unpalatable truth about British food’ – namely that it is, er, in some establishments he’s been to, done badly. Leaving aside the fact he’s looking for his fish and chips in the wrong place (outside the M25 it wouldn’t be such a struggle), encountering a few

The jigsaw is having a moment. Ditto other puzzles, games and brain teasers. Couples engage in post-coital sudoku (apparently). Wordle was played 4.8 billion times in 2023 (the lockdown invention of a young Welsh lad, Josh Wardle). Board game cafes have sprung up in cities. This recent resurgence in the popularity of puzzles is partly

Whether we’ve got Mad Men or lockdown-inspired home boozing to thank, one thing is clear: the drinks trolley, or bar cart, is back. Interior design websites and social media are awash with them. And that means suddenly the bottle is becoming as important as the drink. Design agency Stranger and Stranger (motto: ‘Don’t fit in.

On 2 October 1814, a grand feast was held at the Hofburg imperial palace during the Congress of Vienna. Famed French chef Marie-Antoine Carême was charged with cooking and didn’t disappoint. But when it came to the cheese course, a lively argument broke out among the assembled statesmen, each advocating for the superiority of their

Those who still make a habit of the Sunday roast are faced with a challenge come Christmas: how to make sure the big meal doesn’t disappoint. What if the turkey is a let-down given everyone so loves the topside of beef? It would take a real Grinch to sniff at the festive spread – we

It is now not unusual to find ‘bone broth’ in the refrigerated sections of supermarkets or delis, on sale for more than £7. Who can afford this stuff? If you have the time to make your own stock then all credit to you. But if not, the concentrated stock in little cubes or tubs is

Ikea has opened its first high-street restaurant in the UK. There’s not a flat-pack in sight – but a hotdog is 85p and a children’s pasta dish with tomato sauce (plus soft drink and piece of fruit) is 95p. A nine-piece full English will set you back £3.75, while a serving of their famous meatballs

Marco Pierre White may have earned a reputation as the tousle-haired kitchen bad boy who once made Gordon Ramsay cry, but these days he spends his mornings rather more quietly, enjoying his kippers. Yet in his retirement, he can still cause controversy. He recently told a podcast how he cooks his kippers. ‘On a plate,

I remember, vividly, when working at Raymond Blanc’s Michelin-starred Le Manoir, the moment the truffles were delivered. A frisson went round the kitchen staff as the napkin covering the precious morsels was dramatically whipped off. Physically inspecting the gnarled, knobbly nuggets was a right reserved for head chef alone. As a lowly pot-washer, I was

They were loud, vivacious and gloriously un-PC.  Sometimes they seemed to be learning how to cook as they went, barely one step ahead of the viewer. It didn’t matter. If anything, it only made the BBC’s Two Fat Ladies more watchable. And 25 years on – the last of the two dozen episodes pairing Jennifer

I have been reading Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature which came out in October, just a few months before the great man’s death aged 100. And so a weekend holiday in Suffolk was calling to me. I went to Aldeburgh, on the coast, north of the river Alde. The town appears to be thriving –

When imagining a monarch’s wardrobe, what comes to mind? With the late Queen, it was bold-coloured dresses (as she famously said, ‘I have to be seen to be believed’), elaborate hats, silk headscarves and those black Launer handbags. Our new King is no less a style icon. For him it’s well-tailored double-breasted suits from Anderson

There is something very equalising about a street party. At one gathering I attended last year on a central London mews, a trust fund baby peered nervously out from his living room window before deciding to emerge, carrying two bottles of champagne and a flower vase filled with a tumultuous mess of a Platinum Jubilee

At one level, asking why the coronation matters is to slightly miss the point. Living as we do in a constitutional monarchy, the coronation doesn’t need to make a case for itself. It is simply an indispensable part, primarily in symbolic terms, of the installation of our new head of state. But setting aside for

Lots of things seem to get described as ‘once in a lifetime’ experiences nowadays, but for many of us the coronation really will be just that. So, how to make the most of the historic long weekend? Clock off from work at a reasonable time on Friday and while getting dressed into your glad rags

Every so often, one stumbles across some long-forgotten text that could have been written yesterday. It’s a reminder that often the answers to today’s problems lie in the past. I had one of those moments when I read Lord Baden-Powell’s Rovering to Success. Recently I had another such moment reading about Kurt Hahn’s Six Declines