Author: Paul Southgate
-
Kush, Clifton: A Curry With Delusions of Grandeur
I’m exhausted by reviewing fine-dining Indian restaurants. At one end of the scale you’ve got the really interesting ones, like Gymkhana and Quilon in London, doing something genuinely exciting with the food, backed up by great service. At the other, you’ve got your standard High Street Indian: a decent enough masala, a pint of Cobra,…
Written by
·
-
InterContinental Shenzhen: a hotel that somehow missed the memo
I discovered something genuinely unusual in Shenzhen. Something old. Not old old, obviously. This is Shenzhen, a city that has gone from fishing villages to gleaming metropolis in roughly the time it takes London to approve a planning application. Almost everything here is new, shiny, ambitious and faintly terrifying. And then there is the InterContinental…
Written by
·
-
The Three Horseshoes in Batcombe – Where London Escapes to the Country
The Three Horseshoes in Batcombe is the sort of pub that makes you wonder whether someone has built a witness protection scheme for Londoners fleeing Zone 2. It’s deep in Somerset, but feels reassuringly insulated from too much actual Somerset. The locals are there, of course, but they seem carefully curated, like extras who’ve been…
Written by
·
-
InterContinental Crete – A Supermodel Hotel
The InterContinental Crete arrives like a supermodel walking into a beach club. Heads turn. Conversations stop. Everyone notices. And for the first couple of days, you completely understand why. This is an exceptionally handsome hotel. It occupies a glorious position above the sea, with views so perfectly framed they look less like scenery and more…
Written by
·
-
Maistrali – A Lesson in Human Behaviour (and Overcooked Chicken)
I always feel sorry for restaurants in resort towns. Imagine the predicament. Every evening a river of holidaymakers shuffles past your front door, peering at menus laminated sometime during the Ottoman Empire, trying to decide between five or six almost identical tavernas. The food is probably broadly the same, the prices broadly the same, and…
Written by
·
-
Ofou to lo – An Outrageously Perfect Greek Taverna
If the gods of Olympus ever tired of ambrosia and decided to open a taverna, they would build something very like this. The sea beyond the tables is so extravagantly blue it looks as though someone has turned up the saturation on reality itself. The fish arrives with such startling freshness that you half expect…
Written by
·
-
Hotel Port 7 – Substance is hard to achieve
I didn’t stay at Hotel Port 7. I can’t tell you whether the pillows are plump, the showers powerful, or whether the housekeeping folds the loo paper into little triangles that make people feel they’ve entered a higher social class. What I can tell you is that I stopped for a drink on the terrace,…
Written by
·
-
Amoodi – The Best Thing on the Beach Isn’t the View
We’ve all been there. You trek down a glorious stretch of coastline, lured by turquoise water and the promise of a lazy afternoon, only to find the same tired formula waiting at the end of it. A beach shack at the back. Sunbeds at the front priced somewhere between “luxury experience” and “small family hatchback”.…
Written by
·
-
Moxy Barcelona Gets the Modern Hotel Just Right
I’m starting to develop a worrying affection for the Moxy brand. Worrying because, on paper, it ought to annoy me. It’s a hotel concept apparently devised by a committee of people who own trainers costing more than my first car. There’s the inevitable industrial-chic aesthetic, the communal tables, the mood lighting, the sense that someone…
Written by
·
-
Pez Vela – The Restaurant That Attracts Exactly the Right Sort of Crowd
You can tell a great restaurant by the people who choose to spend their time there. A beach bar in Barcelona ought, by rights, to be a chaotic affair: sunburnt tourists comparing maps, influencers photographing cocktails from seventeen angles, and stag parties negotiating with the laws of gravity. Yet Pez Vela somehow escapes all that.…
Written by
·