Tag: Restaurant
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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…
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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”.…
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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.…
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Man Wah – Silk Slippers Above the Harbour
Hong Kong, after Shenzhen, feels like stepping out of a spaceship and into a well cut Savile Row suit. Not because it’s old, though parts of it gloriously are, but because it understands something Shenzhen hasn’t yet learned: that progress without polish is just noise. Shenzhen dazzles you with drone delivered toothbrushes and toilets that…
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Pisco, Precision and a Touch of Lima: Alfonsina Is the Real Deal
London is an elite city. It simply is. Not in the peacocking, velvet-rope sense, though there’s a fair bit of that to, but in the far more important way: you can wander into almost any district and, if you know where to look (or sometimes even if you don’t), stumble across somewhere that feeds you…
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Scott’s Richmond: Oysters, Opulence, and the Comfort of Getting It Right
Scott’s in Richmond is the sort of restaurant that makes you want to sit up a little straighter the moment you walk in, as if the building itself has opinions about posture. Oysters, opulence, and old-school service, really, what’s not to love? It is a modern throwback, which is a perfect contradiction and all the…
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The Pelican Notting Hill – Built by Gods
If the ancient gods ever convened on a cloud somewhere above W11 and announced, “Right, let’s design the world’s most implausibly perfect winter pub,” they would, naturally, bicker for a bit; Zeus insisting on thunderbolts behind the bar, Hera wanting better cushions, Dionysus demanding bottomless wine; before finally agreeing to conjure The Pelican, Notting Hill.…
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King’s Arms Oxford: Everything a Pub Should Be
Yes yes yes. A great pub. Everything a pub should be. None of your distressed brick and faux industrial nonsense, no ironic lighting or Shoreditch wankery masquerading as “authenticity”. The King’s Arms is the real thing, the sort of pub that’s been around since God was a boy and still smells faintly of ale, wood…
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The Alice, Oxford: Proof That Some Restaurants Really Are Special
For those of you who read my restaurant reviews (and, truly, I adore your stamina), you’ll know that I often talk about restaurants trying to be special. The dim lighting, the overpriced cocktails with sprigs of rosemary the size of bonsai trees, the waiter who says “awesome” when you order water; all the theatre of…
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Queens Lane Coffee House – Probably Quite Old.
I love it when venues claim to be the biggest, the best, or my personal favourite the oldest. It’s such a gloriously unverifiable boast. No one’s really going to cross-reference parish records or trawl through 17th-century shipping manifests to check whether your “since 1654” claim is true. And even if they did, what are they…
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The Travel Critic 