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There’s so much to love about TCH, I don’t really know where to start. So let’s kick off with the food. It’s basically a twist on what you’d get in an old-fashioned Brit ‘chop house’, only using Indo-Punjabi spices and swapping the grill for the tandoor. It’s meaty, fiery and smoky. Plates are small. Well of course they are. Then there’s the vibe. Picture
There’s nothing like Hoppers in London. Sure, there’s good Sri Lankan food in certain pockets of the capital. But very few restaurants are exclusively Sri Lankan (most are South Indian and certainly don’t do hoppers, the egg-topped pancakes after which this Soho restaurant is named); the few exceptions are okay, rather than amazing. So the fact that Hoppers
Take two things to El Pastor: a mobile phone and a list of local bars. This taco joint in a railway arch next to Borough Market doesn’t accept bookings and the wait can, at peak times, be up to two hours. But at least there’s no standing in the rain: they take your number and will text when your table is ready. So why all the
Back in 2004, top-notch Spanish importer Brindisa hired rising star chef José Pizarro to open a tapas restaurant on the corner of Borough Market. This original site – it has since spawned branches across town – became the first place you could get a decent – but affordable – plate of proper tapas in town. Fast-forward to
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you love pasta, but never order it in restaurants because it’s something ‘you can just make at home’.
But unless you own a pasta machine – correction, unless you own and
use
a pasta machine, rather than leave it in the back of a cupboard like a small-scale instrument of torture that enjoys
Heard of P Franco? It’s a super-cool Dalston wine shop that also happens to do a mean line in comestibles. Bright is from the same crew, but is a restaurant proper. And it’s the best thing to hit the neighbourhood since sliced bread. Sliced bread also happens to be the makings of the cutest thing on the menu – a meaty take on a fish finger sarnie, using
So you thought you loved the
Palomar. You thought you’d be faithful and true. But that was before you met little sis the Barbary. It’ll make you want to quit your job, pack your bags, and run away into the sunset together.
The Barbary, you see, takes everything that’s good about the Palomar but ditches the bits that don’t quite work (like the
Purists, take note: this isn’t your traditional dim sum restaurant and doesn’t claim to be. Instead, My Neighbours the Dumplings has adopted the dim sum dining style of shared small plates and given it a hip east London twist, combining traditional Chinese dishes with other popular Asian influences, including Thai-style green papaya salad and a saké-based
It was a cold, drizzly Wednesday night. It wasn’t even 7pm. Yet here we were, standing in the doorway of the new branch of Flat Iron, being told the wait for a table would be an hour and 20 minutes. ‘One hour and 20?!’ we squeaked, aghast. Still, there was a silver lining: this Covent Garden outpost of the hip steak hangout – the third one to date – has a
Imperial Treasure is a rare creature. It’s one of only a handful of London restaurants serving refined Cantonese cooking. That’s not to say we don’t have brilliant high-end Chinese restaurants – oh, we do – but many of them draw from regions with punchier ingredients like Sichuan and Hunan (and of course Taiwan, whose food has influenced enough ‘Chinese’
More than a decade after it started wowing London’s big spenders with its classy Cantonese cooking, this Michelin-starred trendsetter remains a benchmark against which all high-end Chinese restaurants should be judged. The basement’s stylish interior (all dark wood lattice screens and moody lighting) still attracts the kind of beautiful people who
If you’re plugged into social media, or are just a human in London who reads the news, here’s what you’ve most likely heard about Din Tai Fung: a) it was founded in Taiwan by a young Chinese immigrant but now has branches in more than a dozen countries; b) it’s best known for its xiao long bao – Shanghainese soup dumplings – but also plenty of regional
Just outside Chinatown, this is London’s prime exponent of the alluringly fiery and mouth-numbing cuisine of China's Sichuan province. The distance north of Shaftesbury Avenue, though only 20 metres, is important. Barshu (the original of a Sichuan quartet along with Ba Shan, Baozi Inn and newcomer Baiwei) is distinct from Chinatown’s mostly Cantonese
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