It’s late on Wednesday when the phone goes. It’s Foodie Ed. The conversation goes something like this: “Is that you Richie? Course it is. Listen, I’ve got a job for you. See I need someone solid, reliable, not afraid to put a bit of fork about, know what I mean?
Fitzrovia – bohemian hub of the early 20th century, home to literary and artistic bon vivants who would frequent the area’s many watering holes…
“A hubbub of excited noise and the turmoil of other people having a jolly good time crash into us as we enter the main restaurant.”
The attention to detail is exceptional and intriguing; with napkins wrapped in riddles, sugar cubes contained within a whimsical ballerina musical jewellery box which plays “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”…
“As we settle into our seats with their fraying edges, and frail wooden armrests, we hear a commotion at the table behind us. Without proper warning a man suddenly falls backwards off his chair and rolls onto the floor. He’s ruddy and broken looking.”
The Docklands area is an unknown land for most of us; a mystery for those of us who don’t get to don a well-tailored suit and head off into its murky depths to worship at the slippery altar of high finance.
“It’s extremely rare that I find myself in Parson’s Green. I love London for all its multifarious gastronomic eccentricity; I love diving on a bus and eating Turkish feasts in Haringey, Indian food in Southall, but you’d have to work pretty hard to drag me down to Parson’s Green.”
“Over the past five years, London’s steakhouse scene has become a well bred beast and the steak spectrum for meat eaters in the capital is now broad and multifaceted…”
I first read about The Connaught at an extremely impressionable age. I was too young –it left an indelible, immovable mark on my consciousness. I was fourteen years old, but I remember the sequence of events very clearly.
“If you visit the restrooms at the Goring Hotel you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve taken a step back in time to a Victorian gallery of smut. Adorning the walls are a selection of Reubenesque beauties leaving very little to the imagination…”
“Since opening in trendy Fitzrovia just eight months ago, Peruvian restaurant Lima has already been voted ‘One to Watch’ at the National Restaurant Awards and, perhaps more importantly, has received the thumbs up from London’s hippest tribe of foodies…”
BRGR.Co. A strange, vowel-less beast that’s popped up on Wardour Street, part of the renaissance of Soho restaurants and the new breed of burger purveyors who’ve set up shop to make the most of London’s burning desire for re-imagined American junk-food.