“As you enter the Brasserie you will be greeted by a perfectly polished staff member, who leads you through the spacious dining room, filled with railway-era accents: polished steel railings, cobalt blue booths, mahogany chairs and slate floors.”
“There was a time when the corner of Bethnal Green Road was not the epicentre of distressed, broken down cool; a time when bags were cheap plastic, rather than vintage Chanel.”
“The old bookworm arose, twitching eagerly, and I sighed. It was his birthday, and I knew what this meant; another day of pandering to every of his whims, which normally verge between the esoteric and the frankly unspeakable.”
“The Westbury is one of Mayfair’s more understated hotel addresses. Tucked away between the hedge funds and art galleries, away from the gaze of shoppers and tourists, it luxuriates gently, with a quiet confidence.”
“Whether it’s gorging on hot cross buns for Easter, tucking into neeps and tatties on Burns’ Night or seeing in the Chinese New Year with spring rolls and a few glasses of Jiu, I’m never one to turn down a food-related festival…”
“The Factory House is a curious beast. Nestled in a sheltered nook beneath the intestinal behemoth that is the Lloyd’s building, one could simply wander past the understated façade without a second glance…” Felix Hagan dines in the Industrial Revolution…
“‘Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning…’ My sentiments exactly Mr Capote, for there is something fresh and exciting about this time of the year…”
“‘First catch your hare’ is the famous, apocryphal statement that is often misattributed to Hannah Glasse as the beginning of her recipe for Jugged Hare in her legendary 19th century text on gastronomy – The Art of Cookery.”
The rain hammers down in cruel sheets as I wander the cold, hard streets looking for the elusive dive bar. I’m using Googlemaps, but the technology seems to be playing wicked games
“The lobsters are the most generously proportioned I’ve ever seen. They sit in huge tanks in the centre of the restaurant, beautiful and languid and blissfully unaware that there’s a small Chinese man coming towards them with a portable net in his right hand…”
“There’s that moment after dessert when the restaurant owner wheels out a flaming pan of liquor coffee in order to stop anyone dying from a medieval curse…” All in an evening’s dining, if you’re on an island in the middle of Lake Como.
The Hampshire Hog. The name resonates with Englishness. You feel like it should be said by some portly, ancient chap wearing a cravat and a smoking cap as he reminisces about misspent student days in ‘The Hog’.