Author: admin
Review: Artusi, Peckham SE15
January 12, 2016
No checkered table cloths and enormous priapic peppermills in this local Italian favourite on Bellenden Road. Artusi is a simple, slender neighbourhood restaurant where the prices are as stripped back as the decor. The hipster hordes of Peckham can count themselves very lucky.
The daytime drinker’s guide to… the Walworth Road
January 3, 2016
Because beer tastes better when you should be at work Pubs in the daytime often have a desolate air, even at lunchtimes, as workers reject a one o’clock pint for a meal al desko. It’s this sense of being forgotten, of letting the world go busily by outside as the clock noisily ticks in a quiet pub that […]
Review: Cockneys of Croydon
December 8, 2015
Pie and mash is my hangover food of choice. It’s cheap, with no sharp edges, and it’s usually dished up in a compact, bright white tiled space, so it’s just like staying safely put in your own bathroom. But with food. How comforting is that? Okay, so you often have to share a table with […]
Review: Sunday lunch at Sylvan Post, Forest Hill SE23
December 1, 2015
Stylishly converted from a post office into a boozer, does Sylvan Post, in laidback Forest Hill, deliver?
Review: The Ivy House and Old Nuns Head, Nunhead SE15
November 25, 2015
The Ivy House in Nunhead, with its narrowly rescued Grade II-listed exterior, impressive range of real ale and craft beer and palpable sense of community, seems to blueprint the future for local pubs. And that future is full of kids. Damn.
Review: Sunday Lunch at The Camberwell Arms, Camberwell SE5
November 9, 2015
It’s all swell in Camberwell, not least around our belt buckles, after a gut-busting, button-popping blow-out of a Sunday lunch at gastropub The Camberwell Arms. If Sunday lunches are designed to do anything it’s to put you flat on your back until well after the Antiques Roadshow. Fiona Bruce was already looking like a long […]
Review: The London Particular, New Cross SE14
November 2, 2015
Herman Melville, visiting London in 1850, described his walk through a choking and poisonous “London particular”. It was an “old-fashioned pea soup London fog – of a gamboge colour.” Gamboge is a mustard-coloured pigment used to dye Buddhist monks’ robes and varnish violins. And it’s roughly the same colour as the murky split pea soup […]
Twenty hilariously awful TripAdvisor London restaurant reviews
October 26, 2015
Judging by the glossy metropolitan food supplements and awe-struck newspaper reviews, you might think London is a dining-out nirvana where every earthly cuisine is served up at its finest. Luckily for the schadenfreude-seeking, TripAdvisor and its diners’ reviews teach us that there are still pockets of resistance, where hygiene is unheard of, customer service is […]
A swill time at the Croydon Craft Beer Festival
October 18, 2015
Thirsty Londoners lapped up a banquet of pale ales, wheat beers and milk stouts at the first Croydon Craft Beer Festival this weekend. And it seemed another indicator of outer London’s growing cultural chops. In the old reference library of Braithwaite Hall in central Croydon, beneath a hammer-beamed roof and stained glass windows extolling the […]