eat great food. meet great people.
The bacon cheeseburger at the Dalston Superstore in theultra- cool heart of East London sure is tall. Maybe the skyscraper burger is the bar’s idea of New York style.
Whatever.
I identified no fewer than eight serious problems with the one I ordered medium-rare. [Read more...]
The first thing I noticed about Gianluca Franzoni when I introduced myself to him just minutes before a tasting of Domori Cacao Culture at Gallery Illy in London was his suit.
There are artisan silk weavers in Lucca who dream of threading a fine scarf with the polish and delicacy of that blue pinstripe. There are custom glovemakers in Florence who fantasize about fitting your hands as flawlessly as those jacket and trousers traced Franzoni’s slender frame. And there is perhaps only one chocolate maker in Turin who’d dare to produce Napolitains, as individually wrapped squares of chocolate are known, as smooth as that fabric – would you mind showing us the label, Gianluca? – cut and stitched by the Naples sartoria Salvatore Fusco. [Read more...]
To prove to you there’s a lot more to young&foodish than burgers, spaghetti, pizza, sandwiches and coffee I decided to devote my newest top 10 to the Frieze Art Fair at London’s Regent’s Park. [Read more...]
When Pino Cuttaia advises young, ambitious Sicilian chefs to follow his example and work abroad to experience new techniques and unfamiliar foods he is not necessarily pointing them towards London or New York. The overseas destinations he has in mind are on mainland Italy and in particular the north, where you find such curiosities as polenta and, stranger still, butter. Butter, for the uninitiated, is a dairy product made by churning milk or cream and is often used in place of olive oil. [Read more...]
“Spain,” Belgian chef Viki Geunes told a group of London foodies at the Galleria Illy, “is more technique and less product. Whatever I do must add value to the product.”
By evoking Spain the two-star Michelin chef at ‘t Zilte in Antwerp was asserting his opposition less to the contemporary cuisine of an entire nation than that of its most famous chef, Ferran Adrià. And by aligning himself instead with “the Nordic kitchen” and its obsession with exceptional vegetables from local producers and small farms he had one particular Nordic kitchen in mind, Rene Redzepi’s Noma. [Read more...]
“There’s no good tea, there’s no bad tea,” Didier Jumeau-Lafond of Dammann Frères, the exclusive Parisian sellers of 3,500 fine teas, told the 13 September gathering at the Galleria Illy pop-up. “There is just one tea, the one you like.” [Read more...]
The genius of the Wimpy Mega Burger may not by immediately apparent to those of you grew up with and later grew weary of that national chain of fast-food hamburger bars.
But to an American introduced to the uncertain charms of Wimpy 57 years after its launch on Coventry Street in London and decades past its sell-by date this Mega achievement stands out like yellow mustard on a white shirt collar. Behold a monument in modernist fast-food design: The cheeseburger hot dog cohabitation. [Read more...]
There are only two things wrong with the exceptional bagel created by Luca’s Bakery in the South London suburb of East Dulwich:
