The 800 pizza-loving Londoners who attend the 2018 London Pizza Festival, which returns to Borough Market Sunday May 20th, will not have to settle for just one or two of the featured pizzas and forgo the rest. They'll be served quarter-pizza slices of all 6! The only...
London
London Pizza Festival: The Judges
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The Making of Radio Alice’s Potato & Lardo Bruschetta
Last night I had the pleasure of attending a spring pizza party at Radio Alice, the Hoxton Square pizzeria that will be competing at the May 28th London Pizza Festival. Radio Alice will open a second London pizzeria in Clapham next month. Testing out some new spring...
Slinging Slices of Pizza in London’s West End
Three new fast-casual restaurants bring pizza-by-the-slice to Charing Cross road in Central London. Here are my early takes based on single visits to NY FOLD, Fornetto and Vico. NY FOLD The New Yorkese way to attack a triangular slice cut from a large pizza is...
I’d rather wait for my fish & chips than have my fish & chips wait for me
Are you a conscientious cook who will only buy fish from someone who can tell you where, when and how it was caught? If so the eight words you most want to see or hear at your chippy may be the same as those you expect from your fishmonger: Our fish locally sourced...
Acme Coffee Cups: An Icon as Plain as Can Be
If there's a lesson to be learned from the Looney Tunes Road Runner animated cartoons it's this:A-C-M-E spells doom. To help catch his elusive prey Wile E. Coyote keeps putting his faith in the latest contraption manufactured by the Acme Corporation. The...
Top 10 Reasons To Love the Salt Beef at Tongue & Brisket
[slider_pro id="60"] Tongue & Brisket, 24 Leather Lane, London EC1N 7SU (map)
Alexis Gauthier’s Smokin BurgerMonday
When Alexis Gauthier  accepted my challenge to create a one-off burger for the January 27th BurgerMonday at Andrew's Gray's Inn greasy spoon I assumed he would reinvent, deconstruct, Frenchify or otherwise gastronomise the American classic. But the chef at Gauthier...
Pizza Pilgrims Think Out of Box & Into Pan
"I have something for you," said Londoner James Elliot, one of the Pizza Pilgrims behind the pizza van and insanely popular pizzeria of that name. "I'd like to you take it home and test it." I assumed the white pizza box Elliot handed me contained a pizza, albeit a...
The Single Cut Burger: A Cut Above All Else
[slider_pro id="52"] You don't beat Josh Ozersky, the New Yorker who wrote the book on The Hamburger, at his own game. So when Richard Turner invited Fred Smith and I to compete against Josh in a NYLon Burger-Off at the Meatopia UK Meat Festival in September we...
The Hamburg Hamburger Returns to London
The creator of the historic Hamburg Hamburger has accepted my invitation to bring it back to London to compete in the 3-4 November @BurgerMonday #LondonBurgerBash at Camden Town Brewery In October 2012 German chef Oliver Trific travelled from his Hamburg house to a...
Shake Shack’s in London & So’s the Meyer Touch
Back in the early days of the Union Square Cafe, any difficulty first-time diners had reconciling the New York restaurant's accolades with its informality rarely lasted through dinner. With a comprehensive approach to attentive service that would become his signature,...
Top 10 Fish and Chips in London
When the batter coats a fresh cod fillet in a single layer and the frying time, temperature and oil are right, the fish effectively steams within its crisp golden shell. The hidden treasure – firm, glistening flakes of pearly white cod – distinguishes my picks for Top...
Pizza Good Enough for Rome but not London
What a shame Datte Foco didn't have a more central location. Or a more stylish look. Or a more hospitable welcome for the stroller mums of Stoke Newington. Or more business savvy. Or more of a story to sell to the food media. All it had was superb Roman-style pizza al...
Codsmacked by Fish Bone’s twice-cooked fillet
My punishing quest for the best fish and chips in London hit a new low on a return visit to Fish Bone, a much-praised chippie on Cleveland Street in Central London. At lunchtime there is always a queue. When the young man in a hygienic trilby hat (right) served me the...
Taking Your Salt Beef As It Comes
In an era when cured pig back is more chic than caviar and the once prized but hopelessly lean fillet (filet mignon) cut may soon be sold off for scrap it's hard to remember back to a time when fat was a four-letter word. Seek out any good Old English dictionary and...
1+1=3 at London’s new Electric Diner
A single cheeseburger at the Electric Diner contains two patties; a double cheeseburger, three patties. The George Osborne arithmetic is a Christmas gift to London from Brendan Sodikoff, chef/owner of Chicago's Au Cheval diner. (Au cheval is French for "on horseback"...
Fifty Shades of Grey
[slider_pro id="25"] The slideshow above contains images of three burgers each ordered medium-rare at Bukowski, an ambitious burger grill squeezed into a shipping container on the upper level of Boxpark in London's Shoreditch. The third burger was a...
A Rosetta By Any Other Name…
[slider_pro id="18"] Saporitalia, 222 Portobello Road, London W11 1LJ (see map)
Is The Sea Shell London Legend or London Myth?
Search online for the best fish and chips in London and you're sure to find several first-page references to The Sea Shell of Lisson Grove. Rarely is the praise on review sites so unanimous. Just look at the intros from the toptable.co.uk and timeout.com reviews:...
What’s Better than Toast & Jam?
On a Sunday? Nothing. Nothing is better than toast and jam, if it's slices of the hand-mixed pain de compagne from Ben Mackinnon's E5 Bakehouse that go in the toaster and nearly any combo from Lillie O'Brien's London Borough of Jam spread over 'em. It goes without...
When 5 Napkins are not Enough
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Seven Degrees of Separation
It is perhaps unfair of me to fault Mother Flipper for slightly overcooking their burgers, missing by less than a minute the liftoff from the flat-top griddle to juicy medium rare. This has happened twice, first in February at its original home ground at Brockley...
The Best £1.70 Steamed Burger in London
Amongst several tiny outlets for baozi – Chinese steamed buns – along Newport Court, near the Leicester Square tube station in London's Chinatown, only the pork bun from the takeaway bun stall operated by Yang Guang Supermarket looks, feels and eats like a burger. A...
Is it Kosher for Mishkin’s Not To Be Kosher?
Most of the grievances from the kibbitzers of Covent Garden boil down to Mishkin's authenticity deficit. The latest theme restaurant to get the Russell Norman touch (think da Polpo, Polpetto, Spuntino) is less the great Jewish deli they wished it to be than the...
Belgian Chef Viki Geunes Lays It All Out on The Table at Galleria Illy
"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...
For Galleria Illy Tea Talk, Didier Jumeau-Lafond of Dammann Frères Brews Cup of Anti-Snob Snobbism
"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." It was a good line, infusing...
Duke Ellington: King of Jazz & Gluttony
The three-part profile of jazz great Duke Ellington written by Richard O.Boyer for The New Yorker in 1944 isn't just one of the greatest musical portraits ever written for a magazine. "The Hot Back"Â is a classic in food and travel writing, too, a tell-all from a then...
Princess Burger Transformed Into Prince Meatloaf
Come mid-August I welcome a glass of pink wine or pink lemonade for cool refreshment. But oddly I'm no happy camper when my Provence rosé tastes like old-fashioned lemonade, or when my freshly squeezed lemonade is no sweeter or pulpier than a dry rosé. I'm funny that...
Wimpy Mega Burger an Endangered Classic in Fast-Food Design
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...