An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
I’ve always thought working in hospitality is like getting a free MBA – but one rooted in the real world rather than theory. So it didn’t surprise me to discover a brilliant business idea in a book about the restaurant trade. In Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, star
West Virginia. There is a paradox. A state of natural beauty, glorified by mountains and watered by rivers – including the Shenandoah (surely the most beautiful word in American) – carved out of reluctant nature by hard human labour, then divided by slavery and war, but ending on the Union side – it ought to
The Italians have a phrase: ‘brutti ma buoni’. It means ‘ugly but beautiful’, and it’s the name they give to their nubbly hazelnut meringue biscuits, which – as the name suggests – taste lovely but aren’t lookers. The phrase came to me the other day when I lifted the lid on my pan of golden
We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up. Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The
The River Cafe has grown a thrifty annexe, and this passes for democratisation. All restaurants are tribal: if dukes have Wiltons, ancient Blairites have the River Cafe. It is a Richard Rogers remake of Duckhams oil storage, a warehouse of sinister London brick, and a Ruth Rogers restaurant. Opening in 1987, it heralded the gentrification
How’s this for a bargain? A Pizza Express margherita for only 33p, if you dine in and order between 5 and 6 p.m. tomorrow, to celebrate 60 years of the chain. ‘In 1965 we brought proper pizza to the UK, and what better way to mark those 60 years than with 60 minutes of our
24 min listen
Loyd Grossman is a man of many talents: from appearing on our screens as the host of MasterChef and Through the Keyhole, to crafting a beloved line of pasta sauces. Loyd has left his mark on both the culinary and cultural worlds. On the podcast, Loyd talks to Lara about hazy memories of ‘sipping a Shirley Temple cocktail aged
This morning, as usual, I was woken up by the large ball of golden fluff that is my dog, Honey. At a time she considers decent, she bounds on to my bed, tail wagging furiously, to tell me it’s time for her breakfast. Honey still has the puppyish bounce she has always had – even
For more than 50 years I have assumed that any sensible person will be a right-winger, even if not all of them will admit it, and that this will be especially true of oenophiles There are exceptions. Harry Waugh, a clubman, author – Bacchus on the Wing is especially good – and merchant-connoisseur, was one
For several years, a debate has raged (mainly on Twitter, now X) over whether animal fats are actually better for you than industrially processed ‘seed oils’. The debate has become more mainstream thanks to the efforts of the new US Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, who wants to Make America Healthy Again. His strategy
Picture the scene. The year is 2004. The setting, a British field or maybe a beach. There is a small open fire burning with a single cast-iron pan perched on it. A male TV chef – dressed in a striped shirt, open at the neck, chinos, possibly red, leather shoes – is standing over it,
The regular’s stage is the fetid pub carpet, the creaky floorboards, the cramped smoking area where they can sneak a shot between rounds. Their audience is the jaded, spotty bartender, the unsuspecting family looking for a quiet Sunday lunch, and any poor soul too cowardly or inebriated to walk away. Regulars are the backbone of
Following the closure of Hungarian restaurant the Gay Hussar in 2018 – that Soho institution and virtual museum of Labour party history – it seems Londoners are about to lose another Central European landmark. The Polish restaurant Daquise has finally had time served on it by Transport for London, who wish to redevelop the buildings
The immaculate bourgeois socialists of north London – that is not code for Jews – like to eat and drink in the former servants’ quarters of Kenwood House, because this is a mad country. Kenwood is beautiful. It is Hampstead’s best house, standing at the top of the heath, near the head waters of the
25 min listen
Ash Sarkar is a journalist, academic and political activist known for her commentary on social justice and democratic socialism. She is a senior editor at Novara Media, and her work has been published extensively. Ash’s debut book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War, examines how ruling elites exploit cultural divisions to maintain power. On the podcast,
I bought some pork scratchings the other day, and the packet said it was ‘high in protein’. Gruntled, the brand, is distributed by the Keto Shop and is now being marketed as some type of health food. I had to laugh. Wolfing down a packet of pork scratchings in the pub is now part of
Walking into this crowded and clattering restaurant for the first time in more than 30 years, two things strike me almost immediately: 1) it seems to be largely unchanged and 2) the prices have scarcely risen. I can’t claim to have tried every wine list in Soho, but I can tell you with certainty that
I will admit to having been dismissive of red velvet cake in the past, considering it to be bland in flavour and garish in colour. It tended to come in cupcake form with towering hats of super-sweet buttercream, which made it unpleasant and difficult to eat. The cult love for red velvet, inspiring scented candles
I’m on the 10.45 slow train to Ipswich. It’s not even lunchtime, yet everyone around me is already gorging on food. The corpulent man opposite is posting fistfuls of cheesy Doritos into his gaping maw, washing them down with cheap lager. A woman is noisily chomping her way through a limp burger that reeks of
Is there any more evil influence on the world than Gail’s the bakery? It has thrown thousands of poor people out of their homes by gentrifying their neighbourhoods; it has destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of hard-working owners of independent coffee shops by drawing away business; it has scorned the poor by throwing away its
The Cherry Tree on Southgate Green began life as a coaching inn on one of the historic routes from London to York and beyond. It has been trading since 1695, when what are now the north London suburbs were open fields. But the other evening, the pub – my local – rang last orders for
In a social media age, certain ingredients – long esteemed by those in the know – suddenly burst on to the scene. One morning we woke up to all the supermarkets stocking Mutti tinned tomatoes. Ortiz sardines and Perello Gordal olives are now in the limelight. I wonder – given the current zeitgeist for all
La Môme is the new ‘Mediterranean’ restaurant at the Berkeley, Knightsbridge’s monumental grand hotel. It has changed, as all London’s grand hotels have changed: it is Little Dubai in the cold and the chintz is on the bonfire. Fairy lights hang from the awning of the entrance, as if in an eternal Christmas. I barely
28 min listen
Emma Fox is the chief exec of Berry Bros & Rudd, the world’s oldest fine wine and spirit merchant. A retail veteran, Emma’s broad experience has been shaped by a career spanning over 30 years. On the podcast, Emma tells Liv about early memories of ‘sugar butties’, what’s the best bottle to bring to a
In a world of bewildering uncertainty and breakneck change, where a pack of butter now costs about the same as a small family saloon in the 1950s, there is at last some good news to cheer the soul. It concerns the lobster, that culinarily appealing crustacean which has sustained us nutritionally since the Stone Age
My local gastropub, which is very popular, serves a hot, freshly made and runny-yolked scotch egg. It’s billed as a ‘Cackleberry Farm Scotch Egg with Maldonado Salt’ because part of hospitality is marketing. If you just chalk up ‘scotch egg’ on a board, it doesn’t entice the appetite in quite the same way. But call
We were almost having a symposium and I was invited to define Toryism in one sentence. I replied that one book would be easier: the late Roger Scruton’s On Hunting, which ought to be subtitled: ‘From Horse-Shit to Heaven: the Search for Love, Order and God.’ ‘But what if you leave out God, and therefore
You may be forgiven, if you are a regular reader of this column, for thinking that my primary motivation in cooking is showing off. I’m always banging on about lovely dishes you can serve to unsuspecting guests that will guarantee plaudits and amazement. But while there is more than a kernel of truth in this,
It’s somewhat risky to make the case for lard for a publication whose cookery columnist is the author of a book on butter. But so be it. Because lard has generally been at best overlooked and at worst openly maligned, and that is madness. The cost of cooking oils has rocketed in the past couple
