Food 2018 – Locanda Locatelli, London

Monday, February 26th 2018 – Locanda Locatelli, London February got slightly out of control when the lovely people at the Harden’s Guide announced their latest dinner. This would be at Locanda Locatelli, a restaurant we last visited in 2009 for a friend’s 40th birthday. It was lovely then, and given that Giorgio Locatelli is one…

Food 2018 – Frenchie, London

Saturday, 3rd February 2018 – Frenchie, Covent Garden, London A post-theatre treat after a trip to see Mary Stuart at the Duke of York’s Theatre. We’d come out of the theatre slightly too late to get a table for cocktails at the Beaufort Bar in the Savoy, so we’d fallen back on our usual fail-safe,…

Food 2018 – The Oxford Kitchen, Oxford

Saturday 20th January, 2018 – The Oxford Kitchen, Oxford Finally, 8 days after my birthday, we actually got to go and have a celebratory dinner. We had intended to do it the previous weekend, but I was outsmarted by OpenTable, and my booking at The Harrow in Little Bedwyn somehow got transposed from Saturday to…

Food 2017 – Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Great Milton

Friday 13th October, 2017 – Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Great Milton If there’s one restaurant in the UK that I would sell my grandmother to eat at, it’s probably le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. I make no secret of my admiration for Raymond Blanc, and having met him a couple of times now, I’m even more…

Theatre 2017 – Macbeth, Iris Theatre Company

Saturday 24th June, 2017 – Macbeth, Iris Theatre Company, St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden On Saturday afternoon we attended a performance by the Iris Theatre Company of Macbeth at St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, also known as The Actors’ Church. It is therefore fitting that it has a theatre company all its own, and it…

Food 2017 – The London Shell Company, Regent’s Park Canal

Saturday 24th June, 2017 – The London Shell Company, Regent’s Canal, London There’s been quite a bit of buzz around the London Shell Company of late, with reviewers including Jay Rayner (whose opinion I value) loving it, and Michel Roux Jr featuring it in his Hidden Restaurants programme. For Saturday evenings the barge heads off…

Food 2017 – Paris House, Alsace Wine Dinner

Thursday June 1st June, 2017 – Alsace Wine Dinner, Paris House, Woburn It’s been quite the Spring for wine dinners after almost a year with none. This time we had moved on from the Mosel to Alsace, and swapped to a new restaurant (new to us anyway) in the shape of Paris House on the…

Food 2017 – Roux at Parliament Square, Riesling Wine Dinner

Wednesday 17th May, 2017 – Riesling Wine Dinner, Roux at Parliament Square It’s marginally easier to get a table at Roux at Parliament Square than it is at parent-restaurant Le Gavroche (which is to say we’ve been to Parliament Square twice now and I’ve only ever managed to get a table at Le Gavroche once,…

Travel 2017 – St. Paul’s and Around, London

Thursday March 16th, 2017 – London It was a glorious day for March in the UK on Thursday and when I came out of the gym after my regular morning swim I decided that rather than walk to work by the most direct route, I’d head down towards the river Thames and walk along till…

Travel 2017 – Etiquette for Tourists, London

Saturday 11th March 2017 – London This is not about visiting London, more about being a visitor to London. Dear London Tourists! We need to talk. Really, really we do. While I’m sure we all appreciate the amount of money you bring to the now-benighted-by-Brexit-UK, and we are grateful that you buy all that jam…