If a restaurant has a coat check, the coat check exists to soften you up for the pricing.
Short observations. Filed as they happen.
Not full verdicts. Not a Twitter feed. The asides that didn't make a full ruling, kept here because they're too good to throw away.
Worth sharing
Pass the bench notes to whoever needs the gossip.
Coffee at the end of a tasting menu should be excellent and free. If it is bad and £6, you have been mugged in a polite handwriting.
A pricing tell: when a menu lists a vegetable side at £8 and the steak at £29, the steak is the loss leader and the broccoli is the business model.
Restaurants used to close on Mondays because the kitchen needed a day off. Now they close on Mondays because the spreadsheet does.
If the staff cannot tell you which fish is which, the fish is whichever was on offer at Billingsgate that morning.
Anything called a ‘grain bowl’ is the lunch equivalent of a polite cough.
A starter that arrives on a slate is fine. A main on a slate is annoying. A pudding on a slate is a referral to social services.
The instant a London restaurant gets a second location, the first one quietly loses a star you cannot see and a chef you used to be served by.
Reservations at 5.30 or 9.45 are not a courtesy. They are how a restaurant says it would rather have your table than you.
A restaurant that proudly serves ‘local produce’ in zone one is mostly serving Heathrow.
If you can hear the table next to you debating the calories in the gnocchi, the room is too quiet and the gnocchi is too dear.
The death rattle of a London restaurant is the moment they add an oat-milk surcharge to the espresso.
Any chef described in a feature as ‘humble’ has a publicist on £450 a day. The two are linked.
A wine bar with no wine fridge is, technically, a bar.
Steak frites is, when done properly, the most generous meal a restaurant can serve. The number of London kitchens that can do it properly is in the single digits.
If the bill includes a discretionary service charge AND a cover charge AND a bread charge, the only thing discretionary is whether to go back.
Bottomless brunch is what happens when a restaurant gives up on food and stays open for the rent.
The bigger the spoon-and-fork crossed logo above a restaurant’s door, the smaller the actual flavours inside it.
Sourdough became a slur somewhere between 2017 and now. Nobody noticed. It happened.
‘Modern British’ has, over the past decade, quietly come to mean ‘we serve burrata’. We are owed an inquiry.
If the room is silent and full, the food is excellent. If the room is loud and full, the food is fine and the lighting is good.
The first half-bottle of wine on a list tells you more about a restaurant than the eighty-pound flight does.
A ‘chef’s table’ at the pass of a kitchen with one chef and no pass is, in plain English, a stool.
Stop asking where the toilet is in a restaurant. Look for the queue. Same thing.
If the website auto-plays a video of a chef tweezering, the food will, statistically, be middling.
The standard of bread in a London restaurant is now the standard of the restaurant. The amuse-bouche of class.
A place that calls itself a ‘destination’ is the place you spend forty pounds to feel slightly let down in.
A restaurant that translates its menu into four languages is rarely serving any of them well.
Average rating is the most dangerous phrase in food. I do not average anything. Ten places. Two scores. Done.
There is no good restaurant in any British airport, in any British train station, on any British high street with a Cotswold Outdoor on it. These are not opinions. They are weather.
The price of a Negroni in a London hotel bar has now exceeded the price of the cocktail book that explains why it should not.
Carbonara contains cream the way I contain enthusiasm for carbonara that contains cream.
Any restaurant that uses the phrase ‘curated experience’ on its own website forfeits the right to call itself a restaurant.
A wine list that opens with a half-page of ‘natural’ selections and a sole burgundy at £220 is a wine list that knows what it is doing to you.
The arrival of ‘small plates’ to a steakhouse is the canary in the coal mine for that steakhouse.
Three rules for a Sunday roast: the gravy must come in a jug, the Yorkshire must arrive last, and nobody at the table should be required to be ‘sharing’.
If a restaurant has 4,200 Tripadvisor reviews and you have never heard of it, you are not the customer. The cruise ship is.