On a balmy summer Sunday, Tim Scorer and his girlfriend Emma Jarvis welcome brunch guests to their spacious London flat. After greeting them, the couple direct their visitors to the garden — a stunning space outfitted with a wood-fired oven — for cocktails and mingling. The scene looks like a typical gathering among friends, except that [...]
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“Very good, and for you, sir?” You is me and I just don’t know. “What I will have…obviously…is…. What I shall in fact have is the…the….” Now, this kind of dithering is very much not what I’m about. You can ask anyone. When it comes to acting decisively it’s been said that I make George W. Bush [...]
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Smartphones have made it simple to find a restaurant at the last minute. The gastronomic triumvirate of Urbanspoon, Yelp and OpenTable each have well-designed mobile apps for Android, BlackBerry and iPhone users, and they’re all free. For a reservation, though, there once was pretty much just one choice: OpenTable. It can be a lifesaver when you [...]
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Something strange is happening on the London food scene. New dining locations are emerging in unlikely, out-of-the-way neighborhoods, where paying guests turn up to eat in someone’s private home. Elsewhere, established chefs are taking over a temporary dining venue to cook large no-choice meals for 30 guests for one or two nights, only to disappear [...]
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In January, Ferran Adrià announced that at the end of the 2011 season he planned to close El Bulli, his mythic restaurant on Spain’s Costa Brava, with plans to reopen it two years later as a foundation, in which food service will be only a part. El Bulli has often been called “the best restaurant [...]
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Fine diners are drinking premier cru wines at plonk prices as a bring-your-own booze revolution gathers pace in Britain’s best restaurants. Worried by empty tables as a result of the economic slump, a group of Michelin-starred establishments are letting customers bring their own favourite bottles for no extra charge, or a modest corkage fee, instead [...]
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One of the hottest tables in town isn’t at a restaurant. New York chef Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit has cooked here. So have local chefs Susan Feniger of Border Grill and Street, Evan Funke of Rustic Canyon, and Church & State’s Joshua Smith. The culinary team behind Red O by Rick Bayless served sopes and ceviche [...]
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David Chang was asleep in his aisle seat on a recent flight to Melbourne when searing pain jolted him awake: a flight attendant had accidentally spilled boiling water on his arm. That the worst scalding of the Manhattan megachef’s life occurred in business class rather than in a busy kitchen was perhaps surprising. But that [...]
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Edna Stewart’s legendary soul food restaurant on Chicago’s West Side served as a meeting place for leaders of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Among her patrons were the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and an aide, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who came to eat for free while they organized for equal rights. King and [...]
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Egon Ronay, the dapper Hungarian food critic who stamped his name indelibly on British culinary history, has died at the age of 94. Ronay died yesterday morning at his home near Yattendon, Berkshire, with his wife Barbara and two daughters by his side, having been ill for a number of weeks, according to his friend Nick [...]
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Union Street, the eight-block retail stretch in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow-Marina neighborhood, is undergoing a restaurant boom with six eateries slated to open in the next six months. Behind the surge: moves by local merchants to revive the area by removing a zoning law restricting new restaurants. At the same time, landlords in the historically high-price [...]
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At David Burke Townhouse, the average bottle of red wine has crept back up over $100. At Delmonico’s, diners ordered nearly twice as many white truffles compared to last year’s season. And at Aldea, the new lobster gazpacho appetizer is selling briskly at $16 a pop. New York City’s restaurant industry is showing signs of recovery, [...]
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They are huge in the US, but few British diners have heard of Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG) or Ruby Tuesday (RT). But all this is about to change as the restaurant chains join Taco Bell in a three-pronged US attack on the British market this summer. Chipotle, the burrito chain with nearly 1,000 restaurants across America, [...]
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Is the era of “supersize” being replaced by the age of mini meals? Whether it’s Dairy Queen’s mini Blizzard, mini meals at McDonald’s or mini tenderloin sandwiches at The Capital Grille, restaurateurs are thinking small and shrinking new menu items. “In the last five years, portion size has gotten out of control,” said Adam Werner, director of [...]
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