Lessons in wine: Don’t be intimidated by fine wine, it’s a fun journey September 15, 2015 Recently in this column we have waxed didactic on popular wine regions for drinking and investment, detailing facts about Bordeaux, Champagne, and Tuscany. But for readers who are new to fine wine and perhaps overwhelmed by the plethora of information, how and where does one start? The easiest answer, of course, is via client dinners [...]
Lobos has bite but good tapas doesn’t come cheap September 15, 2015 14 Borough High Street, SE1 9QG 020 7407 5361 FOOD ★★★★☆ VALUE ★★☆☆☆ ATMOSPHERE ★★★☆☆ Cost for two with wine: £120 Somewhere under London Bridge station, tucked beneath the tracks, is a winding tunnel of a tapas bar. It is the kind of space that further down the line in Bermondsey or Peckham would be full of [...]
Motoring review: Superformance GT40 September 14, 2015 Supercar or historic racer? Or another one of those pastiches, built in a workshop by enthusiastic but ultimately misguided engineers who don’t know a business case from a briefcase? The Superformance GT40 is none of these, though it’s easy to see how it could have been. This is a road-going version of the famous GT40, [...]
Cruising through the Moroccan Atlas Mountains in a 4×4 September 11, 2015 The ancient Greeks believed that Atlas was the primordial Titan who held up the sky. The mountain range that takes his name separates the Sahara desert from the Atlantic Ocean; Marrakesh, the cultural and spiritual capital of Morocco, rests in its shadow. This would be my base before I set off in a 4×4 to [...]
Reviews: Irrational Man, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, Song From Far Away, The Visit September 11, 2015 FILM Irrational Man By James Luxford RATING ★★★☆☆ A disaffected older man given a new lease of life by an affair with a young woman? A murder that eats away at the protagonist? If a Woody Allen exploration of the moralities of sex and death seems familiar, it’s because he’s been here many times before. Often [...]
Legend movie review: Tom Hardy triumphs as he plays both Kray twins September 10, 2015 Cert 18 | ★★★★☆ The Kray twins would have loved that there’s a film about them called Legend. Being wanted for a litany of crimes – extortion, robbery, intimidation – didn’t stop them courting the limelight at the height of London’s swinging sixties. Being well-connected may have made them untouchable, but it was [...]
Working Lunch: K10, Minster Court EC3 September 9, 2015 WHAT? K10 specialises in, ahem, kaiten-style Japanese cuisine – that’s conveyor belt sushi to you and me – using fresh ingredients and a good selection of booze to wrestle the serving format away from the likes of YO! Sushi, which has trampled all over its good name in recent years. WHERE? It’s tucked away [...]
Why Chile is perfectly suited to making delicious wine September 8, 2015 This week we attended a tasting run by one of Bordeaux’s leading negociants, CVBG. However, it surprisingly featured no Bordeaux wine, instead only Italian and Chilean. The Place de Bordeaux is the wine trading system originating in the middle ages which sells 70 per cent of Bordeaux’s wine by volume into 160 countries. What some [...]
Salt & Honey restaurant review: London’s modern European Bistro is the bees knees September 8, 2015 28 Sussex Pl, W2 2TH Tel: 020 7706 7900 FOOD ★★★★★ VALUE ★★★★★ ATMOSPHERE ★★★☆☆ Cost for two with wine: £100 The internet has done for the food scene what cheap international flights did for travel: it made it accessible. There are no secrets – a new restaurants barely needs to open its doors before an army of [...]
Motoring review: Fiat 500 1.2 Pop Star September 7, 2015 IT’S s a city car, so you need to drive it in the City”, they said. Fair enough. So why am I aboard a boat, admiring the view of Tower Bridge exchanging small-talk with a fashion blogger while sipping a virgin cocktail? Well, I’m at the launch of the new Fiat 500, of course. By [...]