48 hours in… Belgrade July 19, 2015 WHERE TO STAY The city isn’t the prettiest in eastern Europe, but Hotel Moskva in the centre is beautiful inside and out. With a great restaurant and spa, it’s the most comfortable way of doing Belgrade. Visit hotelmoskva.rs, rooms start at €89 WHERE TO GO The National Museum of Serbia is the largest in the [...]
Theatre review: Constellations is a beautiful and sad play about life’s possibilities July 16, 2015 Trafalgar Studios | ★★★★☆ A disconcerting and comforting thought: everything that has ever happened, every permutation of what could possibly take place, is taking place now, forever, and stretched back infinitely into the past. It’s a point drummed softly but precisely home in Nick Payne’s thoughtful play Constellations, in which bee-keeper Roland and cosmologist Marianne [...]
Film review: True Story lacks direction July 16, 2015 Cert 15 | ★★☆☆☆ True Story takes a fascinating premise and does its best to drown it with clumsy story-telling and a lack of clear direction. The film, which really is based on a true story, begins with two men on opposite sides of the world introducing themselves as Michael Finkel from the New York [...]
Theatre review: The Mentalists is overblown and overstretched July 16, 2015 Wyndham’s Theatre | ★★☆☆☆ Long before the crowd-pleasing slapstick of One Man, Two Guv’nors, outrageous phone-hacking satire Great Britain and musical Made in Dagenham, there was The Mentalists. Playwright Richard Bean debuted this short play back in 2002 and now it’s back for a limited run. Only this time his success has ensured it’s in [...]
Film review: Self/less is slick but not memorable July 16, 2015 Cert 12A | ★★★☆☆ Immortality is rarely given a positive spin in Hollywood – from mopey vampires to haunted Wolverines, it appears living forever ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. The latest to tread this path is Tarsem Singh’s Self/Less, in which a dying businessman (Ben Kingsley) pays for a secret, expensive procedure to [...]
Film review: Ant-Man is entertaining but forgettable July 16, 2015 Cert 12A | ★★★☆☆ Ant-Man is an entertaining but largely forgettable romp set on the peripheries of the rapidly expanding Marvel universe. It follows Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), an earnest ex-con who accidentally steals a suit that can shrink him to the size of an ant (it also allows him to talk to ants). He’s [...]
Perfect Saturday July 16, 2015 AUSSIE BREAKFAST FARM GIRL Forget fry ups, treat your hangover to a nutritious breakfast at new opening Farm Girl. Set up by 26-year-old Rose Mann, it brings the food of her rural upbringing in Melbourne to Portobello Road. Open Tuesday to Sunday, serving breakfast all day, thefarmgirl.co.uk SUMMER LOVIN’ HACKNEY VILLAGE FETE St John-at-Hackney Church [...]
Restaurant review: Les Deux Salons is a reassuringly old-school restaurant July 14, 2015 You wait all year to review a French restaurant and then two come along at once. Last week Les Gourmets des Ternes, with its no-nonsense, unfaffy cooking, reminded me of a time before the gastronomic landscape was dominated by “sharing concepts” and pop-ups and street food and cocktails with bits of bacon in them. Les [...]
If you want to know your wine, learn your vintages July 14, 2015 Vintage wine is sometimes thought of in vague terms as either old wine or a particularly good drop. In actual fact, the vast majority of wines are from a specific vintage, which simply means that its grapes are primarily or all grown and harvested within a single year. The micro-climate of each wine-growing region will [...]
Mix it up: The perfect cocktail is a sublime balancing act July 14, 2015 The Cherrybrum Cocktail is probably the best rum and cola you’ll ever try Cocktails are a balance of five flavours: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. A good cocktail is made or lost on the balance between two of them: sweet and sour. The sweet in your cocktail will usually come from sugar syrup, [...]