Rather than hog a whole hogget to yourself, bring some mates and tupperware with you to Tooting. Private dining in London often means sitting in a finely upholstered room, but with some remorsefully threadbare food on the plates. But only if your event requires graspingly aspirational formality and if you stick to the unimaginative choices parroted repeatedly in listicles. If you preorder the whole lamb from Pashtun restaurant Namek Mandi in Tooting, you get to gobble your meaty feast with blithe, hedonistic abandon in the privacy of your own upstairs dining room. You have to pop off your shoe ..read more

The punchy restaurant hidden away on top of a food court It’s a bit of a tired cliche to say that restaurants, when serving food originally from faraway shores, can whisk you away to those far flung places. And yet, for the bulk of 2022 at least, that has been somewhat true. As chronic issues with renewing passports and lost luggage plagued would-be travellers, it’s been far less stressful (for the most part) to seek out foreign flavours using Oyster cards and train tickets rather than boarding passes. Plaza Khao Gaeng inadvertently leans into this daycation vibe with its decor. Located in Arc ..read more

A tantalising array of skewers, salads and seafood that’d you be a fool to miss out on Special thanks to MiMi Aye, author of Burmese cookbook Mandalay, for proofreading this review. ‘Burmese food isn’t as good as Thai food’ has to be one of the strangest and dappiest things another British person has ever said to me – at least in the realm of food. Perhaps it’s because British food is so frequently the butt of international jokes that a Brit would somehow feel both entitled and comfortable in ranking the culinary traditions of entire cultures, as if they were choosing between different TVs in ..read more

Pigging out with the Filipino restaurant that moved from Brixton to Mayfair Names are funny things. In French and Italian, you don’t just have ‘restaurants’. There’s a whole system of names for eateries, from bistro and brassiere to osteria and trattoria. The higher up the hierachy one goes (and it’s inevitably a hierarchy), the more formal, elaborate and pricier the food one should expect. Although English isn’t completely devoid of such a system – see caffs and diners – the word ‘restaurant’ is still expected to describe a broad variety of eating places, a task for which it is not especially ..read more

The whitewashing at this Kingly Court restaurant is royally screwed up. There are queues everywhere in London. Alongside all the usual queues that you’d expect – to get pissed, to have a piss, to be pissed upon from a great height and then to piss off (toilets, the bar, any sort of public/government service and then public transport/airports, respectively) – are the ones that you don’t. Overhyped no-reservations restaurants like The Breakfast Club and Dishoom, where the queues are so long that you’d be forgiven for thinking that everyone lining up had just found a NHS dentist accepting new pat ..read more

Ring, ring, ring the bells for more fast food hell For most British people, their only knowledge of Taco Bell will be from the infamous scenes in Sylvester Stallone’s mildly diverting 1993 sci-fi yarn Demolition Man. In the dystopian future setting of the film, Taco Bell is apparently the *only* restaurant left in the world following the ‘franchise wars of the 1990s’ (as Sandra Bullock’s character explains with a straight face) before inexplicably pivoting to fine dining. While clearly meant as a cheap joke for American audiences of the time, Taco Bell – like many other fast food franchises ..read more

When 133 pizzas from 60 Southwark pizzerias hits your gut, that’s amore. Even by my standards, this particular Best and Worst group test was a monumentally daft undertaking. Eating pizzas from any restaurant, takeaway or street food stall that offers delivery or collection in the northern half of Southwark is a coronary-baiting endeavour. But I’m nothing if not stubborn in the face of a challenge, especially during the omicron waves which made dining out indoors to be an even riskier activity. Aside from needing some kind of geographical limit to make this Best and West group test practically ..read more

Previously a small takeaway, this restaurant has not only moved into larger premises around the corner, but has also upped its game. Some things truly do get better with age. While numerous restaurants have closed over the past two years, Surrey Quays’ La Chingada has not only managed to survive but has even moved into larger premises. After spending the first 18 months of its life in a glorified takeaway (with a handful of counter perches) on Lower Road, it has since taken root in what was previously a caff on Rotherhithe New Road. In doing so, the kitchen has gotten noticeably better in knoc ..read more

I come to praise Chinese mock meats, not to bury them Many people are wary and cautious of the new and different, especially food. Acceptance often comes gingerly, with the new arrival initially forced to adopt a more familiar guise. Chinese food in the UK is a case in point. For many decades, it bore little resemblance to the dishes that Chinese people actually ate – both here and elsewhere – instead having more in common with chip shop fare. The many tastes and textures of Chinese food were flattened out and oversimplified to make it as familiar and unimposing as possible. In many smaller to ..read more

Rest easy: The best food writing I’ve read this year isn’t about the pandemic In a year when it’s still generally been advisable to spend more time at home than eating out with others, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I’ve spent almost as much time reading about food as I have been eating it. In spite of this, there’s surprisingly little pandemic-related writing in this now traditional round-up. While this probably doesn’t mean the big C has finished causing havoc on the world of food and restaurants, it does at least mean this round-up is a largely coronavirus-free zone. While there’s no guaran ..read more