Hearty French food that’s worth going back for ..read more

55 portions of roast duck, 47 of char siu, 49 of roast pork and 39 of chicken from 43 eateries. This isn't your racist uncle’s Chinese takeaway ..read more

The ‘exotic’ yet homely Central Asian restaurant hidden in Queensway Market ..read more

Broaden your horizons by eating someone else’s comfort food There’s a theory that for any foreign cuisine to take root and become popular in the UK, its various traditions, flavours, ingredients and dishes have to be boiled down into a series of easily understandable archetypes. Unfortunately for an island that happily and absentmindedly trades in cliches and stereotypes, that means culinary cliches and stereotypes. Y’know how it goes. The continent-sized collections of gastronomic customs from China and India have been dumbed down to become chow mein and fried rice, curries and poppadums. Tha ..read more

Come for the tacos; stay for the birria One of the great things about tacos is that there’s nowhere to hide. When using a small maize tortilla, there’s very little room to hide slapdash sauces and miserable-quality protein. If you attempt to do so in anglocapitalist fashion by overloading with guacamole, refried beans and other frippery as if it were some of kind of burrito, then such a house of cards will buckle and disintegrate under such misguided heft. Taca Tacos is a former street food trader that has settled down in the Deptford Yards Market with a hole-in-the-wall alongside an exclusive ..read more

Long-lived isn’t always the same thing as top-notch The only thing more uncommon than a long-lived restaurant in London is a long-lived restaurant that’s still at the top of its culinary game. The Begging Bowl has been trading in Peckham since 2012 which is quite the achievement in a restaurant market that tends, as a whole to, value superficial newness over everything else. Longevity doesn’t necessarily equate to quality, though. Local restaurants can often be favoured and lionised by the locals, irrespective of whether they’re actually any good or not – as anyone who has ever attempted to cr ..read more

Woolwich already had four terrible kebab takeaways. Now it has a fifth. There’s a crusty old saying that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is the very definition of madness. The countless words spewed onto this website over the past decade or so may well be an example of this. Woolwich’s unthinking love affair with subpar kebab eateries probably counts too. Prior to 2023, at least four purveyors of meat tornados did business in this corner of south east London. That now includes the cheekily unimaginative weasels that have taken over the name and premises (but sa ..read more

There’s plenty of decent sinophilic eating to be had outside of Chinatown. Tourists, out-of-towners and people new to London automatically head to Chinatown whenever they’re in need of a hearty meal-by-chopstick. Of course, that lantern-festooned patch of West End real estate doesn’t have the monopoly on corking Chinese cuisine as reviews on this site have alluded to over the years. Southwark’s Dragon Castle isn’t quite as grand as its name, its high ceilings or its koi pond-equipped foyer would have you believe. But it’s still an eminently comfortable place in which to spend a long, winding l ..read more

Tubthumping noodles and dumplings that you’ll struggle to find anywhere else. There’s this scene in Kill Bill Vol 2 where the eponymous Bill, memorably played by David Carradine, goes off on a slight tangent by pointing out how Superman is different from other superheroes. Specifically, how the costumed character is the real person and the civilian identity, Clark Kent, is the artificial construct, rather than the other way around as with most other superheroes. Comics aficionados will argue endlessly over the fine details of all that, but the thrust of Bill’s critique (more or less) is that t ..read more

This Scotland-focussed article is a break from The Picky Glutton’s usual London-based coverage. For such a relatively small island, the Isle of Skye has a surprisingly large number of restaurants – no doubt due, in part, to the many tourists that hike across its ridges and munroes every year to gawp at its dramatically dreamy vistas. My eyes were loch’d onto the scenery. These bloggy-style travel eating round-ups aren’t meant to be as comprehensive as my London-based reviews. It’s also not for me to say whether these restaurants meet the needs of the islanders themselves. Having said all that ..read more