Straight Up London

The thing you might already know about Blacklock is that it does chops. That’s its Thing, and it’s probably the first restaurant to centre itself around that concept in London, despite the plethora of barrel-scraping gimmicks and idiosyncrasies across the restaurant scene. I say ‘probably the first’ because I know that Whitechapel’s Tayyabs is famed for its

The Grey Horse is an unassuming pub a few minutes from Kingston train station that has been rebranded as a whiskey bar and barbecue restaurant. I was a little apprehensive about going, suffering from a sore throat and having had a pretty bad run of barbecue food over the past few weeks. A bit like hamburgers,

There’s a concept in economics that says when it’s difficult for consumers to tell good products from bad products before they buy, you eventually only end up with the bad – there is no advantage to selling things of decent quality, but doing so takes more work, so why bother? I sometimes wonder if the vast number of

Brunswick house is a very strange proposition. The building has sat there since 1758, and for four of those years it’s been a perplexing enigma on my daily commute through Vauxhall. The area around Vauxhall’s bus station is a whirl of big, hard-to-cross roads, building sites, and soulless ugly high-rise buildings and offices, and despite

My awkward relationship with Brixton’s restaurants continued with The Joint, a barbecue place in Brixton Village Market. I’ve written before about my biggest problem with Brixton: quite a bit of choice, but mostly in places that are outdoors which isn’t great even on a mild night. When we got to The Joint, I was a little annoyed to be moved from

One of the things we’re aiming to do at Straight Up London is to create a useable guide to London: something that isn’t just interesting to read, but that is helpful for people deciding where to eat tonight. It’s why we’re putting so much effort into the food map (which now has 93 recommendations!) and generally try to emphasise things

Dip & Flip is one of the large number of middle-market hamburger restaurants that have swarmed like locusts across the city. This swarm is an unreservedly good thing, because hamburgers are delicious and just a few years ago it was very difficult to find anywhere decent at all. I wake up in cold sweats sometimes remembering the time

Since Christmas I’ve been on a cooking-binge, making spatchcocked chickens, risottos and chillis, mostly from J Kenji Lopéz-Alt’s The Food Lab cookbook (which is quite brilliant). Even when things don’t turn out as brilliantly as they might if they’d been from a restaurant, there’s something very special about making your own food. I think this is why I liked

Noble Rot is an aspirational place for me, because in theory it says that I could one day be a restauranteur. Originally the folks behind Noble Rot had just a magazine—a beautiful magazine with some good features—and now they have a beautiful website, restaurant and wine bar too. Right now I have just a humble

A few months ago I moved to Brixton by accident, and I’ve been slightly frustrated by it ever since. (I thought I had moved to Stockwell but realised a few weeks in that I was only about five minutes away from Brixton High Street.) Of course it is a hip area with quite a few nice restaurants