Test Drives

Alex Dilling at the Hotel Café Royal promises to deliver an elevated Frech dining experience from a lauded chef. We went along to see if the hotel has finally landed a full-on destination restaurant.  

  Out of almost nowhere, an interesting new South East Asian restaurant has appeared in Covent Garden. Sunda Kitchen has some very impressive names behind it - and they've managed to create something that easily meets the high expectations we had for the place. 

This stylish seaside spot boasts the top chef Nuno Mendes' involvement in its menus. We booked ourselves in for a south coast staycation. 

The latest M Restaurant in London has arrived in Canary Wharf. They still have all the steaks - but there are some added Provencal-style dishes. We went to take a look. 

Chef Abby Lee brings Malaysian cuisine to Peckham with Mambow. Already an instant hit, we popped into Market Peckham to try it out. 

Scottish chef Mark Greenaway has found a prime spot for his London restaurant, right on the piazza at Covent Garden. We booked a table with a great view to check it out. 

The Beaumont hotel in Mayfair has just introduced a fun element to the wine offering at its restaurant. We took up the challenge. 

Bring two wine importers, a charcuterie genius and a chef trained up at London's hottest restaurants together and you have the team behind this hit wine bar on Newington Green.

Robin and Sarah Gill, who are the people behind Darby's The Dairy and more, have transformed a corner of Brixton into a small Parisian-style wine bar. We went down for a look. 

Top Japanese restaurant Chisou has opened a tiny (but beautiful) omakase restaurant called Roji next door. We went down to try out the experience.  

Notting Hill has a bouji new wine bar with some serious open-fire cooking going on. We headed west to try it out. 

Israeli celebrity chef Eyal Shani already has branches of Miznon in Tel Aviv, Paris and NYC. We popped along to see what his London outpost is like.

Islington gets a new pub called The Baring with an ex-Dabbous and Kerridge's chef in charge of the kitchen. It all sounded very promising, so we went down for a look. 

The largest Moët & Chandon Champagne bar in Europe has just opened at Harrods. We pulled up a stool at the bar to check it out. 

Chef Akwasi Brenya-Mensa's Tatale is one of the year's most highly-anticipated openings. We went down to Southwark's new African Centre to check it out.

Chef James Cochran has opened a modern day sports bar down the road from his Islington restaurant. We popped in for a look.

Top pastry chef Angelo Musa has opened his first patisserie outside Paris. We took the lift up to the fourth floor of Harrods to check it out.

  They quickly became big in Spitalfields and now Bubala have opened a second restaurant in Soho, with the same focus on Middle Eastern vegetarian cuisine. We went for a look. 

Maria G's is the latest restaurant from Robin Gill which sees the chef creating an Italian restaurant in Kensington. We went in to check it out. 

It's hard to make a dent in London's saturated burger market, but the creativity and craft on show at Black Bear Burger manages to do just that.