facttime

Since I moved back to London 15 years ago, I have spent a lot of time eating my way around the city's increasingly diverse and impressive restaurant scene. To help me keep track — and for when friends and family asked for recommendations — I started jotting down my favourites in a Moleskine City notebook, which eventually evolved into a Google Sheet and then a blog post in 2016 . An update was long overdue and here it is: my 50 favourite restaurants in London.  My main criteria for the restaurants on this list are: quality of food, warmth of service and style/ambience of the venue. The list features a wide range of cuisines and price points — from budget to blow-the-budget. Because of where I live and hang out and where I worked, there's a bias towards SE and central neighbourhoods; sorry, West London, I'm working on it! I left out places where brunch is the primary focus because I already  created a guide to my favourite brunch spots . I've added links to my reviews w...

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I've visited a fair few speciality coffee shops over the past 16 years. Many of these cafes have been beautifully and thoughtfully designed. But the new branch of  % Arabica  in Spitalfields really takes the cake (canelé, perhaps) with its stunning coffee bar. If you enjoy the works of Yayoi Kusama , you'll probably feel at home here. % Arabica is a Japanese speciality coffee company founded by Kenneth Shoji to celebrate his twin passions of coffee and design. He opened the % Arabica flagship cafe in Kyoto in September 2014 — four months too late for my trip to Japan , unfortunately. I've been to one of the London branches, in Covent Garden, a few times, but I hadn't realised how much the company had expanded: they currently have 150 cafes in 20 countries. I had seen a couple of pictures of the company's newest coffee shop, inside Spitalfields Market , and took advantage of a bank holiday Friday to ch...

While wandering home from Stoke Newington recently, I made a pit stop at  Batch Baby , a unique and welcoming coffee shop in Haggerston that puts filter coffee — including batch brew, of course — front and centre. Located on the ground floor of the Rose Lipman Building, a community space and creativity hub on De Beauvoir Road, Batch Baby occupies a colourful space with a relaxed vibe. There is plenty of seating, from the stools at the bar, to the tables of various sizes by the windows and a bench out front. The décor has a vintage feel, from the comfy leather dining chairs and wooden counter, to the pops of red and orange. The bright red La Marzocco that sits on the counter was the first thing I spotted, but my eye was soon drawn to the three bags of coffee beans sitting on the counter. These were the three coffees available that day as hand-brewed filter coffee (batch brew filter coffee is, of course, not just available but encouraged, but I soon got my heart set on this trio)....