Restaurants – let’s eat chic – Page 2

High Tea with G&T at Le Meridien Piccadilly

High Tea is a quintessentially English tradition, introduced by Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, to maintain one’s aristocratic blood sugar levels between an early luncheon and dinner served late into the evening. The tradition caught on rapidly, developed with the Earl of Sandwich’s then-revolutionary idea to place fillings between slices of bread, and is now…

A London Art-U-Cation with Le Meridien at Frieze

A luxury hotel, lashings of fine dining and a whirlwind of contemporary art? Chez Epicurienne, that’s what I call a killer combination that I’d be happy to dive into on any day of the week. Courtesy of the Le Méridien hotel group, I was recently invited to partake of just such a tantalising synthesis of…

My Favourite City – at MetroMarks

My New Best Friend on the other side of The Pond is Adam Zettler of MetroMarks. He’s recently launched a regular feature called My Favourite City on the MetroMarks website, where you can find all sorts of insider info about an ever-growing number of cities around the world. They kicked off My Favourite City with a post about Toronto,…

Les Fleurs du Thym restaurant, Les Sables d’Olonne

It’s hot, the heat has fried any sort of decision-making mechanism that Monsieur and I might once have possessed, and we’re hungry. The afternoon has been spent squeezed onto a beach with hundreds and thousands of French holidaymakers at Les Sables d’Olonne in the Bay of Biscay and we’d prefer not to spend the evening looking out at…

Les Sables d’Olonne

Monsieur and I recently found ourselves in the searing hot Vendée region of France. On arrival it was forty degrees in the shade and the land was baking. The beach beckoned, so off we set for the coast for a swim. As it was still holiday season, we knew it would be busy, but the scene that…

Still Life of Seafood, Venice, Italy

Isn’t this a delicious display of seafood? Ready to lick the screen? I am.

A Taste of Tavolara

It’s hard to imagine an island of 5 square kilometers becoming a kingdom on the whim of a royal visitor, yet that’s exactly what happened to tiny Tavolara, off the east coast of Sardinia. When King Charles Albert of Sardinia visited Tavolara in 1836, he bestowed independent royal status upon it and decreed that resident…

To Bellini or Not to Bellini – at Harry’s Bar, Venice

It’s hard to conceive of a Venice without Harry’s Bar. Opened in 1931 by former hotel barman, Giuseppe Cipriani, it’s found a stone’s throw away from St Mark’s Square, looking directly out at the beginnings of the Grand Canal. Calle Vallaresso, at the water’s end of which Harry’s Bar sits, is lined with designer stores, the likes of…

Bar Gelateria Del Molo, Porto Rotondo, Sardinia

Porto Rotondo is a place of fantasy: an artificial port and marina filled with luxe and super-boats. The one below is charming instead of the usual gin palace that’s the size of a house on water. The sad thing is that these super-vessels only get used for a few weeks each summer. The rest of the…

Newtons, Abbeville Road

Monsieur and I have been househunting in earnest of late. That means Very Busy Saturdays. We set off straight after breakfast and spend most of the day with real estate agents, checking out kitchen appliances, the direction of the sun versus garden aspect, whether windows are sash or double-glazed, finding out if there’s a chain to…

Falling for Flammekueche at Les 3 Brasseurs

It’s official: Epicurienne has discovered a new guilty pleasure: Flammekueche. Translated from Alsatian, it means ‘flame cake’. It doesn’t arrive in a flash of fire, as its name might suggest, but is in fact cooked in a wood-fired oven. In the eating, it’s not dissimilar to pizza. In the words of Blue Peter, here’s one I…

In Search of a Ciribiri pizza at Venice’s Al Profeta Pizzeria

I’m not at all averse to change, yet I do find it comforting to know that some favourite things don’t necessarily shapeshift when you turn your back for a while. When I was an intern in Venice, on a poor intern’s wage, my colleagues and I had a little black book of great places to eat…