The food game is a vicious business, littered with spectacular failures and well-intentioned enterprises that don’t quite last the distance. Restaurants come and go, sometimes suddenly, sometimes after a period of stagnation, slipping into an unstoppable downward spiral of cut corners, tatty interiors, tired service and crappy food. Harry Ramsden’s at Guiseley typified this type [...]
You know those times when a restaurant creates a bit of a buzz about it? How it gets mentioned often on twitter and facebook and blogged about endlessly? That makes me nervous. There are plenty of places that don’t live up to their hype, plenty of places that just have good PR people cooking up [...]
Remember the other week I wrote about trekking all over Rome to find a pizzeria late at night? The same thing happened the next evening, too, when we yomped across the city to a closed-down restaurant, complete with tumbleweed rolling past the door. Luckily, I’d idly canvassed some twitter opinion on decent restaurants when I [...]
The community of very decent coffee shops in Leeds seems to be expanding all the time. Good indies are still outnumbered by the Faceless Chains, but you don’t have to walk far these days to get the real deal. Brewbar Espresso takes a bit of effort to get to, not because it’s out of the [...]
We’d travelled a long way, and when we arrived in Rome, it was late, right in the middle of that strange hinterland where the kids flick from being wide awake and excited to worn-out zombies within a couple of seconds. Not feeding them properly helps to hasten the transformation, so we strode out into Trastevere [...]