rjs1

Sorry we had to relocate Glas, but we are getting more than twice as many covers on the old Lola's site as we had in Borough Market, so hopefully it will be a worthwhile move. Question is, how can one persuade Ms Maschler not to come in too early? Haven't tried Franklins, but I used to live two doors from Mr & Mrs Franklin's house in Stockwell nearly twenty years ago and ate far better in their kitchen than in any local restaurant then, so it could be good.

My host on my last visit was back there this afternoon, and says that the flights were £20 and £25. He also said that while our lunch for two in August was £200, lunch today for four was £300.

Before 'New China' he was head chef of 'China House' which is now The Wolseley. Felix, by the way, is still around - he was promoted to General Manager. ← Only ate at China House once, but it was really bad. Was he there throughout its existence? ←

A little late in the day, I know, but Fortnums and Masons stock a small selection of verjus. I had no luck in many many other London shops. ← They used to stock Maggie Beer's verjus at Sainsburys in Ladbroke Grove - probably still do.

Errr, Aberdeen Angus Steak House, mate? ← Didn't Aberdeen Angus Steakhouses go bust at one point?

where's the proposed site matt? french food fashionable again ← It's West Street, Covent Garden, the old East@West site, isn't it? Went past a few days ago and work was progressing.

Neals Yard wraps the cheese in waxed paper then packs it in strong cardboard boxes lined with wood shavings for both insulation and protection from bruising. My wife just took a couple of kilos of cheddar and stilton in this packaging by plane to Ghana and it survived the journey perfectly (I guess it's pretty cold in an aircraft hold anyway). Getting cheese through customs can be harder; I nearly got arrested by security staff leaving Pisa once when the sniffer dogs went mad at the smell of gorgonzola in my hand luggage.

Seashell: good but not great, I think.

Had lunch at Benares today. There was a £20 three course lunch menu, which offered two choices at each course and looked very acceptable. However, we were tempted away by the a la carte. Starters (£12.95 each) were hit & miss; soft shell crab salad had subtle spicing, but scallop and tiger prawn salad was terrible; just two scallops and two prawns for £12.95, and the scallops did not taste particuarly fresh. Service was also chaotic (though friendly) at this point; breads didn't arrive but rice did (not ideal with salads...), and despite several requests to desist the waiters kept trying to fill our glasses. I was being entertained by a wine merchant who found this quite infuriating. Then everything improved rapidly. The lamb chops (£24) were about the best thing I've ever eaten in an Indian restaurant, and are apparently much favoured by Gordon Ramsay. They were very tender, beautifully marinaded and cooked on charcoal, served with a pomegranate, green bean and feta salad. The pulao rice came back from the kitchen and proved to be perfect. The wine merchant had lamb rump with chickpeas, which he said was excellent but a little spicy for his taste. Breads (plain nan and potato & herb nan) were as you would expect at a top-end Indian restaurant. Puddings were a yogurt cheesecake (dense, but the yogurt stopped it from being cloying) and a duo of kulfis (mango and pistachio) - and I passed on the chocolate sauce which was meant to accompany these. Good, but overpriced at £7.50. We drank a Riesling Kabinett from the Rheingau which worked with the whole meal. Interestingly, the lady (ex-Roast) who does the wine list told us that until she arrived there was no Alsasce, German or Austrian wine on the list, which seems crazy given the cuisine. The bill was just under £160 for two including service, which I thought was high given that we had only had one bottle of wine, but you could have lunch here for half that. I'd go back, but at these prices I'd stick to the lunch menu. There were very few other people lunching, so it was bad luck to be near a dreadful couple who didn't jsut talk on a mobile but even put their daughter on speaker phone so that they could share a lenghy conversation with their daughter and the whole restaurant.

Two of us had lunch there yesterday. I should mention that Jason Atherton is a friend and he selected the dishes for us. We had: Cornish crab mayonnaise with avocado, sweetcorn sorbet & caviar: Served at just the right temperature, wonderful summer-y flavours. Sweetcorn sorbet was very powerful and I think there was just a hint of Chinese-by-association (crab & sweetcorn soup...) White onion veloute with duck ragout & cep brioche: The soup was rich but manageable in a tasting menu portion - I couldn't have coped with a full portion of this. The cep brioche was feather-light and had a very subtle flavour. Honey & soy roasted quail with foie gras and spiced pear chutney: Again, a rich dish, but the pear chutney cut through the fat perfectly. Both the foie gras and the quail were cooked exactly right. BLT - bacon & onion cream, chilled lettuce veloute, tomato gelee: I have to agree that the lettuce veloute had no flavour (spectacular colour, though), but liked the tomato jelly and loved the bacon cream (the onion was not very apparent). I think the dish is fun and almost works overall. Braised halibut, squid & cauliflower with spiced ox tail and red wine leeks: Lovely bit of meaty fish, cooked perfectly; the squid and the cauliflower didn't really register, but the ox tail and leeks were a highlight of the meal. Slow cooked Cannette with Chinese plum chutney, pomme puree and sauce hydromel: I thought that this was a bit too similar to the quail to have at the same meal. Very tender meat, but personally I can't see the point in serving duck so young. Apple and caramel trifle with cider granite and cinnamon doughtnut: Another highlight; the cider granite was just what was needed at this point as a palate cleanser, and the tartness of the apple helped dispel the fattiness of the duck we'd had just before. White chocolate & coconut panna cotta with olive caramel and white chocolate granite: Fabulous dish, and the olive added something I'm struggling to define. I'd take my chocoholic wife to Maze just for this dish. Apricot & lychee soup with Macadamia and honey wafer: The lychee was in the form of ice cubes, which I thought didn't work at all - not nice to crunch up in your mouth, and you'd have to wait for ages for them to melt and contribute anything to the soup (in any case, the delicacy of the lychee would be lost given the intensity of the apricot flavour). Overall, some wonderful flavours and eye-opening combinations, but I'd have liked more fish and less meat at lunch in August. Service was both sweet and skillful, and the sommeliers were enthusiastic and knowledgable. We had champagne, then a "flight" consisting of a Condrieu, an Alsace Gewurtztraminer from Michel Wust (I think) and a Tempranillo from Ribera del Duoro, then a Rosso di Montalcino, and finally a really nice dessert wine about which I am ashamed to say I can remember very little. I wasn't the host, but I think that the bill for two was just over £200 including service; we were drinking good wine in good quantities over a long lunch (I was with a lawyer who was celebrating finishing a tricky deal), but I guess one could eat well and drink acceptably for a little over £120 for two including service. My impression is that Maze is a lot more expensive than it used to be, but worth it. Hate the decor, though, and the designer should be made to sit on one of the uncomfortable banquettes until he learns the error of his ways.

At Borough Market this morning I noticed that Fish on Bedale St are fitting out what was Loco for what they claim will be an outlet only doing fish and chips and doing them well. We'll see.

Liberty Wine will sell retail as I have bought from them before - but their website is not very retail oriented. Best to email them for a copy of their list and then choose what you want. ← Problem is that generally their minimum order is 6 or 12 bottles of any given wine (depending on case size), so not much use if you want a mixed case of 12. ←

IMHO the best wine merchants in London for Italian wine are Liberty and Enotria, but unfortunately neither of them has retail premises. You might try The Winery (www.thewineryuk.com/00 44 20 7286 6475), which has a really interesting selection and where the staff would certainly rise magnificently to the challenge. I checked this afternoon and their Italian selection is small, but they do have some Californian wines made from Italian varietals (e.g. Rabbit Ridge Barbera, and of course Zinfandel more or less equals Primitivo), which could be a fun variation, especially if it's a gift from the US. They're about to get in some Wild Hog, a Californian "garage wine", too. Germany is their main strength. Prices reflect the quality and limited supply of most of the wines, but I would have thought that if you wanted to spend an average of, say, £15 a bottle, they would deliver the goods.

David Selex' food at the Sugar Club was sometimes quite wonderful, so Mews could be great. Can we have a separate thread for it, please?

If you thought England lost the Sweden v Germany game, the beer must have been quite something.

I'd argue that the reverse is true, given downstairs is non smoking. I'll take overcrowding over fumigation every time. ← I agree with you in principle, but downstairs at Andrew Edmunds is claustrophobic and will be like the Black Hole of Calcutta in this weather, whereas upstairs has to be one of Soho's nicest spaces. Answer is perhaps to get one of the tables by the door and only inhale when facing outside? When I lived nearby there were also two tiny outside tables on the street, although in those days you had to share the pavement with about five people shooting up and leaving the syringes in the gutter (don't know what it's like now). (

I think that the beer isn't yet brewed on site, but that it is brewed specially for Brew Wharf and some of it is excellent. I tried the whole range, and while my recollections are a little hazy for obvious reasons, I seem to remember a rasberry flavoured cloudy beer that would definately hit the spot in a heatwave.

The wine list at Andrew Edmunds is a model of what a wine bar list should be like, and very good value at that. However, you need to make sure that you book well in advance and absolutely insist on a table upstairs - downstairs is a dreadful space.

The PR spin when he was at Pied a Terre was that he was so into the job that he was at the markets early every morning selecting the produce himself. But perhaps he went to fewer society bashes in those days?

Keeps the peas on the knife.

No one seems to have suggested Zaika. Last ate there about a year ago, when Sanjay Dwivedi was just back in the kitchen from opening Deya. We found Zaika wonderul on that occasion, although to be fair this may have been becasue it was a wine matching special with a nine-course tasting menu. Details like chutneys and breads were particularly pleasing. Might be worth trying for lunch, when they do a good value set menu. Has anyone been more recently?

Menu 1 is certainly L'Anis - we had that snail and garlic mash just about every visit. Allegra Mcevedy (sp?) was actually at that site (as "The Good Cook", I think) before Cuisine Collection bought the lease and essentially moved the Frith Street Restaurant team there to trade as L'Anis. It went straight from being L'Anis to being Zaika under the same ownership when Jason Atherton went to Dubai for Grodon Ramsay and Zaika moved to Kensington High Street from Fulham Road.