Food & Drink

London in Bits
A conversation with London food writer, Jonathan Nunn
Well, we almost made it to the end of 2021 without interviewing another Substack writer, but today we’re ending that trend, and for good reason. Jonathan Nunn has been writing about London and food for a long time. His writing for Eater London ranges from articles on…
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London in Bits
A 'belly up' history of London
Charlie Taverner is a writer and historian, who lives in North London and currently works at Trinity College Dublin. His first book, Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London was published last week by Oxford University Press. As you might expect, it’s a richly researched history book that, as Charlie puts it, “tells an unusual story of the city's history and also makes us think about the stories that we tell about our own city.” But it’s also a book that might help guide our future, by “inspiring us to eat differently, and be more aware of where our food comes from and who the people are that are delivering it to us…
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London in Bits
New Restaurant Review Roundup 2022
In case you missed last Monday’s issue, we are currently in the process of trawling through the all the restaurant openings we’ve told you about in the last 10 months, to see which of them are worth paying a visit to. Just to recap the rules: They have to be restaurants we’ve mentioned in the newsletter; the reviews have to come from publications that actually write reviews, not just puff pieces in return for free grub; and if Giles Coren has reviewed somewhere for…
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London in Bits
New Restaurant Review Roundup 2022
Around this time last year we went back through all the Weekend Roundups to see which restaurant openings we’d told you about and then went and found all the reviews we could of those place, to see if they were actually worth a trip or not. That seemed to go down pretty well, so this year we’re doing it again. This Monday and next we’re going to check in on fifteen or so places that opened in 2022 to see if they live up to the hype…
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London in Bits
Tales of a takeaway kid
At the end of May we visited the South London Zine Fest at Deptford Does Art, the wonderful gallery, shop and bar on Deptford High Street. One of the zines we saw at the festival was 明Ming Hai海, a very personal history of a family-run Chinese takeaway…
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London in Bits
A guide to proper picnicking
This is a paid-subscriber only edition of London in Bits. If you want to continue reading this issue and access the archive of paywalled articles, please subscribe for £5/month or £50/year below. You can also sign up for a free trial…
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London in Bits
New Restaurant Review Roundup: Part One
Over the past few months we’ve featured a lot of new restaurant news, but until now we’ve not really had chance to go back and see if any of them have turned out to be any good or not. As more and more people venture out to eat in rooms where other people are also eating, we thought we’d do a roundup of some of the places we’ve mentioned in past issues. Consider this your handy guide to London’s new restaurants of 2021 (so far…
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London in Bits
New Restaurant Review Roundup: Part Two
Welcome to the second part of our guide to London’s new restaurants of 2021, in which we go back and check in on some of the openings we’ve covered in the past six months to see if they turned out to be any good or not. In Part One we reviewed floating cheese, spicy thighs and boozy honeybears. In today’s edition we tackle posh Nandos, funky wine and Batman-based immersive dining…
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London in Bits
A conversation with urban winemaker, Sergio Verrillo
This is a paid-subscriber only edition of LiB. If you’re receiving this as a full issue then thank you very much for supporting independent writing about London. If you’re not a subscriber already and you want to read the full thing, please subscribe for £5/month or £50/year…
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London in Bits
Is a 'return to normal' going to be good enough for the hospitality industry?
Boiling Point, which was released earlier this month, is the new film by the British director (and ex-chef) Philip Barantini. Here’s the trailer…
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London in Bits
Is this the end for one of London's most beloved institutions?
Last week, the restaurant firm Corbin & King was ‘plunged’ into administration (because you don’t just ‘go’ into administration, you ‘plunge’ into it, or you at least ‘fall’). Why should you care about this? Well, Chris Corbin and Jeremy King own The Wolseley…
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London in Bits
We ask food writer Helen Graves 'Where Do You Go?'
Every now and again we like to ask people for their personal take on London. We get them to tell us the places in the city that they turn to for different reasons: the spots that excite them, inspire them, make them feel calm, happy or just make them want to spend money. We call it …
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