British

The Don is one of those “old” city lunch restaurants that has been around for years and has got a loyal clientele (I think mainly the older generation that started going to Don when no other restaurants in the city were available). The Don is located close to Bank station and there is a more casual brasserie and a more formal restaurant next to it, located in a courtyard, so more secluded. We went to the more formal restaurant for lunch.

The décor in the restaurants is quite nice, there are colourful paintings (including seven original Hoyland paintings), blue long, quite comfortable chairs, white tablecloths, a standard city lunch setting. The food is modern French/ British and starters are £10 on average and main courses a bit more than £20, so standard for the city.

The Harden’s guide rated Lyle’s one of the top 10 best new restaurants of 2014, so I was always very keen to go and try it out. The owners/ chefs are James Lowe (who used to be part of The Young Turks team) and John Ogier. I booked a table 2 months before our dinner for a Saturday night and could only then get a table for 6.30, showing how popular this restaurant is. It is located in Shoreditch in between the Shoreditch House and Pizza East, and just like a lot of the surrounding restaurants has that modern, minimalistic and a bit industrial décor. The restaurant is just one room, that is not too big and there is a bar on one side of the room. We had a table booked from 6.30 to 9pm and we were running very late and arrived at 7pm (and some of our friends arrived close to 8pm) and they dealt with this very well, bringing the food quickly and not giving us too much attitude, but they were very strict about us leaving at 9pm when the next seating arrived.

Tredwell’s is the new restaurant by Marcus Wareing. In comparison to his flagship 2 Michelin star restaurant Marcus (recently renamed from Marcus Waring to Marcus), Tredwell’s does not aim to get a Michelin star and aims to serve people cheaper Marcus Waring influenced food in Covent Garden. I had read a lot of reviews of this restaurant, most of them negative. I generally thought this was because people wanted to be mean to Marcus Waring like people can to do with famous chefs, but when I went there, the restaurant had so many problems, I could see where the negative reviews were coming from.

St John is a very special restaurant. I never thought I particularly liked British food, but I absolutely loved St John and also their sister restaurant St John Bread and Wine, so these restaurants have totally changed my perception about British food. I am not alone in rating this restaurant highly, and it has been part of the 100 best restaurants in the world list for many years and has 1 Michelin star.

Gidleigh Park is a country house located in a wooden wally in Devon. It is quite hard to reach the place on a very narrow road, which is very beautiful, but apparently during the winter larger cars can’t even get there. Gidleigh Park houses a two-Michelin star restaurant with Michael Caines as the main chef (the restaurant was recently voted number 1 restaurant in the UK by the Harden’s Sunday Times Food List 2014). Gidleigh Park also has bedrooms (apparently all individual in style and design) and you can stay there for the night and then wonder in the gardens of the estate, which I saw some people doing when I was there.