British

Riding House Café is a wonderful brunch restaurant. Located north of Oxford Circus on the corner of Riding House street and Great Thichfield Street it offers wonderful classic breakfast dishes before 12 and after 12 serves lunch specialties (at lunch you can chose smaller plates and share them or a bigger plate just for yourself).

I went to Riding House Café for brunch/ breakfast, and we had a table booked for 5 of us for 10.45, as there was no later table. This place is very popular and you can either book a table (half of the tables there they let you book), but you need to book a lot in advance as these tables get taken very quickly or you can just turn up and try to occupy one of the walk-in tables but chances are you will have to wait around 1h for them.

John Salt is a pub in Islington (no idea if it is named after the English artist called John Salt) and late last year a new chef, Ben Spalding, was invited to cook food there. After only a few months during which he attracted a lot of positive reviews, he suddenly left and now the main chef is Neil Rankin. Neil used to work in Pitt Cue Co in Soho, the amazing meat restaurant, and people say he has an obsession to grill things which you can see in some of the dishes he creates in John Salt. All their fish comes from Newlyn Fish Market, meat from Warren & Sons in Cornwall and greens from Keveral Farm (on the menu they even have a dish called “Keveral Salad” which just has greens from this farm)

Mark Hix has 8 restaurants these days (btw we apparently saw him during this meal, my lunch buddy Dom recognized him and pointed him out to me and he looked quite scruffy but in a trendy way) and the restaurant named after his surname, Hix (located in Soho) was the second restaurant he opened in 2009. Mark Hix is a famous chef and worked in Caprice for 17 years and after he left he opened his first restaurant Hix Oyster & Chop House in Smithfield, and he is known for his original take on British gastronomy. Hix boasts Mark Hix’s signature daily-changing menu of seasonal British food. And downstairs is the famous Mark’s bar which has great cocktails apparently, but which I did not try on this occasion.

This is a quite a new restaurant in Edinburgh, that only opened in July 2010 but it has already managed to get 1 Michelin star and also been ranked as a top 100 place to eat in the UK, and is a sister restaurant to another famous Scottish restaurant The Kitchen. The main chef is Scottish and his name is Dominic Jack and the restaurant serves modern British cuisine influenced by French cooking techniques (so fairly standard Michelin restaurant in the UK) and using Scottish produce. Dominic Jack has worked in one of my favourite restaurants in the world l’Arpège in Paris, but unfortunately I did not see much influence from l’Arpege when I went to Castle Terrace nevertheless it was a very enjoyable meal.

I had quite low expectations for this place and it was much better than I thought. Corrigan’s Mayfair used to be ranked quite highly by the Hardens guide (and was awarded London Restaurant of the Year by the Evening Standard) but in the recent years the Hardens guide has taken a view that it has gone down in quality, so I was not expecting much, but I had a wonderful meal there. The main chef at Corrigan’s Mayfair is Richard Corrigan who is Irish, and besides Corrigan’s Mayfair also owns Bentley's Oyster Bar and Grill (the funny looking Mitsubishi tire building 5min away from South Ken station) and Bentley's Sea Grill in Harrods, and is a very famous chef and has gained a Michelin star (first time in 1994 when he was the head chef of Stephen Bull) as well as cooked for the Queen and won the contest the Great British Menu. Richard Corrigan opened Corrigan’s Mayfair in 2008, and I went there for lunch on a wednesday.