london restaurants

I live really near there - I should go along sometime for sure.

I was at Raw Duck recently enough and it was good - better than I remember the Soho one.

I went to A Wong in Feb also and it is really really good but you're right there's not much in the way of good drinks afterwards (there are a couple of alright pubs in Pimlico but nothing incredible, I enjoyed the cocktail I had downstairs in A Wong before I ate, fwiw).

i've been keen to go there for ages, i used to work in smith square nearby but my colleagues weren't really into food.

may just revive a long-time friday tradition of queen's head followed by chilli cool as my cousin works in king's cross.

I went to the Typing Rooms in Bethnal Green a couple of months ago, which is a restaurant clearly gunning for Michelin star status but sort of falling short. Some of the early courses and desserts were astonishing but it also failed to realise that the key to really first class cooking is BALANCE. One dish went way overboard on spring onions, another was basically a bit of burnt cauliflower.

Good cocktail bar, mind, even if mine was served with a piece of dried bacon on the glass.

i prefer satan's whiskers across the road - as far as the bars go. never been to the typing room.

I went to Padella, the Trullo people's pasta bar, the other week. Was good, didn't break the bank.

Was it super-busy?

Dying to go there.

Yeah it was, ish. The queue looked bad but took... ~25mins? before we were seated. That was on a tues night, though i think it was just after there'd been a good review in one of the weekend papers. We were downstairs- was laid out quite like the downstairs in trullo.

every detail emerging from this byron immigration story is even more grim and cruel

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/28/it-was-a-fake-meeting-byron-hamburgers-staff-on-immigration-raid

Yeah I'm never going there again.

Mostly shit burgers anyway.

Any employer of the size of Byron knows full well that there are ways through which they can check people's immigration status BEFORE they hire them. Either they knew full well they were employing illegal immigrants and still sold them out or they had a vested interest in looking the other way and not doing really basic due diligence. Or they were incompetent and just didn't bother. None of these reflect well on them at all.

wasn't it bought by some evil megachain a while back? it's depressingly ubiquitous now - i don't have a prob with chains but nobody needs that many of anything, it becomes a visual blight.

didn't mention it here but if any of you are in chinatown looking for an unhealthy and cheap treat, i really recommend bigbe chicken - it's taiwanese fried chicken, pretty big portions for a fiver with a stool or two if you don't have a place to take it away to. they have about 10 different powdered condiments, like chilli plum salt or whatever, i rest my case.

Any employer of the size of Byron knows full well that there are ways through which they can check people's immigration status BEFORE they hire them.

Aren't they legally obliged to?
https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work
idk there might be exceptions for some industries.

gov keen to prove their pro-business chops

this tory government longtime byron fans i seem to recall

Checking immigration status isn't as easy as all that. This is the part of the guidance:

Check

the documents are genuine, original and unchanged and belong to the person who has given them to you
the dates for the applicant’s right to work in the UK haven’t expired
photos are the same across all documents and look like the applicant

To the best of my knowledge, there are only two members of the Metropolitan police (out of 50k employees) who are able to visually confirm whether a passport is fake or genuine. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do - and most border guards can't do it either. That's one of the main reasons passports and other ID documents went biometric.

It's also virtually impossible for someone without extensive training to visually confirm whether a person standing in front of them is definitely the person in the photo on their documents. You can look for tell-tale signs like the shape of the ears and the distance between the eyes but if my cousin from Trinidad looks extremely similar to me (or the version of me in my 2012 passport photo) there's pretty much no way to tell.

You can also, i think, use a genuine photo ID and a fake letter giving indefinite leave to remain and a right to work, etc.

It's possible they were very slack but it's also a challenging thing for businesses to keep on top of and i don't particularly support the move (from the government to some extent, but also from the public) towards a kind of strict liability where the employer is assumed to always either be lazy or crooked, particularly given the disproportionate focus on immigrant-run businesses.

there are only two members of the Metropolitan police (out of 50k employees) who are able to visually confirm whether a passport is fake or genuine

surely they can teach other people "the gift"? pretty crazy stuff...

It's an extremely specialised craft - pretty much every national passport in the world has a different format and security features. If you don't know what that shadowing in the microtext on a Lithuanian passport looks like, etc, etc, you can't be sure whether a good fake is a good fake. It's also hard to tell whether genuine documents that present as accurate have been tampered with. It's like being an expert in art forgery.

Expecting business, universities, landlords, etc to be able to do this without access to central databases they can cross reference information with, is kind of ridiculous.

There are companies (with ex Met staff) who can train people to spot obvious forgeries and can, in some cases, offer an expensive verification service but it's not going to be standard across any businesses.

Fair enough - fundamentally the blame here lies with the govt but this is May's Britain now.

decided to go to noble rot bar tonight, in the end.

Good choice, we had a v fine meal there (in the resto rather than the bar but whatevs) a few weeks ago, and swore we'd go back.

A place for breakfast/brunch around Oxford Circus that isn't too crazily expensive? My impression of the area is it's either that or trashy chains...

quo vadis.

http://www.quovadissoho.co.uk/wp-content/files_mf/1468937124BreakfastMenu19072016.pdf

I know I'm a bit of a Koyabot on this thread but the couple of times I've brunched in Koya Bar it's been outstanding.

A few weeks ago I was in desperate need of a greasy breakfast in the area, and the Little Portland Café on Little Portland Street did the job in an entirely unsurprising and satisfactory way; plus across the way D0n L3tts was eating a bacon sandwich while consulting his Filofax. I noticed that he left the crusts.

princi is really terrific for casual brunching

riding house café also v good

(both soho obv)

than you oh London restaurant thread denizens for the Pidgin recommendation, I went there with the other half last Friday and it was superb

Mmmm time I went back there.

I've just found out I'm going for lunch next week at 8 Hoxton Square, which had some decent reviews in 2014. Anyone been recently?

i was last there like a year ago - i liked it - it's sort of spanish tapas. i've been there two or three times and it was good each time, so hopefully still good.

of course few of you will believe me and fewer still will even consider venturing that way but Sidcup - yes, Sidcup - is home, since March, to one of the best Italian restaurants I've been to in London, Cinquanta. not only fresh ingredients, endless wine list and good service but they took a few well-judged risks with their food and all of it wound up exquisite. there were two couples in there the entire night, albeit on a bank holiday. it really ought to be constantly full - 'hidden gem' doesn't really do it justice. Sidcup! and to think we went there on a hunch en route back from golfing at st mary cray

I'm at a conference at KCL (on the Strand) next week, and I will have to take some people out to dinner a few times in the early evenings afterwards. I've hardly eaten out in the centre of town in ages - does anyone have any suggestions of good places for 2-6 people in the area spanned by Soho/Covent Garden/South Bank that will not break the bank (say 30 quid/head max) and either take bookings or won't require queuing for hours?

Great Queen Street is an old reliable.

RSJ on the South Bank is pretty good in a was that was v fashionable (I guess) 25 years ago but is less so now, ie (what was once) modern European with a clear French accent, you'd need to get the set menu to achieve yr price ceiling.

Polpo on Maiden Lane might do you, that's within easy stumbling distance of King's... dunno what the waiting time is like these days, obviously that's always tricky with bigger groups.

We very much enjoyed the Korean / fried chicken / beer stylings of Chee Mc on the Walworth Road the other day, but that is not really apropos of your question Toby.

Brasserie Zedel, really fancy and not expensive. I think they take bookings.

Delaunay is closer to King's but probably dearer.

Great Queen Street is good though they seem a bit more expensive now and £30 might be optimistic.

Baltic near Waterloo is meant to be pretty good.

I work on The Strand and it isn't easy to find great places.

Baltic's OK but I don't adore it (it maybe used to be better or maybe my tastes have changed); don't feel like it's appreciably cheaper than GQS.

Thanks all - this is a good start! Have been meaning to do Polpo and Zedel since they opened, and haven't been to GQS in about 8 years, so those all sound like good options. Had never heard of RSJ, will investigate.

Yeah Zedel is excellent value for money and feels really fancy even if you're not breaking the bank. You can do that in the American Bar upstairs instead.

Imago, I have passed on your recommendation of Cinquanta to an acquaintance who lives in Sidcup. I will visit myself at some point.

Has anyone come across anything of value in the Medway towns? As tempting as the buffet at Spoon World in Chatham looks there surely must be a few places better.

Thai Four Two on Rochester High Street was surprisingly pleasant a couple of years ago.

Thanks. That's one of the places there I haven't tried yet. It does always seem fairly busy, which is probably a good sign.

slight abuse of the title of this thread but anyone know anywhere nice to eat in birmingham?

i'm in telford with work for a week next week but staying in birmingham sunday night.

i'm assuming there's nothing much around telford so i anticipate a week of eating in nandos or my hotel, or maybe a taxi to a pub somewhere if there are nice ones in the surrounding villages.

I would have said Dosa Mania in Harbourne but according to Trip Advisor it's plummeted over the last couple of months. Purnell's is good value fine dining, especially the taster menu. Adam's is maybe the best fine dining option. The Wilderness had a good rep when it was still called Nomad but I haven't been there. There's a good Ethiopian in the Jewellery Quarter (Blue Nile?) and actually Chinatown is really solid, there aren't that many bad options (and Chung Ying and Cafe Soya are probably the picks).

Clays in Brosley might be the best place in/near Telford. Apart from that there are a couple of OK Indians and I think the Thai is all right maybe?

Thanks a lot! Chinatown sounds like a good bet for Birmingham. Yeah Telford looks slim pickings, I'm staying in a Park Inn, but there is a cinema nearby so that might be a way to spend my evenings.

Your options around the Park Inn are pretty much 100% chains.

yeah so it appears. I might hop in a taxi one night, an ex-colleague works in the HMRC building there. I could have stayed away from Telford but I'd rather walk to the place where I'm working.