Dinner’s on Heston: Fat Duck chef makes a grand entrance to London February 28, 2011 Dinner by Heston Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge, SW1X 7LA Tel: 020 7201 3833 FOOD SERVICE ATMOSPHERE Cost per person without wine: XXX LEARNING that Heston’s new restaurant was to be called Dinner, I grimaced and sneered. How pretentious! Plain old Dinner indeed – this from the man behind snail porridge and yam flakes [...]
Where to book if you’re planning the ultimate honeymoon February 27, 2011 Jade Mountain, St Lucia JADE Mountain is about the most spectacularly situated hotel in the Caribbean. Facing out across a bay towards the Pitons, St Lucia’s iconic pair of dramatically steep mountains, it hangs against the side of a jungle-covered mountain like an eagle’s nest. Some nest. The rooms – or “sanctuaries” as they are [...]
Dragons eating up a hoard of black gold January 24, 2011 THE Chinese dragon continues to eat up fuel. Chinese demand for oil hit another record high in December, climbing to 9.618m barrels a day – an annualised increase of 19.9 per cent. At least partly as a result, the price of crude oil has climbed up significantly over the last few months, with Brent crude [...]
Dragons eating up a hoard of black gold January 24, 2011 THE Chinese dragon continues to eat up fuel. Chinese demand for oil hit another record high in December, climbing to 9.618m barrels a day – an annualised increase of 19.9 per cent. At least partly as a result, the price of crude oil has climbed up significantly over the last few months, with Brent crude [...]
Rising commodity prices have further to go February 6, 2011 FOR two weeks our headlines and television sets have been dominated by Egypt. Prior to the scenes in Tahrir Square, all eyes were on Tunisia; contagion is spreading across the Middle East. So what role did rising food costs play in pushing the region to the brink? And how can citizens be expected to understand [...]
It’s time for the City to stop ignoring Brussels January 19, 2011 DID we not learn anything from the great British fridge fiasco? You remember those surreal months, when TV bulletins lead every night with the giant fridge mountains swamping the countryside, growing by the hour. And it was all because Britain sent a junior official into the Brussels lion’s den, and his London bosses not only [...]
Only a dribbling loon would buy a green laptop February 28, 2011 SONY knew it had to up its game for the new range of Vaio laptops. It’s consumer division is struggling and those pesky people at Apple have just launched another shiny new device carved out of a single block of solid gold, featuring a beacon like the Bat Sign that broadcasts into space the fact [...]
FREW STEPS UP FOR THE 30 PER CENT CLUB CAUSE February 3, 2011 GOOD news – of a kind. The 30% Club has finally found a female chairman to join its ranks. For those not au fait with the club’s goings-on, it was founded to pursue the “aspiration” of getting boards at the UK’s top companies to be at least 30 per cent female by 2015. While the [...]
WHISKY, JAZZ, AND BETTING ON THE EURO February 16, 2011 WITH whisky tasting, a jazz band and the chance to win a sports car for the weekend on offer, WorldSpreads winter party (definitely not just a late Christmas do) was the place to be in the City on Tuesday night. Held in a candlelit crypt underneath St Etheldreda’s church near Chancery Lane, the night saw [...]
Israel’s land of plenty January 23, 2011 “WOW,” says my (non-Jewish) friend. “Whenever you’ve banged on about how gorgeous Israeli men are, I always thought you were just being biased. But you weren’t. They are. This is madness.” Olivia and I are one-and-a-half hours off our brilliantly Israeli El Al flight – think warm bread rolls, smoked salmon, mid-aisle prayer, non-stop gossiping [...]