Life in your hands: smartphone apps September 28, 2011 RIGHT, you’ve got the latest kit, the iPhone 4, iPad 2, BlackBerry Bold Touch perhaps, but your smartphone’s home screen is looking ever-so bare. Remedying this involves a trawl through app stores and user reviews without even knowing what you’re looking for. Fear not. We look beyond the social necessities of Facebook and Foursquare, and [...]
WESTFIELD AT STRATFORD: OUR PICK OF THE SHOPS September 13, 2011 CLOTHES & ACCESSORIES ASPINAL OF LONDON The second standalone shop for this affordable heritage brand, Aspinal has a plum position at the start of the Street, and is a wonderfully windowy space, glinting with cufflinks, jewels and charms and full of its signature bright croc skin bags and wallets. FOREVER 21 There were nearly 400 [...]
THREE OTHER RESTAURANTS WITH FORAGED AND ORGANIC PRODUCE July 25, 2011 PETERSHAM NURSERIES CAFE The only garden centre cafe with a Michelin star, Petersham uses ingredients from the nurseries themselves to draw on. Dishes such as red and golden beetroot with heirloom tomatoes, marjoram and purple basil, and sardines with spinach, shaved fennel, rocket and sauce vierge are among chef Skye Gyngell’s creations. Church Lane, TW10 [...]
Celebrate Big Food: Our diet is cheaper, richer and more nutritious than ever before October 12, 2011 BIG Food is widely regarded as the polar opposite of good food. Big food companies, we are told by campaigners and celebrity chefs, produce poor quality, waistline-busting, environment-wrecking, small-farmer-bankrupting products. The supermarkets allegedly destroy communities to sell rubbish to zombified shoppers. Industrial agriculture gives us nutrient-lite, flavourless, chemical-soaked food produced in a shockingly wasteful manner. [...]
The Malaysian chateau where bodysculpting gets serious October 9, 2011 ON ARRIVAL in my spa suite at Malaysia’s new all-organic destination spa, I was pleasantly surprised to find a note on the pillow reading: “Chocolate is an elixir of life. Scientists from Harvard University say that eating a couple of chocolate bars a week could extend your life by almost a year.” By day two, [...]
A drink with the master of UK entrepreneurship June 19, 2011 LUKE Johnson is a man who takes a while to introduce. He seems to have run, or had his hand in running, half of the middle-class high street. Pizza Express, Giraffe, Patisserie Valerie, Belgo, Strada, Feng Sushi, Baker and Spice, the Signature Restaurants that owned The Ivy and Le Caprice – to name a few. [...]
Make like Bond with an Aston in the Alps August 21, 2011 AMERICAN novelist Mark Twain wrote that rambling in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland was incomparable to any opiate, legal or otherwise. Imagine the rush, then, to be booming an Aston Martin V8 Vantage S round the picturesque, vertiginous Alpine passes, past crystal-clear glacier lakes and verdant valleys where cow bells jangle for miles. I’ve been let loose [...]
Social and delicious in one | City A.M. June 23, 2011 THERE are restaurants that open with whimpers and others that open with bangs. Ex-Ramsay super-protégé Jason Atherton’s new eaterie, Pollen Street Social, was always going to open with a bang – and, two months in, continues with a clamour. The clamour is not of chaos, plates smashing or chefs shouting, but of the throngs trying [...]
Social and delicious in one June 22, 2011 THERE are restaurants that open with whimpers and others that open with bangs. Ex-Ramsay super-protégé Jason Atherton’s new eaterie, Pollen Street Social, was always going to open with a bang – and, two months in, continues with a clamour. The clamour is not of chaos, plates smashing or chefs shouting, but of the throngs trying [...]
RAMSAY COOKS UP A PROFIT June 1, 2011 GORDON Ramsay shrugged off the acrimonious sacking of his father-in-law Chris Hutcheson last October to post an overall return to profit for his companies yesterday. Cost cuts and the sale of Boxwood Cafe pushed pre-tax profit at Gordon Ramsay Holdings to £2.05m in the year to August 2010, from £0.57m in 2009, although sales fell [...]