The short list.
Six restaurants for the first cold week of October.
London's best editorial dining guide. Honest reviews, stubborn opinions, a brass-hairline rule between every course.
The short list
Bar Gemella
A small Italian wine bar on Lexington Street that takes walk-ins until nine. Three marble tables, a short list, and a clear point of view ab...
Kiln
Ben Chapman's tiny Thai counter on Brewer Street is still the best bowl of clay-pot noodles in London. Walk in at the counter; book ahead fo...
Noble Rot
The original Lamb's Conduit Street wine bar remains London's best place to drink well, eat seriously and hear yourself think through a bottl...
Where to eat, by area
"The best meal I ate last week was half a plate of cured mackerel at a bar in Soho. I am confident nobody involved was trying."
There is a kind of restaurant that has, over the last five years, become impossible to book and impossible to enjoy in equal measure. You know the one. It is small, it is loud, it is entirely lit by filament bulbs and a sense of its own arrival. The plates are heavy. The staff are thin. The dishes are so determinedly of-the-moment that you can feel them ageing while you eat.
This is not a guide to those places. Vivi is a guide to the places you will eat at twice. Some will be new. Some will be older than you are. Most will be somewhere in between. What they share is a point of view - a cook who knows what a dish should taste like, a front-of-house who knows when to walk over, a wine list that doesn't try to teach you a lesson.
Read us in the middle of the week, not first thing on Saturday. Plan accordingly.
By Clara Whitfield / Editor
The art of the bottomless brunch.
Twenty years ago this did not exist. Now it is a Saturday institution. We tell you where it is done well, where it is done cynically, and why you should always book for the first sitting.
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