For the last little while I’ve been feeling a bit adrift. So far, my early 30s have been a strange time. I’m not old but I am emphatically not young either; I feel as though I ought to have things quite a lot more nailed down; I wonder often whether it is appropriate to turn up to a work dinner with a Hello Kitty laptop case. I feel sort of stuck in a middle place, with one foot in Proper Personhood and one foot somewhere… else.

I guess this is firstly a product of living quite centrally in London and deciding that “writing professionally” is a good idea and accepting the lifestyle (and the limitations) that come with that. Secondly, though, it is a result of being pretty much the only single person among my friends, at a time when people are marrying and babying and moving in and all the rest of it. It can feel weird. It’s like you are a balloon - maybe a Disney foil balloon, from a shit stall at a funfair; say you’re Lightning McQueen - and all of the other balloons on the fairground (there’s like, Belle and Pegasus and Ursula and Mickey Mouse himself) are tied to some kid’s wrist or clutched in their clammy hands, and the kids are all pure loving the balloons - they are having a ball with their balloons - but your kid has let you go, or you somehow just got loose from the bunch, and you just float up and up and up until you get stuck in a tree for a bit, or something else undignified, looking down at the rest of them bobbing along merrily.

I say all of this not to be self-pitying (first time for everything), but rather because when you don’t necessarily have the traditional things that everyone else does to help you organise your life, you look for other stuff to provide routine and purpose - and honestly, writing Dining Out has become that for me. I love telling you all where I’ve been and what I thought of it, and I love going to the places and experiencing all of the beautiful things people are doing in the name of showing others a nice time, which is such a sincerely human thing to want to do, I can hardly bear the sweetness of it sometimes. I love the dance of the meal, the simultaneous cleverness and obviousness of it all, and the feeling that for the couple of hours when I am inside a restaurant, I am in someone else’s hands. I am not worrying about my invoices or my washing - I am just there to take part.

All of this is to say, really, that I am very grateful for the funny old situation I find myself in, which is that I go and eat my dinner somewhere and then I get to write absolute rot about it for your information and entertainment. It really has become very foundational for me, something around which I arrange my time and my thoughts - so I suppose I should shut up and actually get around to doing it now. This week, then, my subject is the newly opened, even better, 2 Fast 2 Furious version of The Sea, The Sea, on Chelsea’s Pavillion Road, which demonstrated so much of what I enjoy about all of this. We got there eventually, didn’t we?

The Sea, The Sea - a fish restaurant which prides itself on freshness and on working with rather than in spite of the catch - has just expanded into a new site very close by to the old one. This one is loads bigger, and it has a fishmonger’s shop downstairs, which I think demonstrates their real dedication to their ingredients even further.

Upstairs, however, is where the action happens - the room is bright and open, and right now, it actually smells new. The menu also reflects this newness: there is more space, so there is more opportunity for experimentation, with oysters, followed by raw fish, followed by small plates which are followed by big plates which are followed by dessert.

The first four of these sections felt designed for a bit of silliness: there was surprisingly rich langoustine and crab consomme served in cute little ceramic cups, bites of seabream and shiso so pretty that they could easily have fallen off an afternoon tea cart, a plate of cured red prawns with peas, broad beans and gooseberries arranged like a gallery installation, and more fancies that just kept coming for a while (the best were the chunks of John Dory with chewy, moreish maitaike).

I like faff as much as the next person with an extensive collection of tiny handbags - little lobster donut thing with a seaweed ribbon on its head? Absolutely, and let me get a photo of it before I eat it in one mouthful like a Scooby Snack - but what I like even more than that is confidence. There was a lot of fun to be had at The Sea The Sea, like when they wheeled out “potato ice cream served with frozen eel” (absolute nonsense and completely marvellous). It was, however, more when they just kinda stood there, folded their arms and said “bet” - via the medium of fish cookery - that I was seriously impressed.

By this I mean that the selection we were served for the main course was so simple that it was honestly sort of a flex. It was kind of like how the sexiest, most aura-enhancing thing you can wear is jeans and a white t-shirt, as long as they hang just right on your body*. In this case, there were huge hunks of burly, meaty turbot with Get Your Own Back gunge-green wild garlic sauce, and whole plaice bigger than the plates they were served on, seasoned simply - a little salt, honestly not a lot else - and grilled expertly, until you could scoop through the flesh almost like butter. There was a salad, and there were potatoes. That was the meal. You don’t serve that on one of the very first nights in your new place unless you absolutely know you’re going to crush it. As such, the chefs at The Sea, The Sea, led by Nick Marsden, seemed highly aware that they were operating at a sort of “hydraulic press”-type level from the get go.

Turbot, of course, is the Grant Mitchell of fish and therefore you are always going to be able to take a firm, meaty wedge off it. The taste was incredibly clean, though it managed to avoid totally succumbing to the garlic sauce: rather, the two flavours blended, like the harmonies in the chorus of “Islands In the Stream” when Dolly and Kenny sing it. What was particularly special - if you’ll excuse me for using words like “special” to describe fish - however, was the plaice.

Turbot is a wonderful fish but it’s also an in demand one. I’m not sure, on the other hand, how many of us are gravitating towards “plaice” on a menu as our first choice. This dish was very good evidence, however, for the fact that we should be. Blackened on the outside, the flesh came away so easily that we barely had to debone the thing: instead, because I had quickly realised how plainly brilliant it was, it took about two minutes before I was simply using the prongs of my fork to drag as much fish away from the communal plate as I could (it is insane to me that I am invited back to nice restaurants honestly). And when it came time to flip this big beast over, the second side, heavier with the butter that had sunk down through the fish, resulting in a less crisp skin, was potentially even better for its softness.

The Sea, The Sea is kind of a “get you a restaurant that can do both”-type place. There is plenty of novelty and intrigue across the menu, and while sometimes, too much of this feels like it’s masking something, here, the main courses do just very much walk the walk, too. Overall, the expansion from the old space feels totally justified: The Sea, The Sea is now an even broader church, with room for classic, loving fish cookery, and for potato and eel ice cream.

In a way, for this reason, it was a good place for me to be right now, at a time when I feel pulled in various directions regarding who I think I should be by now, and who I actually am. The Sea, The Sea does a few different things at once, very well, and so it serves as a nice reminder that this is actually entirely possible. You can be the scallop and flowering currant place, AND the simply fired plaice place; you can be the Hello Kitty laptop case person, and this does not preclude you from being the serious person elsewhere (if, that is, you want to be). Slightly insane to have gotten all this from a visit to a fish restaurant, but at this point if you’re not coming to this newsletter half-expecting this type of crap, I can’t really help you.

Thank you to Tonic Comms for a gorgeous night at The Sea, The Sea (free but thoughts my own), and my apologies for such a demonic write up.

* You can tell that Love Island is back on because I’ve started saying things like “aura” despite being 32 years old.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month.

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*I am neither, I am simply - as we have to describe the more mentally ill of my two family dogs - extremely ‘food-oriented and -motivated’.

Bar Etna

Longtime readers will know that I am very reticent to label anything “the best in London” because doing so is pointlessly buying into a ranking and optimisation culture that I disagree with (WHY do we always have to have the best pizza? What about the pretty good pizza at the cute place with the fit waiter, or at the restaurant round the corner where you go once a week for a bit of comfort? What about Pizza Go Go??? Isn’t there something to be said for fondness and familiarity over pure performance? Why does everything always have to be the best? HUH???). This said: the cheese and tomato pizza at Bar Etna is the best pizza I have ever eaten in a restaurant in London.

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As such, this week’s free post is about not one but two London restaurants - Café Deco and Auguste - because I am a cutie like that, and I might as well give you two for one considering how much of a blue arsed fly I’ve been. (If you do wanna hear about the others, sign up for Tuesday’s paid post where there will be bits on Bar Etna, Vesper and more hehe).

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These are two restaurants - one in Bloomsbury, one in London Fields - which, give or take, attract a similar sort of customer. Admittedly there are seemingly more older guys solo dining while reading newspaper supplements at Café Deco, I guess given the location and the trad-ish menu. At both dinners, though, I encountered a fair amount sunkissed young Londoners taking photos of their messy, post-meal tablescapes - largely couples or groups of girlies* in Little Tops - and generally enacting the aesthetic of London Living that TikTok likes to extol.

It’s nice, admittedly, to escape into this fantasy sometimes (not every day tube strike and financial ruin, after all), and, as I’ve written before, I find restaurants to be wonderful places to indulge fantasy. This is because for the two hours you are there, you can, in a best case scenario, kind of leave the rest of your life at the door and submit to someone else’s care and hospitality and their vision of what that looks like at its best. In many ways Café Deco and Auguste are very different places, but both are defined by a relaxed energy, and the type of obvious love and generosity that allows you to focus, for a little while, on nothing else but the experience you’re having and the people you’re with. Here’s a little about each, anyway. Also I’ve got my digital camera back so it’s over for everyone. (It’s really not).

Café Deco

Café Deco - by the former River Café and Rochelle Canteen chef Anna Tobias - is a restaurant famously defined by an insistence on simplicity and paring back. This is true of everything from the neutral, chilled out space itself, to the menu, which is known for a sort of aggressive championing of ingredients, to the point where they will serve, like, “boiled veg” as a starter, because they believe in allowing the produce to speak for itself. This attitude is of course, largely very admirable (I really do wish more places would back themselves to share it) and, unsurprisingly, it was a huge feature of the meal I ate there on Tuesday with my dear pal Tom.

The order looked something like: asparagus toasts (there is always a “toast” on the menu and it is always described as something like “A Little [Whatever the Ingredient Is] Toast”, which I find cute and charming because I’m an easy mark) > egg mayo; Parmesan > confit trout potato salad > roast chicken > mint choc chip ice cream. The Parmesan was simply: salty, toothsome Parmesan crumbled up artfully on a plate and served to us just as it was. The salad was trout, potatoes, herbs, with each ingredient firing on all cylinders; the chicken very simple, as to best flex how well-executed the cookery was.

It is, generally, food that demonstrates the very rare and difficult skill of restraint. Occasionally, this did mean that, for my Wham Bar, artificial flavouring-bred palate, the volume was turned down too low. The spring veg with my chicken, for example, lacked some of the seasoning that would have turned it technicolour, and the dish came with a quite a slight gravy or jus or whatever we’re calling it; I’d have gone nuts for, say, some wild garlic purée or something a bit bouncier in its place, because the chicken, out of which so much flavour had been coaxed, could absolutely have stood up to it.

On the whole, though, the confidence is just so rare, and the balance so brilliantly judged. My confit trout salad was oily and heavily dressed, but never once cloying on this baking hot day; and so many mint ice creams are toothpaste-y, but this one was subtle, suggesting the mint rather than punching you in the head with it, and studded with big shards of dark-ish chocolate to crunch down on.

Obviously throughout the summer there will be plenty of places catering to the lightness, freshness, and freezing cold glasses of wine we’re all looking for when it’s hot, and they will do it with varying degrees of success. A place like Café Deco, though, which is so dedicated and attuned to seasonality all year round that there’s always a bit of exactly what you fancy on the menu, even if you didn’t know you fancied it before you walked in, will always be equipped to kind of do it best of all.

Thank you so much to Gemma Bell and Co. for arranging this, I am a spoilt little bitch and I am very grateful.

Auguste

I would like to start my little chat about east London’s Auguste by simply saying: more of London’s white-tablecloth-and-little-candle restaurants should be playing the Shrek soundtrack. What I mean by beginning in this way is just to say that while you might think of Auguste as one thing on first glance - brand new Italian restaurant in a clean, neat space right by London Fields with a “Chilled Red” option on the By The Glass menu; ergo your common or garden variety Instagram spot - spending a bit of time in there actually reveals it to be quite a bit more fun and idiosyncratic than that outward appearance implies. This, I think, can only ever be a good thing.

I was interested to go to Auguste because it is no secret that it has been a bit polarising among “the food press” - this, to me, is always, always more exciting than somewhere that is getting universal love, because it often implies that a place has a point of view that not everyone is on board with. I suspected, however, that Auguste - a restaurant celebrating the regional food of Abruzzo, via charcoal cooked arrosticini and big, belly-laughing bowls of meatballs - might well be a bit of me, and for the most part, I was spot on.

The big, Abruzzo-influenced stars of the show are those arrosticini - that is, small, simple skewers of meat grilled over coal: we opted for lamb, which came tender, well-rendered, and never once chewy, with bagna cauda for dippies - but there’s a lot to admire otherwise too.

The bread is house-made and addictively malty; caramelised onion aglonotti in brodo (made with the lamb offcuts, for the Soup Heads) look like little origami swans bobbing around in the bowl, and taste… much better than that, caramelised onion being a simple-but-effective pasta filling I’d not really considered much before. The aforementioned meatballs were fully fist-sized, made with a mix of wagyu and wild boar, with all the depth and richness and oomph you’d expect from that mix. As someone who grew up with a Nonna, I’d like to consider myself something of an authority on meatballs, and these were certified bangers, as were both puddings: a kind of beautifully pure semifreddo with strawberries and olive oil, and a more full-on mascarpone tart, whose pastry gave an extremely satisfying snap, and whose layer of coffee-caramel put me into that sort of demonically possessed “I literally cannot stop eating this” mode that only the best desserts manage.

Naturally for a new restaurant, however, there were a few less solid moments. Straciatella with fired tomatoes and long, slinky peppers was too busy and oversalted, and while puttanesca salsa is kind of brilliant as an idea on paper, the delicate cured sea bream it was paired with didn’t hold its own on the plate alongside it. In some cases, then, Auguste basically has the opposite issue to Café Deco: where there are certainly dishes at that restaurant which (as mentioned) would absolutely benefit from a bit of Auguste’s two-footedness and gusto, there are definitely items here where a little pulling back would go a very long way.

This, however, is stuff that can be refined and streamlined. What you can’t learn is the sheer love of the game. Restaurants (ESPECIALLY Italian restaurants) should be a laugh: in my view, the people running them absolutely should be pulling out a couple of glasses from the freezer and sharing an amaro with their diners at the end of a meal, or indeed, getting the devil in them to the extent that they end up playing “Accidentally In Love” on the overheads. Basically what I’m saying is that the point of restaurants is a good time, and it seems that Auguste’s head chef and owner Mike Bagnall is just really skilled at offering that, and this is the important bit - the tweaks can come later. So while, as I say, this restaurant’s slightly reserved exterior might have you thinking differently, this is a place for big flavours and big fun, and I am beside myself to see how it evolves.

Thank you to Rosie and Goya Comms and the whole Auguste ~team <3

* Something I will never understand is why every glossy women’s mag doesn’t have a restaurants column, because every time I go out, particularly to new places, or places which have had a recent viral second wind or something, they are always full of young women eating in their twos, threes, and fours - this is CLEARLYYY a demographic of people for whom food and restaurants are lifestyle markers in the same way as what you wear or where you work out, and in my humble opinion, everyone is missing a trick. Anyway, unrelatedly, my DMs are always open.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month.

Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.

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As I mentioned in Sunday’s free post, I’m going to start doing weekly digests for paid subscribers, so if you’d like to know more about what I am getting up to, this is where you’ll hear about it outside the weekly free post. This week, however, because I am like Mother Teresa in my generosity, I am sending it out to everyone for free so you can get a sense of what it’ll be like going forward. As such, here it is: My Week of Gout and Indigestion, ft. incredible Thai noodles, posh Mexican food, wine happy hour. Let’s go!

KHAO SŌ-i

You know when it’s boiling and people do that annoying thing of being like “haha just have a hot drink it actually cools you down” and you do that thing of being like “please fuck off” back? Well unfortunately it seems that these pedantic freaks might actually be onto something. I say this because last Friday, on the first properly hot day of the year, I had lunch at KHAO SŌ-i in Fitzrovia, and despite the fact that the food was spicier than a group chat where all the members share a mutual enemy, I actually can’t really think of anything that I would have preferred in this weather.

Khao soi is a Northern Thai noodle dish made with egg noodles and curry broth, and this is what KHAO SŌ-i, fairly obviously, specialises in - but when I say they specialise, I mean they actually specialise. They press their own coconut milk in the basement of the restaurant (allegedly very rare in London though I’d love to hear about anywhere else where this is done!), and the herb mix that flavours the soup is precise, and relies on the importation of some ingredients. What I’m saying is that these lads are serious about soup - and considering that this is the first KHAO SŌ-i outpost outside of Asia, that is not entirely surprising.

There are a bunch of different khao soi varieties on the menu - you can go for wagyu, chicken, tofu, langoustine, ox cheek, and a load of other good sounding stuff. Each order comes on a tray: the main event is a bowl with noodles, a soup, and your protein, and then there are your extras, like fresh herbs and pickles and chilli flakes for garnish, traditional crispy noodles to chuck in and add crunch, and some additional coconut milk to cool things down if you find that you are too much of a baby for the Full Monty.

Sitting up at the counter so we could watch the chefs work (btw: Adidas shorts and a wooden stool on a hot day: don’t do it), I went with a scallop khao soi - and, by the way, a sliced scallop on top of some noodles has absolutely no right being the best cooked, softest, sweetest scallop I have eaten in months (and possibly even all year) but this one managed it - and some shared sides, and I was so impressed. Due to being quite rubblishly travelled, I’d never tried fresh coconut milk before this, and the difference between this and the regular degular stuff is quite mad: this was creamy and dimensional, managing to stand up in the flavour stakes to a complex herb mix and a lot of chilli (a lot).

The noodles were properly toothsome - chewy in the way where you have to actively chomp; slurpy in the way that makes them categorically not first date noodles - and the crispy, peppery beef makwen side was so good that I’d have eaten these long strips of sirloin like gummy worms for hours if such behaviour weren’t frowned upon.

I’d say of all the things I ate last week, this is the meal I’ve thought about the most - not least because of the glamour girl cocktails (Thai Sunset is the one to order), and the perfect desserts, which included a tea-flavoured Basque cheesecake, and a beautiful little snowball of ice cream, made from that pure, fresh coconut milk. What a fantastic place.

Thank you Connie and Crab Communications for this one, I’ll be back so soon, largely because if I don’t eat that ice cream again I will never recover.

Decimo

Decimo - the upmarket Mexican restaurant on floor 10 of The Standard Hotel - has got a new head chef in Paola Arenas, and I went along last week to a big group dinner to celebrate and try out her new menu.

I’d never actually been to Decimo before so it was fun to see how the other half (that is, people for whom staying at The Standard is “normal” and not “the literal best night of their life” as it was for me, when I reviewed for Time Out, ordered a burger to the room and watched Bridgerton in a king sized bed by myself) live. The decor is extremely summery - lots of wicker - and the welcome Palomas went down more quickly than they should when you are on SSRIs, but it was the first evening of the heatwave, and I was excited, so allow me.

This welcome dinner for Paola was extremely generous, with samples of basically everything on the menu. There was a lot to admire - though maybe a little less to truly love - but I especially liked bread with an oily, piquant roasted red pepper puree, a very spicy scallop and melon aguachile, and a chocolate mousse served, as is the fashion, tableside.

I could have given or taken a carnitas taco, which I found surprisingly fatty but not in a fun way, but the snack-sized tuna tostada, with a smoky sour cream hiding beneath the fish, and a big old hunk of wild bass on pistachio mole made up for it. Honestly, the pattern that very much emerged was that the seafood was the new menu’s big success, and it would be fab to see Paola and Decimo lean into that more.

The service was lovely (my favourite bit of the meal was when my server asked if I’d like more wine, I said, “No thank you,” and then she looked at me concernedly and went: “What about something else? Like a daiquiri?”) and the surroundings, fairly obviously, are gorgeous, with the skyline view ostentatiously trying to catch your eye from the floor to ceiling windows, wherever you look.

Would I advise going for dinner and, inevitably, spending out of your absolute arse? Probably not. But if you’re asking whether I’d recommend going in for a few drinks, a veritable tower of those tuna tostadas, and a sweeping view of London, then I actually really, really would.

Thank you to Gemma Bell and co., who always treat me like a princess, for this.

Peckham Cellars

Just a quick one to remind you, during this, the heatwave, that Peckham Cellars near Queens Road station does glasses of really nice wine for £7 every Tuesday, and they have a big outdoor seating area. Last week when I went they were also serving sausage and mash off their small plates menu, which I respect no end. Let’s hope this week it’s fish and chips.

Double Raspberry Magnum

Just had one while I was writing this and you really do just have to say: wow.

That’s all for this week, but next week I will be back with some thoughts on Bar Etna - the new pizza place for seeing, being seen, and secondarily, eating pizza - a couple of wine and cocktail bars, and the new Jackson Boxer spot on Exmouth Market. Big kiss and thanks for reading, xo

As mentioned, if you’d like to get a post like this every week, additionally to the free post on Sundays, you can subscribe below:

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I am very pleased to finally be writing about Levan: it is local to me, I like it very much in general, and I can frequently be found in their neighbouring bar, Bar Levan. This is largely because my dear sweet housemate Hannah is the manager, and I adore to go there for what I call a Bother - what is involved here is that I Bother her at work - which she absolutely loves.

Bar Levan is an extremely sexy little establishment - indeed, there are few places better to make eyes at someone over a candle and a plate of posh ham - but what I like even more about both this place and its big sister next door is that they are always giving something a little bit different a go. At Bar Levan, this means Friday DJs and offbeat wine tastings and a rotating cast of chefs from Levan’s kitchen being given free rein on the actually quite extensive bar menu. And at the restaurant itself, it means steak or moules frites for £20 on a Sunday, and even more excitingly, their French Connection series, where for one Sunday every month, a team from a restaurant or bar somewhere in France will come and flex their muscles in the Levan kitchen.

Last Sunday was the turn of Déviant. This, by all of the accounts I can find, is a much-respected wine bar in Paris where you can eat weird snacks and drink from an extensive list of natural wines. For their turn at Levan, they worked with the restaurant to put together a £59 set menu consisting of a cocktail, four starters, a main course, and two desserts, which I would describe as pretty good value (all of the events in the French Connection series, I should add, are £59 a head.)

In terms of the specifics of that menu, I was immediately interested because of the sheer cheekiness on display: it was French cooking, unmistakably, but the Déviant head chef Jeff Schilde and his team were also having a laugh with it. I know that stuff is changing and there is more eyebrow raising than ever about The Hallowed Traditions from food writers, but I do still think that on both cookery and criticism landscapes, French cuisine remains something that is taken deeply seriously. And as someone who is bad at taking almost anything seriously, I naturally jar against that idea.

To digress for a second, I like French food plenty, of course. I have eaten my fair share of escargot and enjoyed it. I think that what they are doing over there with bread is superb. My love of Bret’s crisps has been heavily documented. #ThankYouFrance for fries. I am not ignorant to the nation’s contributions.

But. And there is a bit of a but. Despite these fondnesses, I will say that I have rarely felt particularly impressed by or moved by properly French cooking in the way that you are “supposed” to be*. I don’t revere it and never have (I was, after all, raised on Chicago Town pizza and giant bowls of pasta cooked by a nonna), and if I am completely honest, when I see photos of things like that pig snout cassoulet at Camille - I don’t have an image to hand but look it up - my overwhelming reaction is that new sleep paralysis demon just dropped**. I’m aware that there is probably a shadowy Illuminati of real food critics that is about to have me eliminated for saying that, but it is how I feel.

Happily, then, what entertained me so much about the Déviant menu at Levan was that its idea of French food didn’t have much holier-than-thou-ness - there were references to classics, but these were more nudges and winks than deep, worshipful bows. Snails and garlic came not on a specialist plate with its own utensil, but just encased in a cute little pie instead; barbecued strawberry came to the table adorned with a cocktail umbrella, and floating in a splash of Lillet, like an inflatable in a pool on holiday. It was winking and it had a point of view, and for that reason, it was also memorable.

To start came oyster broth served ostentatiously (compliment) in a shell, then that aforementioned pie - a little underdone pastry-wise, but bursting with fat snails filling-wise - plus asparagus with wild garlic and kiwi, and finally a little skewer of rich but tender duck hearts with pepper sauce (much needed, I will say) for shits and gigs. As you’ll note, all of the requisite Obligatory Frenchness was on display, only a bit more playfully then I’m used to.

The main consisted of steak haché with chicken jus, and barbecued green beans bundled with a strip of pork belly, all of which had a fried egg draped across it in manner of me on my all inclusive in six weeks’ time. Again, it felt like just the right “classic but not being a prick about it” balance for my taste. I love steak haché and this one had a nice amount of pinkness left through the middle, the chicken jus added a bit of summery lightness (as did the BBQ-esque char on the beans), and more vegetables on plates should be tied to each other with tender grilled bacon, I think.

As for dessert, any menu whereby you’re assigned two puddings automatically is alright by me. The barbecue was once again fired up for some boozy strawberries - personally I loved the smoky sweetness, amped up by juicy Lillet in the coupe, but can see it being divisive - before what was, for sure, my favourite dish of the day. You’ve had that thing where they put the chocolate ganache with the salt and the olive oil. But what about this other thing where they put the chocolate ganache with the salt, the olive oil, AND a handful of chopped black olives?

It absolutely shouldn’t work and it absolutely does. The chocolate erred enough on the right side of Bruce Bogtrotter cake richness that it was easy to eat a whole bowl, and the added saltiness and chewy texture of the olives made for a strange but perfect foil - the JB Smoove to the ganache’s Larry David. It was something I knew well with just a further step taken into the weird or novel - a real “fuck around and find out” of a plate of food - and it was very cool.

Sadly, this menu by Déviant at Levan was a one off, though the Levan team are endlessly in the know, so I expect that their next French Connection outing will be just as good, if not better - though I do have to say, I hope the impudence of this one carries over, because but it reflected all of the things I like best about Levan at large. They serve fancy food and drinks - let’s not mince our words, it’s true - but in a chilled out way, with an experimental streak, and this lunch felt like it balanced rigour with levity. I think that’s hard to get right, but this menu managed it and then some. I’ve been thinking a lot about “personal snail and garlic pie” and “ganache with olives” since last Sunday, and it will be a while ‘til I forget either.

* My exception to this would obviously be the food at The French House - while I do think of that as being a London institution more than a monument to French cuisine, I accept that both can be true and dream regularly of their aligot, which represents the best of each side of its Brit/French personality.

** No shade at all, happy to recognise this as a failing on my part, and for what it’s worth I’m sure the snout cassoulet is very tasty – I just find the look of it very arresting. Secondarily, however I do find it quite funny that this dish, heavily photographed as it has been, is sort of like a viral mozzarella stick or a dessert that looks good in a picture for Cool Guy Offal Heads. Phone Eats First culture comes for us all.

I am very grateful to Mark Gurney and all of the Levan/Bar Levan team for this invite and for the thoughtful, relaxed hospitality they show me every single time I darken their door, which is all the fucking time; I didn’t pay but I don’t chat shit as I hope you know.

OTHER THINGS OF NOTE THIS WEEK:

• If you read Dining Out it’s highly likely that you are a fan of a) pasta and b) wine. If you also like to enjoy these two things in tandem, I would heartily encourage you to try out Il Gattopardo’s £20 Pasta and Vino counter deal, which runs from 12pm daily. I went this week and I thought it was pretty great: the idea is that you get a bowl of pasta, plus a glass of wine to pair with the dish, which comes from the same region as the pasta recipe. This week’s region was Sicily, so I had pasta alla nonna (tomato, aubergine, shitloads of olive oil) with salted ricotta, plus a cold, crisp glass of Cusumano’s 2024 Alta Mora (the main thing to know about this wine is that it’s also a little bit salty and mineral-y owing to the fact that the grapes are grown on the slopes of Mount Etna). Lovely combo, at an actually pretty decent price - particularly considering the plush surroundings and very attentive service.

  

  If your mum likes going shopping on Oxford Street when you hang out with her, take her here for the Pasta and Vino at lunchtime, or just as everyone’s about to get a bit het up in the big M&S - whichever comes soonest. She’ll think you’re loaded, you will become Favourite Child, job’s a goodun. Thank you so much to Kitty and everyone at LM Communications for having me come through!!

• Elsewhere I have done a frankly criminal amount of eating and drinking over the last seven days - I’m calling it medieval lord-maxxing - and I’ve noticed that you lot seem to like it when I do a “what I ate this week” post, SO if you’d like to hear more about fantastic khao soi in central London (ft. house-pressed coconut milk), fancy Mexican food, a wine bar where they’re currently doing sausage and mash, and my new fav desserts, you can sign up for paid posts to receive a little digest (a food pun, you see) on Tuesday. I’m going to be doing extras for paid subscribers every week (!) from now on, so if you would like to keep up with all my recommendations and/or my descent into heart disease in real time, you can sign up to subscribe for the price of one underwhelming Pret sandwich every month below. Love you loads.

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Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month.

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The Wild Table takes place at Tey Brook Orchard in Essex - which is run by the Browning family - and it is a dinner prepared largely outside, by Mel Brown (who also heads up The Laundry in Brixton) and her kind and talented team of chefs, on the grounds of said orchard. Don’t get me wrong, on paper this does all obviously sound very pleasant indeed - I am not sure there are many people who would ever be like “multi-course dinner in an orchard? Sounds disgusting actually” - but in practice, it’s about ten times as cool as I had expected, and is genuinely one of the most fun, uniquely lovely things I’ve done in ages. Let me tell you about it.

Tey Brook Orchard’s whole deal is that it is an event space for things like weddings and retreats, and, as I mentioned, you can glamp onsite. My pal Steph and I stayed in a bell tent, and this meant that our morning after the dinner was soundtracked by the very sweet cooing and chirping of birds outside, adding to the general idyllic-ness of the situation (I will say, however, there was also a bed and an electric blanket, and as nice as the bird sounds were, I would have complained about them so, so much if I were sleeping on the floor.)

Before the glamping, however, was dinner. For this, there was an area designated as the restaurant space. Here, there were pretty tables that felt almost Fairyland-ish - adorned with flowers and ornate little menus - set up around the centrepiece of a huge grill, where everything from trout to pak choi was getting the fire treatment, which does, let’s face it, simply just make stuff more delicious: there is a reason why dads everywhere are itching get the barbecue out as soon as it hits 14 degrees, and they are right to do it.

To get things really popping off, before we were seated, we were brought on a little walk through the woodland, to a clearing where there were intro drinks - specifically rhubarb spritzes, made using Tey Brook’s own sparkling rose, which tasted berry-sweet in the front, with a more vanilla-y finish in the back* - plus snacks.

It was when I realised that the snacks on offer were fresh scallops, being cooked on another gigantic, sculptural open fire grill, that I understood I had not appropriately registered the game I was about to encounter. My friends and I have a joke that we tell whenever our circumstances are laughably Nice, which is that we’re like dogs who are being given a really good final day before the vet puts them down - and honestly, the second I saw the scallops on the flat-top, as this sort of miraculous-feeling evening sunshine hit the top of my head, if you’d have told me that the lethal injection was coming for me, I really might not have minded.

As everyone chomped on their scallops (which had all of the right sweet tenderness, brought out even more by a smoky little serving of barbecue sauce), Mel gave a speech to explain the rationale behind The Wild Table. It was born out of the fact that she, a native Kiwi with a restaurant in London, really missed the seasonal, fire-based cooking with local ingredients that she had grown up with, and had long sought out a place in the UK where she could experience it again. Eventually she found the Browning family and Tey Brook Orchard, and established The Wild Table there. I am going a bit soft in my old age, I will accept, but I do just think any sort of meeting of minds and intentions like that is very sweet, and it made the whole thing feel very sincere and uncynical.

After that, we went to take our seats for dinner, and what followed was a selection of sharing starters, selected for seasonality and locality (even the wine on the table was from Sussex), and in many cases cooked on the grill. My highlights from that section were cedar-grilled trout - which flaked away just as soon as you so much as nudged it with a fork - with baby mustard and dill from the Tey Brook Orchard grounds, plus tandoori-style lamb neck served on tart, almost sour labneh.

The main course was venison, which I have not eaten in years, and was easily my favourite part. It came served on a beetroot puree that I thought I would find cloying, but which actually had the welcome sugariness of like, a ketchup? Pressed up against the slight char on the outside of the meat, it was a combination I really loved, though a few more potatoes on the plate would not have gone amiss.

To finish, there were - and you are reading this combination of words correctly - DIY BAKED ALASKA S’MORES (let me repeat: BAKED ALASKA S’MORES) whereby we were invited to come and cook our own little blob of ice cream dipped in meringue, on the fire, before sprinkling it with s’mores crumbs. Again, not sure what number bus I’m about to be hit by, but I’m glad it waited until I got to eat this dessert.

PI had an absolute ball at The Wild Table, and a big part of that was down to so many tiny details - blankets and hot water bottles out on the benches so that we could actually enjoy eating outside; individual pinch pots of salt; egg and bacon brioche rolls the next morning - that showed such care, and such pure hospitality. Truly, everything had been thought of. I’m absolutely not an outdoorsy person in the slightest - but even I loved the chance to get some air into my lungs, some food in my belly, and some joy into my rotten little heart, which, like the Grinch’s, grew about five sizes over the course of this very affirming meal. See you next week, when we’re going to Paris by way of Peckham, unless I get Final Destination-ed as predicted.

The Wild Table will take place again in September and if you want to do something special around that time of year, I would heartily recommend it. Tickets are £85 a head (though you do have to get yourself there if you’re not local, and glamping is not included but you really might as well because it’s such good craic) which, for this particular experience - it really did surpass my expectations - I actually reckon is a decent price. I was able to go along thanks to Danae, Frances, and the lovely people at Tonic Comms, but as usual the thoughts are my own and I always tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

* I am really trying to get better at describing wine without sounding like a knobhead who has never written a sentence in her life, all feedback welcomed.

OTHER THINGS OF NOTE THIS WEEK:

- I went to the opening party for All Roads on Atlantic Road in Brixton on Wednesday. For the last three years, All Roads has been operating as a supper club, and now it is a real life restaurant, which I think is so cool. I also felt like that was very evident in the generous way that the food - which is Carribean-inspired, with some southern US soul food elements - kept coming, and was shared all night, with loads of music and gobby chat from all corners. If you want my take, it’s that if you would like to drink fun cocktails and eat a fucking unbelievable mac and cheese, with crumbly cornbread and peppery fried chicken to accompany it (and why would you not want to do this?), you will like this place, as I very much did.

- Sainsbury’s have got rid of my favourite white chocolate and cornflake cereal milk cookies so I will now be entering an official period of mourning. If you see me going around south east London in an ornate black veil, do not approach me.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.

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As such, my experience of Barcelona’s food has largely been limited to festival cuisine: burritos costing 15 euros, 2/3 size Heinekens, massive bags of Lays crisps consumed exclusively on the man-made beach while nursing The Rock In His 2001 Prime-sized hangovers, and shitloads of patatas bravas. This time I wanted to cast my net a bit wider, so I used my Ask the Audience lifeline, and posted an Insta story asking for recommendations for my short stay. The overwhelming champ among my mates was El Xampanyet in El Born, so during some downtime, that’s where I went, with my colleague and pal Tanya, who humoured me lots over the course of this visit (thank you Tanya <3).

El Xampanyet is a lil hole-in-the-wall tapas place with a reputation that obviously precedes it - when we arrived at about 3PM, there was a (short, in fairness) queue, and while there are many, many other places in the area to eat, lots of which are undoubtedly great, I’m glad that we waited the 20 minutes or so to get in, because I can’t really imagine having a first proper tapas meal more complete feeling than this one.

Here, you can stand at the counter - where there is a little miniature car showroom of montaditos, in front of a bar lined with bottles of spirits I have never even heard of - or sit on stools in front of a pretty wall tiled in blue near the door, or right at the back. We opted for seats, and chose some dishes quite quickly - some seafood, some meat, some veg, all killer, no filler.

What I liked best about El Xampanyet (other than the three euro wine) was how clearly well-oiled this operation is, in order that punters get to have what I would describe as a perfectly paced eating experience. Your little bits come first - the montaditos and patatas escalivadas come out of their display cabinet, and down to your table - then you get your slightly more complicated bits (mini sardines fillets fanned out cutely on a plate; peppers with cream cheese, because I am only human). After that, comes your grilled seafood and meats, and finally for us was a Spanish omelette with chorizo. There were also copious rounds of bread in amongst all of this because the good people at El Xampanyet are not in the business of pissing about.

It felt like we barely waited at all for food, but I also had the sense that I was taking my time, and going at entirely my own pace. When I got up and left, I felt weirdly elated as I walked down the street, like I’d experienced something genuinely new and novel. Obviously, I had not, duh, but it felt new, or at least refreshing, to me, because the simultaneous relaxation and efficiency of the whole thing just made being at El Xampanyet feel like so much fun. Food in London can be - often is, in fact - extremely laboured and effortful and, let’s face it, quite wankerfied. This, however, was just the complete and utter opposite: simple and accomplished and totally laid back because of that. Everyone was operating at an elite level, but nobody was trying because it was all muscle memory. What a thing, to be able to make your punters feel so comfortable. Anyway, I loved it so much that I’ve written an itemised rundown of everything we ate below, for fun but also to give individual picky bits the attention they so richly deserve.

(You’ll also note that I have somewhat solved my issue of being absolutely shit at taking photos of food, by giving my point and shoot digicam - which has a lovely way of making even the crappest composition look glam - a run out. Any feedback welcome, unless it is bad.)

Copa de Xampanyet

House cava, served by the expertly filled coupe at the table from a clear glass bottle with a metal stopper. Like the ones most restaurants serve water out of. When I asked for a second helping, the server came to my table, nodded at the dregs left in the bottom of my glass, and went “finish it then,” which I had to do before he would even countenance pouring me a new one. Two euros ninety. Enough to make me go full FBPE.

Montaditos

I think that when you say “tapas” you probably do think first of montaditos, which look quite iconic (in the dictionary meaning of the word and also the slay mama meaning of the word), and are basically bits of bread with various really good things on. Firstly we had peppers stuffed with tuna - essentially roasted peppers, draped, “paint me like one of your French girls”-style, around tuna mousse. A slightly odd flavour combo, but said flavours were great individually (vivid, rich peppers; smooth, savoury tuna; a brusque little olive), so I didn’t especially mind.

Secondly there was ham. Ham! What else can we say? Few nations better at ham than the Spanish. Let’s hear it for ham.

Mini sardinetes en oli d’oliva; pebrots amb formage

Both kings of the picky bits aisle and so of course even better here - virtuosic even. The voltage of the thrill that coursed through my body when I saw how those little sardines had been arranged could have powered a small village for like, a day.

Patates escalivades

What it is is that you get half of a potato smeared with addictively eggy mayo, and a little blob of roasted pepper and tomato in paprika on top, and you immediately order four more because what the fuck man.

Gambes amb all

There are few things more pleasing to me than a plate of garlicky little prawns and I think most of us would clap like seals upon being presented with the above. These were sweet and tender - as if there would even be the hint of a chewy shrimp at an establishment such as this - and peeling them down to get every morsel we could was a big part of the fun. Also, the serving comes with a single use wipe for the paws of everyone at the table so that maximum enjoyment can be had without concern, which is phenomenal service. Arf arf bitch!

Truita de patates i xorico

A perfect circle of bright egg, salty chorizo, and earthy potato. As a symbol, the circle represents completeness, wholeness, oneness. As does, in many ways, this excellent omelette. I’d have liked it to be gloopier if I’m splitting hairs but honestly who cares?

OTHER STUFF OF NOTE FROM THIS WEEK:

• Elsewhere in Barcelona I did have a very gloopy (complimentary) tortilla at Colmado Wilmot. Write it down, gloop fans.

• I went to the press night for Ornella, which is the new sister restaurant to Lupa in Highbury, headed up by Milanese chef Naz Hassan, whose food I have historically liked. For me it was a big fat hit - focaccia you could shove under your head for a brilliant night’s sleep, a dish referred to on the menu as “butter and Parmesan tagliatelle” which made me hit the Gob Bluth “COME ON” button extremely hard, and a chicken schnitzel for which I chanted BIG CHICKEN NUGGET at the table:

  

  The big chicken nugget in question.

  
  Also, potato puree to rival The French House’s “would you like some potato with your butter approach” (this rocks). I think the desserts could do with a bit of refinement but otherwise it gets a certified “hell yeah” from me.

• Next week I’m going glamping, lol. For journalism x

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.

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All of this is to say that, anyway, I’ve been having a really fun time learning a little bit about wine via the time-honoured medium of drinking it, and one of the absolute highlights of my recent adventures in wine was a trip to sova, a new bar spotlighting eastern European wines, last Sunday. Here I am at sova, on west London’s vibrant Blenheim Crescent, having some wine:

sova is a relatively new opening and I would put it firmly in the category of Places Which Would Be Absolutely Lovely For A Date Night - there’s counter seating, good music, and a cosier space in the back with comfy banquettes - though if you’re into wine, it’s also kind of the motherlode generally.

The coolest thing about sova was the fact that there were so many wines which featured grapes I’d never even heard of, as someone who obviously lives in London and is therefore mostly exposed to western European wines.

I tried a white wine made up of a blend of Chardonnay, Viognier, and a grape called Tamaianka - which smelled aromatic and even herbacious in the glass, but which opened up with the oaky butteriness of all of my favourite Chardonnays as soon as I drank it - and a Slovakian pet-nat which had, for all the world, the savouriness of blue cheese (grow up it was banging). On the recommendation of our genuinely incredible, knowledgeable server, I also had slightly creamy Graševina - Croatia’s favourite grape, don’t you know - for the first time, next to zingy, fresh crudo, and the combination was unexpectedly lit.

Talking of crudo, you do of course come to Dining Out to hear about what I have eaten rather than what I have drank, so let me tell you a little bit about the food at sova too. The best bit of the menu is the snacks: firstly, the crudo of which I speak was a zippy lil tuna number, with generous-feeling little chunks of fish, alongside cute cubes of cucumber, which gave texture and all important crunch, along with some well-deployed fennel shavings. I also liked the beetroot croquettes, which were crisp and then earthy and jewel-toned inside (if a little overpowered by the accompanying walnut and saffron dip, where there was also a touch of cinnamon also making itself known.)

I was also into the pickle plate, each vegetable having been preserved with slightly different flavoured liquids (my official ranking of these pickles is thus: courgette > radish > pepper > cucumber > carrot > mushroom), though of the snacks, the star is obviously beef tartare. It’s immaculately presented on little Borodinsky bread toast things, with, crucially, cured egg yolk across the base of the entire plate, which is a lovely touch. So often I feel that places are stingy with their cured egg yolk (genuinely the type of thought I do be having, and this of course points to a rich and healthy inner life), which I love especially with steak tartare because it somehow both brightens the dish and makes it just more… yummy and comforting*.

Mains were good (I had sweet, whiskey glazed chicken), but I think my big sova recommendation would be to go in on the snackier side of the menu, just because the picky bits vibe suits the experience - which, I think, should ideally see you trying lots of different glasses rather than just going in on one bottle, just because there’s so much interesting, tasty stuff to drink on this menu - a lot more.

As such, in terms of variety and service and just sheer loveliness and charm, I do have to say that sova is my favourite new wine bar I’ve been to in ages. It’s so common in London for things to start to feel identikit and formulaic when it comes to this type of place - the plates: small; the wine: frequently described as “funky” by a guy in an ironic cap - so to be surprised so much and be treated to service so friendly and personalised was extremely cool. For me, it felt both fun and educational, like Cocomelon, only tipsier. I can’t wait to go back, but in the meantime, you should get yourself to Notting Hill, and go drink something you didn’t even know existed.

OTHER THINGS THAT MIGHT BE OF INTEREST:

• Last night I went to the Close Ties event at Newcomer Wines which was of course great. Close Ties’ whole thing is that they want to combine wine, music, and food in a fun and non-wanky way (can confirm: certified non-wanky, my drinks tokens came in the form of a scratchcard), and last night’s event was pitched as a sort of summer BBQ, with food from the grill outside at Newcomer in Dalston, which is SUCH a classy place I always feel like I have my shit together when I go there. Despite the rain, it was a big laugh for a Bank Hol Saturday, and if you are interested, my fave thing on the menu was a cured, jammy, “Scottish devilled egg” with chilli crisp. Here’s some grilled lamb which I also really liked:

  

• Very little better than a Croque Monsieur in the sun, and once again Bar Levan knocked it out the park. Thick bechamel, chiffon-thin ham. Look at that fistful of pickles. Never kill yourself.

  

• There is another new Peckham taco place, which is called Maiz. It’s so good! Go on a Tuesday (two for one tacos!!), get the birria, get a spicy marg (the one here is really good), have a great time.

• Look at this prawn toast bao I had at Chet’s:

  

• Also look at this mango coconut rice I had at Chet’s:

  

• Chet’s is at The Hoxton Sheppy Bush and it is of course very stylish, but it’s also very fun. The idea is that the food is California-inspired “Thai-Americana” and while I am not always convinced by “fusion,” this is an example of how it can be actually good. Fave bits other than the two dishes above were wagyu fried rice (not too heavy, really livened up by a bit of mint), and this hefty boy soft shell crab which had a lot of meat on its bones, putting it right to the top of my Soft Shell Standings (my other fav one is at at Kolamba in Spitalfields if you care).

  

• Okay that’s actually it now goodbye xo

* Is it vile that I said yummy? Feels a bit Frubes and Calpol-coded, sorry. Sound off in the comments.

My visit to sova came via the wonderful Lucy Golding and Caper Comms and I am very grateful for the invite, although of course I am a journalist, mama, and all of what you have read above is my honest opinion. Mwah.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.

Subscribe now

Next week will be back to my more regular degular single place format because I am going somewhere today (Sunday) that sounds really cool, but for now, please enjoy a little recap of my last week in bites.

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Here is an unrelated photo of me looking like a bitch at London’s Tate Modern, which I am including so you have a visual on your narrator:

• I absolutely love Crystal Palace. I think it is a great place to see cool dogs, visit weird shops, and have some snacks along the way. Imo, Elise and I are a trio of big moochers, and so last weekend we hung out there and did our favourite thing of eating a little bit here and a little bit there as to be able to maximise the different opportunities for eating. I am lucky to have friends who understand me in this way.

  
  First we went to Palazzo, which is a pizzeria on Church Road. I have always had a soft spot for this place for two reasons. The first is that there is a section on their menu dedicated to fried stuff, and the second is the really gorgeous 80s-leaning decor - really unexpectedly swish, with lots of red leather and curvy shapes that scratch the millennial part of my brain - go on an evening and impress your date, I promise. The three of us shared an aubergine and ricotta pizza - I guess a kind of Pizza Alla Nonna - which was tasty, Napoli style pizza with really soft, Nike Air Max bubble crusts. There’s a bit of an obsession with particularly thin and crisp-crusted pizza across London at the moment - and I get it, because it tastes great and trends only become trends because people like them - but it’s nice to see that this Neapolitan style is still being done very well in places like this.

  

  We also had a green goddess salad with mango and chillies, which was a fresh lil accompaniment to the soft, chewy pizza and a nod to the sunshine which had decided to come out. Most exciting, however, was this basil aioli, for the crusts*, which tasted like a dip I have been chasing for years, which is (and this is so niche but if you remember it please sound the FUCK off in the comments) the old basil mayo that they used to do at the OG Mildred’s in Soho, which was so vivid and brightly herby but so comforting at the same time that I used to order chips just so I could have it. If there was a This Is Your Life-esque show called Dips of Your Life where you are presented with the dips that have punctuated your existence, this one would be in mine. All of this is to say that this stuff at Palazzo - creamy, verdant, lusciously thick - came very close, so if anyone from there happens to be reading this, please know that I’m in the market for a wholesale deal and am available for contact whenever you wish.

  
  After a bit more browsing around, we stopped off for spritzes in the big garden at The Alma, where we also brought in some contraband pub snacks that Imo had imported from a recent visit to the US. These included my OG Trader Joe’s favourites, Snacky Clusters - essentially salty things like potato “chips” and pretzels enrobed in chocolate, which taste magnificent and which I hope M&S never rip off because it is so over for me financially if they do - plus Birthday Cake pretzels which were essentially pretzels covered in white chocolate-adjacent icing and the type of sprinkles which are probably illegal in the UK due to food colouring regulations. Both 10/10.

  

  We finished the day with some more shops - I bought a “PDRN” facemask from a cute place called ALKEMI, if you’re interested (I don’t actually properly know what PDRN is but I have heard it discussed a lot by people with nice skin on my phone so I decided to take a punt for £6, results to follow) - plus a glass of wine, a gilda and some char-coochie from The Sourcing Table, which is a very sweet wine bar and bottle shop that also has a branch in Peckham.

  

  The charcuterie really hit for me due to the inclusion of the type of peppery, fennel-heavy salami that I am always bang up for, plus an abundance of cornichons. Overall, I am not sure there is a nicer way to spend a Sunday than nibbling about with your loved ones in the sun (bit like saying “spoon found in kitchen” but whatever), so I went home a very happy girl.
  

• With my beloved Polyester pals I went to Chaska Maska in Peckham for a belated birthday dins, held jointly for me and for my fellow March/April babies Rob and Katy. Here we all are mogging on a birthday cake, perfectly art directed by Polyester HBIC Ione Gamble:

  

  A Big Curry is an elite way to eat - as a Birmingham native this is extremely close to my heart - and this was one for the books. Butter chicken was rich and on point, saag paneer was super fragrant with cumin, cheese naan was banging (requires no further explanation), and the artwork on the wall was something I now want for my living room:

  

• I mentioned this on my Instagram the other day but the kind people at Waitrose identified me as someone who a) deals hugely in convenience foods and b) loves a gimmick, so they sent some bits from the new 80s throwback range they’re doing to mark the second season of Rivals (I dunno either really but I did crucially get free crisps so we go with it) to my office. Here is the range:

  

  I’m yet to make my way through it all (I am a bit scared of the Scotch Egg sandwich, I will be so real, but I’m spicy marg hun the house down so am especially looking forward to the pineapple drink), but I can categorically tell you the following:
  - The prawn sandwich sounds rogue but tastes really good; you get a non-stingy amount of sauce, and though it’s been ages since I had Thousand Island (that is, ketchup, mayo, pickles, bosh), since I ate the sandwich I have wondered whether a number of foods I have eaten might indeed be better with the addition of Thousand Island, which does say something.
  - The Bloody Mary crisps aren’t especially Bloody Mary-y but they do just taste like tomato-skewing Prawn Cocktail and therefore I ate almost the whole bag by myself.
  - The Steak Diane crisps are up there with the maddest crisps I’ve eaten in my life and a must for any crisp aficionados. There is little more I can say than: they taste like steak. It’s fucking wild. I know you are reading this now and you don’t believe me because how could a potato crisp taste like a wedge of meat? But honestly: they just do. If you do go and find them and eat them, you will taste the first crisp, and you will silently go to yourself: “Oh shit yeah she was right.”
  

• We had Old Kent Naan for lunch in the office the other day and while I forgot to take photos because I was too busy eating entire naan wraps in three bites or less, what I can say is: a falafel wrap is good as it is, but when the wrap is switched out for a fresh cheese naan, that wrap evolves into the highest version of itself, like a really powerful Pokemon.
  

• Finally, a Dining In moment. We had pals over yesterday to eat M&S picky bits in the garden (highlights from the 3 for £8 deal being: huge tub of anchovies, those peppers with the cream cheese in, big tray of juicy roasted peppers; the other thing worth mentioning was the layered “diner dip” which was basically just an unholy tub of mayo, cream cheese, tomatoes and pickles, and which you should definitely try for your next BBQ or other chip and dip-requiring occasion), followed by big plates of spaghetti and meatballs for all.

  

  We were able to crack out the kilogram of sauce we bought at Bottega Caruso in Margate - which was a true testament to what Proper Olive Oil and Italian tomatoes can achieve when they are just allowed to do their thing. I would say that around my garden table with seven of my mates, two different types of garlic bread, and loads of Lidl wine, on the first properly summery day of the year, was probably the best way I could think of to enjoy it.

• Finally finally: I should mention that I am going to a fun thing next Saturday and maybe you would like to go too. Close Ties, who host parties which heavily involve food and wine across London, are doing an event at one of my favourite wine bars, Newcomer in Dalston. There will be great wines and there will be a grill out the back - think of it as the fanciest BBQ you will be invited to all year. Tickets still very much available so hit up Close Ties on Insta in order to come along and eat only the most finely wine-paired meat skewers. Yay!

  

  Thanks for reading and see ya next week for a review of a new (!) restaurant.

* I know that crust dips are not usually morally permissible to the Italian people so I am grateful to Palazzo for their concession to my lowly culture in providing them.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.

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• Last Sunday I went to Hawksmoor which is not something I have done before. My dad was in town and I feel like Hawksmoor is about as “dad” in vibe as like, Stereophonics and getting fuming about specific football commentators (that is: very), so I made the executive decision to take him there.
  
  I personally am very fond of steak restaurants for the same reason I am also very fond of chain pizza takeaways: I really like side dishes, and both of these types of establishments tend to serve them in abundance (Domino’s Chicken Kickers being, of course, one of the all time great side orders). At Hawksmoor Borough I sat on a leather banquette, and ate a steak which was pretty good - though perhaps not quite special - with beef dripping fries so crisp that the noise they made when I ate them was like that of a Scooby Snack being chomped out of the air, and creamed spinach (can’t get enough of that diva at the moment), plus blue cheese Hollandaise (filth, fair play) and bowling alley sweet ketchup from a little bottle, specially delivered to the table.

  

  (this was obviously an intro portion of fries I’m not soft)
  
  The experience of all of this was exactly what I expected that it would be - that is: competent, efficient, pretty tasty, and not surprising in the least. Sometimes you’re not really after bells and whistles, you just want reliability, and in a world of things that are variously wildly overrated and unfairly underrated, I would genuinely say, after one visit (so my opinion could be subject to change), that Hawksmoor is probably actually just pretty accurately ‘rated.’ If you want to spend a bit less money, get slightly more fun with it, and potentially be a teeny bit less convinced on quality, go to Blacklock; if you’re happy to spend out your arse for one of the best steaks you’ll ever eat, go to The French House. Otherwise, Hawksmoor is pretty good.
  

• There is little more satisfying than cocktail, chip, dip, and discussing deep-rooted personal neuroses with a BFFL on a weeknight, is there? As such, I went for cocktails at Side Hustle - a Mexican-themed bar attached to the NoMad Hotel - with Elise on Tuesday night (this was an #invite, thank you the can!!!). A special “changing of the guards” menu was on offer as former head bartender David Segat made way for the new holder of the position Maxim Schulte, and my favourite drink was called a Warbler. This involved tequila and my favourite fruit cantaloupe (I guess it was kind of Paloma-adjacent but with melon instead of grapefruit), so was always going to be a hit with me.

  

  I also have to shout out the tortilla chips at Side Hustle - massive, oval-shaped and therefore optimised for dipping, fried, flaky, and in our case served with a pistachio salsa - because they are probably some of the finest tortilla chips I have eaten in a bar. And you are talking here to someone who will go in a mood if she is not allowed to order nachos, so my credentials are strong.

  

  Also - and this is girls girlism in action here, ladies - the loos are decent for a photo. Here’s me and my current fav handbag:

  

• I randomly ate not one but two Leon wraps in the last week for some reason. I could not tell you the last time I ate a Leon wrap before this, I don’t know what got into me. The halloumi one was alright; the grilled chicken one was really good. I like that there are pickles on both, and the chicken wrap also contains an actually very coriander-heavy zhoug, which is leftfield and very welcome in the context of high street fast food. As I often say, sometimes Dining Out is not sexy candlelit restaurant vibes; quite often actually it’s “what’s the least shit lunch I can currently lay my hands on?” As such: let my chicken zhoug recommendation echo in your ears the next time you are for some reason happy to pay £9 for a wrap.

• If you want my other lunch tips I am currently enjoying the Lidl salmon poke bowl (salmon, sushi rice, spicy corn, cucumber, red cabbage, soy dressing, way better than it has any right to be at £3.99), and this week I also ate Lunchables a couple of times and they were revelatory. YES the ham is a bit weird but if you’re the type of person who chainsmokes when sitting outside at the pub because you need something to do with your hands, this may well be the lunch for you. Lunchables Summer 2026, I’m calling it now.

• Two fab matcha lattes: one at Watch House Tower Bridge, and the other at Batch Baby in Haggerston. Being someone who gets a matcha is the latest in my very long line of annoying bitch habits (it comes in the list just after “sometimes forgetting to take my washing out of the machine” and just before “writing a Substack”). I would say that I am repentant but I am not. For me the key to a good matcha is a silky texture and a sweet, spicy tasting note - my favourite ones all have a hint of cinnamon and a spoonable foam, and these two hit both marks.

  

• Finally, on Thursday I had the distinct pleasure of eating the very girlypops Girl Dinner menu at Refinery Bankside, which - to give you a flavour - is a venue where I heard “Single Ladies” over the course of my visit not one but three times. The Girl Dinner is a menu set for two, four or six (it’s about £45 per two people which is very good value for the area) where you get a mini martini each, plus a number of foods which have been memefied as “girl dinner” items, including Caesar salad, an olive and feta checkerboard to share, truffle Parm fries, and arancini. There was also a chicken skewer element that, I’ll be honest, I did not love, as it was a little chewy. Obviously this is a slightly silly concept but I do also think: when did a little silliness ever hurt anyone? Nothing wrong with having a laugh, after all, and overall, this is a good option for mates meet-ups when you’re on a budget and/or you’d rather someone else sorted the picky bits for you, instead of having to do an inconvenient flit to M&S.

That’s my dispatch from the restaurant trenches this week; see you next Sunday. In future, if you want me to review a specific place or give recommendations for a particular occasion, I’m on diningoutkisskiss@gmail.com (or you can DM me on Insta @hiyalauren_) and I’ll endeavour to get a post together for you. Mwah.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.

Subscribe now

First, some caveats:

- I have eaten at The Camberwell Arms many times before but never actually for Sunday lunch, so I was taking a punt when I booked this, but it was of course a very educated punt, taken weeks in advance to ensure a table.

- I find that a lot of the Pub Heads I meet actually hate The Camberwell Arms, because it is quite different to most other south London pubs - the word “wanky” is often the one that gets thrown around. My response to this is that the place is of course not strictly a pub - I have never been to an old man boozer that serves a Horseradish Gibson, for example - but it’s also not not a pub, and as such occupies a funny gastropub (for want of a better word) middle ground that other Camberwell establishments like The Bear and The Kerfield Arms also share. Basically I just think it’s wrong to judge it against like, The Old Distillery up the road, which a lot of people tend to, because they aren’t the same thing, nor are they trying to be. They are different and beautiful in their own ways, like all God’s creatures, and all His Pubs too.

- It is well known that I really don’t like Sunday roasts, but what I respect about the Camberwell Arms’ Sunday offering is that they basically take the best bits of the roast - the meats, the potatoes, very select vegetables - and offer them in different configurations which are not just “overcooked beef and microwaved gravy.” There’s thought and variety - on our visit, chicken came with pecorino creme fraiche if you wanted something that felt sunny day appropriate, while Easter lamb was offered two ways - and crucially the roast potatoes are neither skimped on nor shit.

I was joined for this Easter lunch by my gorgeous pals Bex, Steph and Hannah, so there was opportunity for stuff to be shared for optimum sampling. To start we chose pork fat and scotch bonnet on toast, Comte and beer onions on toast, and beef tartare with, you’ve guessed it, toast. Everything rocked, but the cheese and onion was by far the star of the show - an ideal little sweet ‘n’ savoury bite, with so much sweetness and depth packed into those porous lil strips of allium. Hannah said it was almost like a French Onion Soup toast, and I’d be inclined to agree.

(that’s the scotch bonnet one because the cheese one looked crap in the photo)

Between starters and mains we - a group of women in our 30s, yes, what’s your problem? - conducted an Easter egg exchange (Secret Santa but with chocolate), which saw me packed off with a stunning Hotel Chocolat “Egg Sandwich”*, and after that, the treats simply kept coming because before long it was time for our meal’s showstopping centrepiece: pie, baby.

I had been disappointed to miss the Camberwell Arms’ pie event a few weeks ago (this basically saw the kitchen serving up shitloads of different pies for One Epic Night - an incredible concept that should be emulated far and wide), and so as soon as I clocked the words “Guinness, beef and bone marrow pie” on the menu, I imprinted on it like Jacob on Renesmee. This pie was served with roasties and greens with capers and brown butter, and we added on a helping of sandy carrots, plus extra potatoes because we are not wimps.

It was a true sight to behold on the table - the hunk of bone at the centre of the pie really took it up a notch on the banquet-core scale - and it tasted even better. The pastry gave a satisfying crack when we broke it, the beef was stringy and tender, and the Guinness lent everything its slightly malty lift. The veggies were spot on - in a previous life I worked at a fruit and veg supplier and sandy carrots from Normandy were always considered the absolute gold standard; these ones, beautifully caramelised, proved exactly why - and the roast potatoes managed to be knife-scrapingly crisp without losing any inner fluff, which a lot of pub and restaurant roasts fall down on. My one moan was that I’d have gone crazy for some gravy for my plate, but I more than survived with a bit of horseradish instead.

Once the pie had been thoroughly decimated, we congratulated ourselves for ordering perfectly, Bex and I had citrus Eton Mess for dessert (sounds boring, categorically wasn’t), and then we went and spent the rest of the day drinking chicken wine by the literal magnum - because Jesus, famously, absolutely loved wine.

Happy (belated) Easter, He is Risen, but my bank account certainly is not.

Other stuff I’ve been up to this week:

- Recapped some trips to Lisbon and Margate, with lots of decent recommendations, for paying subscribers!!

- I went to a little preview of Mondo To Go in Deptford, which I really enjoyed: same sandwiches, new suntrap spot just off Deppy High Street.

It’s a similar set-up to their Camberwell shop, and most of the sandwiches are the same (Mondo Frango still a monument to the sheer possibilities of roast chicken) (like, this is a sandwich which has peas in it) (and it’s not weird at all in fact it’s really good?), although I hear there is a “local special” consisting of something with beef dip, which will delight the fuckass little cap wearing boyfriends of south east London no end. They also have a slushie which is “Solero”-flavoured, which is obviously just fun and good, and if you ask nicely they will chuck some tequila in it for you. All very positive signs, anyway, which point towards this being a very busy little patch this summer I think.

- I had quite a brutal hangover on Bank Holiday Monday so I had to crack out the big guns:

This is literally better than most takeaway pizza idc.

- I already said this on Insta so sorry to those of you for whom I am repeating myself but: good new Peckham coffee alert.

On the bottom floor of the Rye Lane building which has Forza Wine on the roof (I’m not going to lie I literally used to work there and I cannot tell you what that place is actually called), there is a new coffee shop by Elsewhere Coffee called Daydreamer, and everything I’ve drunk from there has been fab. It is a sad truth that most coffee places do just burn the shit out of the coffee - this is one of the many areas where Gymskin and I agree - but at Daydreamer the taste is categorically vivid, and it genuinely is the kind of cafe that makes you “get” coffee beyond the morning “gotta have my java” impulse.

- Speaking of Insta: I can’t really be bothered to continue manning two Instagram accounts so as of today I am moving everything over to my personal page. If you would like to keep up with Dining Out on the stupid picture platform I’m @hiyalauren_; I haven’t done TikTok yet because I am worried about being called chopped by Gen Alpha but maybe I will feel brave soon.

- My Time Out review of the really gorgeous General Tarleton pub with rooms in Knaresborough, Yorkshire - where I ate one of the most class steaks of my life and then went on to spend the evening watching Strictly under hotel-grade bed linen - is live now. You will not be surprised to hear that I gave it five stars.

- I am highly indebted to the lovely people at Eighty Four agency and the kind, clever, knowledgeable chefs and staff at Daka Daka in Mayfair, where I ate lunch on Friday just gone. This was my first time with Georgian food and it was, I am pleased to report, absolutely off the hook. I loved the khinkali (soup dumplings) filled with earthy mushroom and infinitely slurpable broth, and as a garlic bread aficionado, there was no way I was ever going to dislike its cheesy cousin khachapuri (these are flatbreads stuffed with various fillings but the cheese is the best known), which here is done with fresh feta, mozzarella - made by “a guy in Hackney” and delivered to the restaurant by bike - and Old Winchester.

I was equally impressed with roasted baby aubergines collapsing in on themselves, lamb kebabi topped with grated cedro skin to slice through the rich flavour of the fat, and chunks of sea bream crudo with fennel shavings. I also really respect what they’re doing here so much - the idea, as I’m told, is to replicate for Georgian food what Oma and Agora have done in London with Greek food - because the chefs and owners are genuinely really, properly about it, and they want to get it right to the point where the restaurant itself had to create a distribution company in order to get the produce they need into the UK, because such a thing did not previously exist. Field of Dreams “if you build it they will come” vibes. How cool and dedicated is that? Anyway, tl;dr, everything I tried at Daka Daka I would be absolutely thrilled to eat again - though I should specify that the cheesy khachapuri should be kept away from me for a while for my own wellbeing.

- I had an absolute ball shopping for food zines at Vittles, Pit Magazine and Fat Boy zine’s Food In Print fair yesterday (Saturday 11th). It is as we all know a generally depressing time for the media so it was very heartening to meet so many people making brilliant things about food and restaurants that you can actually hold in your hands.

Also on a personal level, it was really nice to visit because I have admittedly been spending way too much time looking at screens and scrolling, rather than feeding my interests. I grew up making zines and loved physical media so much before I started working primarily in digital writing, so - without being too cringe sorry - Food In Print was also a cute way to reconnect with a genuine lifelong passion and embrace the teenager who used to commandeer the college printers to make booklets to send to her Tumblr followers, because she’s definitely still in here somewhere. What a super lovely thing, I hope it happens again.

* I’d show you but I obviously already ate it in a fugue state in front of MAFS. Thank you Easter Bunny Bex.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.

Subscribe now

I know Dining Out is a predominantly London-based thing, but I thought it would be a bit of a waste to have had such a laugh in both places and not write about it. As such, I wanted to do a special post for the paying members among you, maybe to refer to for your own trips, but mostly, to be honest, to (hopefully) extend the lols to you as a token of my gratitude. Without further fanfare, here is “Stuff I Ate In Lisbon and Margate”:

Lisbon

I am lucky enough that my job involves quite a lot of travel (this almost makes up for the fact that in 2026, the word “journalist” is basically a synonym for “person who sends an awful lot of emails about unpaid invoices”), and I found myself in Lisbon at pretty short notice on a work trip, which is obviously a very cool thing to happen.

Aside from my work obligations, I mostly spent the time bopping about in the sun, buying tinned fish (I got some really good looking peri peri sardines which I’m excited about), and trying a bunch of food. As a Portugal first timer it was very important to me that I at least ate one exemplary pastel de nata during my stay there, and fortunately I was given lots of excellent advice about Manteigaria, which has a few stores around the city, and is widely acknowledged as a nice place for a nata.

Because I am a genius when it comes to enjoying myself (and, it should be added, literally nothing else), I went and procured a little pastel one morning - Manteigaria, by the way, is a lovely pasteleria where you can stand at the counter with an espresso, watching the bakers do their thing, or take away to your heart’s content, and there are about five of them across Lisbon - and then immediately hot footed it back to my hotel room, where the light was starting to leak in from the balcony.

There, I got back into bed with a coffee, pulled the crisp white linen around myself, and took a bite of still-warm pastry. The custard was heavy with vanilla - but also with cinnamon, which was a pleasant surprise - and it was barely set, with a very strong amount of what I’m calling “wibble”. As pastel de nata experiences go, I’ll probably never beat it. Maybe I’ll never try. Sometimes it is best to quit while you’re very clearly ahead.

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When Tiella had its residency at The Compton Arms a few years ago, I was a fan of their cosy take on Italian cuisine, on an Italian food scene in London dominated by boring, efficient but kind of soulless pasta counters. While I liked the food - I found it homely and tasty - I did feel it lacked a bit in sharpness, or in that secret, sometimes hard-to-articulate thing we sometimes call “elevation”. Basically, the food at that version of Tiella never really accosted me the way I want to be accosted by like, a meatball. I want the meatball to punch me between the eyes.

Thankfully, however, if this was my birthday wish, I absolutely got it. Maybe we went on a great night; maybe the kitchen at Tiella 2.0 is just flexing its considerable muscles 24/7; maybe I was just in a really good mood because I was wearing a birthday dress and I’d had a blow dry and I was with my mates and I’d drunk one of those weirdly amazing tomato water cocktails at Equal Parts beforehand. Probably, all of these things are true at once, but regardless of the specific reasons why, this dinner was really pretty great.

(me lol)

We were a group of six so we got to try quite a lot of stuff, which I think is a good way to visit places like this (although I will say I am tiring somewhat of family style dining, but that is a conversation for another day). Beef tartare with Parmesan shavings was, obviously, a riot, the house pasta with tomatoes, onions and stracciatella was rich and layered, as sweetness, and a little umami, jostled against each other like drunk guys outside a Walkabout - getting in each other’s space, really going for it, you know? Oh, and by my patented Physical Assault Metric (PAM™), the meatballs with red sauce and bread cracked my head open: these were the closest I’ve ever tasted to my late grandmother Maria’s cooking in a restaurant, which is the highest praise I can give.

Elsewhere, I was very charmed by a big fucking slab of chicken Milanese - of course I was, it’s basically a massive nugget - served with a tart and crisp fennel salad, plus the bay leaf panna cotta for pudding, which was herbal and botanical but absolutely not in “your nan’s rose perfume that makes you choke” way (I will admit to being really pleasantly surprised about that).

The staff sang “Happy Birthday” to me and put candles in my dessert, and I felt very grateful. Another year older, maybe not quite wiser, but definitely 100% cognisant of a place where I can now head to when I’m in one of those moods where only pasta will do.

(this is obviously not the panna cotta - it is a rly good, nutty Torta Caprese - but I didn’t get a pic of the panna cotta so Totra Caprese you shall have)

*

Other interesting things I have been doing since the last newsletter:

• I got an invite a couple of weeks ago to a “collab event” at Three Sheets Soho with Dumplings Legend. I of course did the embarrassing thing of emailing back almost immediately saying “yes please yes please yes please,” because I am a person with tastebuds. The whole affair was very glam as all things at Three Sheets tend to be (a strong 7.5 out of 10 for the selfie set-up in their bogs, if you’re curious).

  

  Food-wise, Gina and I tried some very gorgeous dumplings (scallop siu mai and our two (two) orders of the truffled lobster dumplings - the latter sounds a bit SushiSamba but they were great, as buttery and delicate as any great lobster dish I’ve eaten - were my faves) and I got to drink something called a Butter Martini which I might as well have personally conjured up in a dream. It was somehow both richer and cleaner than a dirty martini due to a drop of Malvasia, and I hope that it and I meet again on some fated eve. Streets are saying that Three Sheets might be bringing it onto the menu full time due to demand so keep your fingers and toes crossed. Thank you loads to the kind people at Goya Comms for asking me along because it was class.

• I went to Portugal on a random work trip and re-established myself as a true enemy of the seas, by eating shitloads of fish. Paying subscribers will hear much more about that this week!
  

• I also went to Margate with Hannah and we ate as though we were dogs about to be put down. Paying subscribers will also hear about that this week - think of it as something of a world tour, if your concept of “global cuisine” consisted solely of the foods of Lisbon and Kent.
  

• Current Bar Levan devilled egg update: they’ve got roe on them and between your second and third glass of wine they go so hard.
  

  

• Current Forza Wine Peckham frozen margarita update: it’s blood orange flavour and the only way I can describe it is as “lip smacking”. I am sorry for saying “lip smacking” and can only hope you don’t unsubscribe.

  

  ---

  Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.
  

  Subscribe now

I’m also excited to be 32 because a new year of my life also represents a new year of eating cool things, going to cool places, and getting to write about that, which is my favourite combination of stuff to do ever. As this is me we are talking about, I will be getting proceedings started auspiciously - by which I mean “greedily” - by doing a lot of eating over the course of the weekend, but I will tell you about that in next week’s post.

For now, however, I’d like to enter into the spirit of the season (the season being My Birthday Weekend) by giving you a gift. I know, I am like Mother Teresa if she was super into Greggs. For no other reasons than that a) I thought it was a cute gimmick, and b) I wanted to, below, on occasion of my 32nd birthday, I have listed 32 London dishes that I love, and that I think you might be into too. We love a fun list don’t we girls?** To make this actually entertaining, the criteria here is that the dish just has to be available in London - whether that’s at the Ritz or Tesco Express, it need not matter.

1. Turnip Cake in XO at Tao Tao Ju

   Imagine if a tater tot was even softer and a little bit sweeter than you expect, and then smothered in a salty spicy shrimpy XO sauce, and you are maybe 1/1000th of the way to understanding how great this Chinatown dish is.
   

2. Prawn toast at Wong Kei

   While I am on the subject of Chinatown: the Wong Kei prawn toast goes triple platinum in my heart every day. You could probably knock someone out if you threw a slice of it at them and that is, entirely, a compliment.
   

3. The white chocolate dipped Twirl
   Obviously this has nothing on the Cadbury Snow Flake (white chocolate flake “enrobed” in milk choc, which was discontinued years ago but remains the all time great bar) but on a chocolate snack landscape wherein every new release is fucking chocolate orange flavour (vile), it is good to see a true challenger emerge.
   

4. Cheung Fun cacio e pepe at Caia

   

   While I was having a bit of time off from Dining Out, hands down the best thing I ate that entire hiatus was the cacio e pepe - made with cheung fun noodles - at John Javier’s new iteration of Caia in Notting Hill. I am not really one to follow particular chefs about or anything like that, but having eaten his food a few times, my ears always prick up when I hear John Javier’s name, because it’s always creative and surprising without being at all pretentious. Pairing one of the great Italian comfort pastas - creamy, eggy, lots of black pepper - with the thick softness of a cheung fun noodle somehow makes the dish even better. If I’ve had a bad day, this is always what I’d ideally be eating afterwards.
   

5. Welsh Rarebit at St. John

   

   The best thing about this is that they bring a bottle of Lea and Perrins to your table when they serve it.

6. Madeleines at the French House

   There’s something so simple and classic and perfect about a madeleine at the best of times - it’s like the blue jeans and white t-shirt of desserts - and the generous, lacy-edged ones at the French House, caramelised just right and served with lemon curd, are as good as it gets.
   

7. M&S Cookie Dough Bites

   I am actually not really allowed these in the house because every time they are around I go what is unfortunately known as “Noo Noo mode” and hoover the whole pack up within about five minutes. What you need to know is that they are an elite sweet treat - they have a chewy, malty centre, but to get to that, you have to get through a layer of chocolate that is about an inch thick. Inspired and if they ever get discontinued I will chain myself to the railings of Marks and Spencer HQ.
   

8. Sticky Toffee Pudding at William IV
   I remember eating this dish vividly because I had received some weird sad news just after ordering it. It was exactly what I needed in the moment: the cake wasn’t heavy, and the sauce was so glossy and reflective I could check my lipstick in it. There’s loads to love at William IV but for me, this was top of the list.
   

9. Deep pan Margherita pizza from Pizza Hut Delivery
   I feel very passionately about Pizza Hut to the point where I seriously considered having my birthday dinner at Pizza Hut Buffet (Ice Cream Factory heads let me see you). My favourite thing they do is the deep pan pizza - no stuffed crust because I am not an animal - which, textually, is like biting into an insanely delicious mattress. The sauce is ever so slightly spiced, the cheese melts and stretches at first and then - even better - pools and hardens a little as it cools. Perfect for a hangover, or clinical depression.
   

10. Cinnamon roll at Bara

    Bara is the hot sexy Peckham spot du jour. It’s a cafe that specialises in Welsh dishes and produce, but so far my only experience has been a very serviceable flat white, and a really great cinnamon roll. Cinnamon rolls are usually dense and chewy, but this one has a light flakiness to it - inside it looks kind of like when you pull apart the innards of a croissant - which sees it somewhere between a morning bun and a trad cinnamon roll. I am looking forward to trying more from Bara (there is allegedly a Golden Diner-style giant pancake on for weekend breakfast which I am extremely interested in), but for now, my first taste was 10/10.
    

11. Cauliflower Fritti at Forza Wine
    One of those which sounds mad - why would I want fried cauliflower etc. etc. - but is a menu staple for a reason. Anything, including cauliflower, can be made to taste absolutely elite if you smother it in light batter, deep fry it and serve the final product with a garlic aioli so powerfully pungent that it will ruin your chances of snogging anyone for about two days. And I think that’s beautiful.
    

12. Jambon Beurre at Naughty Piglets

    There is a reason this particular Jambon Beurre is famous and that reason is: this is a fucking amazing sandwich. Veritable slices of butter, really salty ham, on an airy baguette that is really satisfying to squeeze. Eating one at the counter on a sunny day when you don’t have anything on is a lovely experience.
    

13. Rita’s mini martini

    

    This is probably my favourite cocktail full stop. When I order a martini I usually ask for it “dirty and a little bit wet” (and then I apologise to everyone else at the table), and that’s because I am basically always attempting to recreate the experience of drinking this. The glass never gets too warm because the drink is so slight, and it also comes with a blue cheese gilda. Truly, actually ideal.
    

14. Coccoli at Brutto

    AKA savoury doughnuts served with stracciatella and ham, whereby the idea is that you rip open the dough parcels and stuff it with the fixings. I’ve seen this around at a lot of places recently, but as with most things they do, the version at Brutto is the best.
    

15. White chocolate ice cream at Bilmonte

    

    I mean it’s “white chocolate ice cream” what else do you want me to say?
    

16. Young Betty with bacon at Juliet’s Quality Foods

    Breakfast takes on a divine quality at this place, and their Young Betty (poached eggs on toast with espresso hollandaise sauce) with added bacon is maybe the most perfect iteration of eggs and bacon I’ve ever known. Obviously eggs, bacon and toast is good at the best of times, but at Juliet’s their flavours are made to actually harmonise - the saltiness is underscored by good butter on the bread, and the whole dish is given a bright little lift by the sauce. I eat it every time I get the chance.
    

17. Sainsbury’s cereal milk, white chocolate and cornflake cookies

    I’m actually about to go to my kitchen and get one of these now. I’m obsessed with them. If you like going to Milk Bar when you go on holiday to New York, you need to get one of these down you pronto.
    

18. Spicy potatoes from Falafel and Shawarma
    If Falafel and Shawarma has no fans I am dead - it’s one of my go-to takeaways, and it always delivers, regardless of which wrap you get (the one to pick, if you’re interested, however, is falafel and aubergine). What always sets the order alight, though, is their knockout potatoes - so soft as to almost be fudgy in texture, and amazing dipped in the chilli and garlic sauces that you can and should order on the side.
    

19. McCain’s potato smiley faces

    

    On the other end of the comfort potato spectrum are potato smiles. To me there are few pleasures greater than a plate of chicken nuggets, smiles and baked beans, and I always keep reserves in my freezer in case of emergencies (hangovers, sad housemates, event television like when Corrie and Emmerdale did a joint episode).
    

20. The MacGyver at Dinner for One Hundred

    There is altogether too much stuff on this pizza - chorizo, feta, hot honey, even crushed fennel seeds? - so it’s sometimes a bit wet but honestly it tastes great and I just love the enthusiasm.
    

21. The mental seafood pasta in a bag at Ciao Bella
    The food at Ciao Bella is fine but the experience of actually eating it is the best thing in the world, and it is neatly summarised by the fact that their signature dish is a seafood pasta that comes to the table in a paper bag and gets dumped on your plate by a waiter. A lot gets made of tableside showiness these days but this is the original, the least ceremonious, and hands down the funniest.
    

22. Chocolate, Bread, Olive Oil at ALTA

    

    I know it is a little bit pretentious but I do sort of love it when, on menus, you’re only given vague details of what a dish might include, because occasionally the thing will come to the table and be something completely different - and way better - than what you were expecting. This is the case with this dessert at ALTA in Kingly Court - the surprise element is a huge wad of marshmallow, tempered down by chocolate mousse that is only semi-sweet, the pool of olive oil that the whole thing is served on, and a sort of ornate bread tuille separating the layers. One of the best desserts I ate all of last year, honestly.
    

23. Devilled eggs at Bar Levan

    Don’t know about you but if I’m drinking a glass of wine and there’s a devilled egg available to me, I am getting that devilled egg. Weirdly perfect drinking snack, and the ones at Bar Levan - always pretty, always with a funny little twist - are the ones I think of most fondly.
    

24. Bran Flakes
    Something we don’t talk about enough as a culture is cereal. I’m really in my cereal bag at the minute and my go to is Bran Flakes - important to get one’s fibre in - with freezing cold milk. I have it most days and actively look forward to it, which is how you know I am 32.
    

25. Matcha latte at NOLA

    As a paid up member of the Stupid Bitch Society I have in the last year developed a taste for matcha, and the one from NOLA in Peckham is my favourite. There’s a little bit of cinnamon in there for some added warmth, and it makes a huge difference to the flavour. For a little pick-me-up treat on a sunny day, it is worth the (admittedly fucking extortionate) price in my opinion!
    

26. Milk chocolate cookie at Puffy

    

    I am also a cookie enthusiast and after extensive research I can tell you that if you are the type of pervert who likes to bite into the cookie and essentially have it melt all over your hand (I am this type of pervert, no judgement here), Puffy in central London is where you should get your cookies.

27. Mini Eggs
    Another “can’t really have them in the house” situation because I just enter a fugue state every time I am presented with a bag, and then come to ten minutes later with bits of shell down my top. What an invention and thank fuck they are not available year round.
    

28. Egg mayo sandwich from Paul Rothe and Son

    

    Big Sandwich has had its day, and while I do love a Frankenstein’s monster of deli meats in a sub roll as much as the next person, probably the actual platonic sandwich ideal for me is just a doorstop number from Paul Rothe and Son. Heaping spoonfuls of God’s own herby, creamy egg mayonnaise with anchovies, shoved between thick, pillowy slices of brown bread. And they cut it into little triangles for you, which is lovely x
    

29. The big ass beef and nduja lasagna from Tom’s Pasta
    They put so much Parmesan on everything at Tom’s Pasta that haters will call it a gimmick. I don’t care. I like gimmicks when they are good. The concept of a wedge of this lasagna - given a kick up the arse by the spicy nduja, which it needs - covered in a snowstorm of cheese is Important to me.
    

30. Mexican Layered Dip from M&S
    The things we’re seeing in the dip space coming from Marks and Spencer are truly next level, and this one is my favourite. It’s layered so that you get cheese, sour cream, salsa and guacamole on your tortilla chip with each dip. One of the especially good things about living in the future.
    

31. Crispy lamb belly roast at Gengelly’s (at the Clock House Tavern and the Earl of Derby)

    I am a pub roast hater, but if I ever have to pick one, I’m usually opting for Gengelly’s. The lamb belly is the best of their offering, with a crisp, caramelised outer skin which actually made me remember how much I do really like lamb the first time I ate it. Also, in a move that is slightly unusual for pub roasts, the potatoes and veg are certifiably Not Shit. Good one for a visit from your parents, I’d say.
    

32. Sheeryakh at Watandar

    

    One of the best things about being an adult is that you never have to ask anyone if you’re allowed ice cream, so if you are ever struck with the immediate hankering to eat the absolute best ice cream you can find (actually happens to me more often than you think), then your pick has to be the delicate, cardamom-heavy, floral-but-not-perfumey sheeryakh at Watandar in Catford, which is properly magnificent.

Okay, thank you, see ya xoxo

*With any luck, by the time you read this I will be ambiently hungover, drinking a gigantic fountain soft drink rattling with ice, while elbows deep in the first of about three takeaways I will consume throughout the day.

**Did you know I used to work at VICE???

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month.

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I like doing this because a long lunch kind of helps me to carve out a time for an unhurried-ness that there’s rarely space for elsewhere. There is, after all, usually a work email to be responded to or a bin bag that smells weird even though I only changed it two hours ago to deal with. So I’m pleased that the long lunch as a concept seems to be having a bit of a moment, PR wise - over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been #invited (lol) to two. As such, I thought you might be interested in hearing about these, because one was at a place that just got a Michelin star, and the other one is at a restaurant that is fully brand new, and I know we like to keep our fingers on the pulse here at Dining Out (a newsletter ostensibly about “food in London” which posted a review of Quality Wines in March 2026)**. Let’s do it to it:

Lunch at Labombe by Trivet on 5th March

• Before I write some thoughts down about this specific long lunch, I’d like to extrapolate a bit about why I think “long lunches” are having a brief moment in the sun. It’s hard to pin down trends sometimes - often there’s just a vibe in the air, and there’s nothing that kills a vibe more stone dead than trying to articulate it - but I’d probably gesture towards: 1) the new prevalence of set lunch menus at lots of popular restaurants; 2) the fact that the days are brightening up; and 3) a romanticism towards the idea of the power lunch, which is something that our work schedules - whether we’re bound by office presenteeism or shifts, or W-ingFH doing laundry loads between Teams calls - allow less of nowadays.
  

• Whatever the causes of this phenomenon, however, I will now actually move onto the specifics of my long lunch at Labombe by Trivet, which is in Mayfair and is from the same “team” as Trivet in London Bridge.

• As previously mentioned, Labombe just got its first Michelin star, so I was excited to try the food. While I have complicated feelings about Michelin stars (tl;dr, I’ve eaten amazing food at Michelin starred restaurants and shit food at Michelin starred restaurants, just as I have elsewhere. I’m not sure it massively tells you as much about the quality of a place as it does about its energy and tablecloth thread count, but that is Just My Opinion), they do always add a layer of intrigue, for the simple reason that it’s fun to see whether you think a place is worth the accolade.
  

• We got to sit in the private dining room which was lovely, and if you have a bit of cash to splash on your own long lunch (for a landmark birthday or something maybe?), this would be a cool place to do it.

  

• (How fun is getting a place setting with your name on, by the way? I never get bored of it.)

• I absolutely love it when there are “snacks” before the main courses of a meal, and they made the lunch feel like a bit of an occasion, like we were being settled in for the long haul. At Labombe we were served a gilda with a deep-fried olive, a king oyster mushroom, and a guindilla chilli, which I thought was quite fab as a veggie take on the gilda, because if there is one thing I believe in it’s that everyone should be able to have a gorgeous little gilda despite their dietary preferences. The other standout snack was a skewer with purple garlic - chargrilled so it was rich and a little bit sweet - and sweetbreads. I’m not usually an offal guy admittedly, but these were meltingly fatty with just the right amount of complementary tang from the garlic.

  

• I’m consulting my photos from the day now and there was actually a third amazing snack: a brioche stuffed with chiffon-thin slices of tongue, which was so cute it looked like it could have been swiped from an afternoon tea.

  

• I’d never eaten Txuleton - Spanish beef steak with higher fat content than standard rib steak - before, but now I’d like to eat it regularly, forever. This was a big slab of meat cooked with real tenderness - just enough to render all of that fat and get a caramelised char - which offered more proof for my rapidly expanding “Seriously is there any meal better than steak with a side of fluffy chips and something green?” file.
  

  

• The Iberico pork was also, obviously, amazing. Soft and perfectly salted. One of my favourite things about Labombe was the care with which these large cuts of meat were treated, because it’d be so easy to get them wrong.
  

• I want every Creme Caramel I eat from now on to be made with Campari.
  

• I liked Labombe, and I thought it was a good place for this type of long lunch. It’s a light, calm space, and the prevailing mode is chilled and relaxed rather than uptempo and buzzing. After we finished eating, I had an espresso and then bobbed back out into the sun, and I felt jollier than I had when I’d arrived. I reckon if there are any metrics to measure the success of a long lunch on, that’s probably a pretty handy one.

Lunch at Meza on 13th March

• Meza in Mayfair, which is a Greek restaurant by the founders of Mazi in Notting Hill, is a bit of a different proposition. This long lunch was to celebrate the restaurant’s opening, and where the Labombe set-up was a small table, here the restaurant was packed out for a full lunchtime service.
  

• Meza is billed as an ode to the taverna with an 80s-by-way-of-2020s spin, and I think you can expect to see it on many, many Instagrams in the near future.

  

• Sharing was the idea here, and food tended to be served on grand-feeling oval-shaped platters, which appealed to my sense of glamour. Food-wise, the idea seems to be an update on Greek standards for the aesthetic tastes of London in 2026 - hearty beef broth and bone marrow comes via the vehicle of tagliatelle; tuna crudo is served with ponzu; baklava is reimagined as an ice-cream sandwich.
  

• This was executed with varying levels of success. Some dishes tried to do a little bit too much (there were a couple of occasions, for example, when delicate seafood was drowned out by rowdier dressings), but some were properly fucking amazing. My favourites were tarama with lemon powder, which had all of the whipped-up fluffiness of the very best kind of hummus, alongside a balance of fish and lemon which allowed both flavours to stand up, and a gimmicky sounding steak tartare with graviera cheese ice cream, which actually turned out to be moreish and really clever.

  

• I think in all honesty, while it was lovely to visit Meza during the day, this is a place which would come into its own massively at night. It’s exactly the type of restaurant where you want to come with a big group for a girlies dinner, shouting at your pals across the table, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the bone marrow pasta being mixed tableside, before taking tipsy selfies in the Yayoi Kusama-coded mirrored corridor before the bathrooms. The music is loud and the flavours are broad shouldered; I hope I will be back for a night out before long, because I feel like that’s where Meza will be at its best.

• Seriously look how good the bathroom selfies are:

  

• If you want my advice, go here with your pals in your sexiest dress, eat steak tartare and baklava and chocolate cake, and take some photos that will ruin someone’s life.

Anyway, I hope this has inspired you to take a long lunch of your own soon. You absolutely deserve it, even if it’s just for a few hours where you are enjoying a big wine, loads of snacks, and something ostentatious to share over the table, and taking a break from thinking about the fact that you really need to buy bog roll and get someone out to look at your boiler.

* Obviously what is less good is feeling sort of pissed mid-afternoon, but that is more to do with my own poor choices and should not be held against the long lunch per se.

** Feeling like a bit of a dickhead re: the fact that this week’s post is about two press lunches in a really boujie area (sorry, next week will be way more normal) so in the interests of transparency I have to tell you that before I wrote this I ate a dinner of chicken nuggets, smiley faces and baked beans.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month.

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This is firstly because, while I have written about many, many restaurants where I have squealed or clapped or done something else annoying due to my enjoyment of the food, Quality Wines is the only restaurant where I have ever sat at the table and literally cried because what I was eating tasted so good. The dish in question (scallop in a molten little pool of golden Cafe de Paris butter) still returns to the Quality Wines menu from time to time, but I have not had it again since that fateful night - an occasion when I also ordered, and ate in full, two desserts - I think because I want the moment to remain crystallised and perfect and unique in my mind, all curry powder and overwhelm.

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It is secondly surprising to me that I’ve never done one of these on Quality Wines because I’m always telling absolutely everybody to go there. It is one of the three restaurants I always wheel out when people ask for recommendations, whether they are from out of town or trying to take their partner somewhere nice, or they just want a meal which will be, reliably, at least a nine out of ten (my other picks in this vein, if you care, are Brutto and Juliet’s Quality Foods). Quality Wines is just always good, but more than that, in my opinion, it has become an era-defining and almost quintessential London restaurant. This is a result of a combination of factors, including but not limited to:

• its spotlighting of sharing plates (like it or not, this is the style that has defined the last decade in How We Eat)

• an extensive wine list, suitable for its demographic, who started getting old during the advent of the whole natural wine thing

• the fact that both cool critics (Vittles) and traditional ones consistently rate it

• its knack for viral dishes, which, again, whatever your thoughts on the matter, is an important part of how a restaurant sells itself in 2026 (“is the mortadella panino in the room with us now?”)

• its brilliantly applied pan-European influences in a city whose restaurants have become obsessed with attempting to recreate the dining experiences of many other European countries, particularly Spain and Portugal, to varying success.

Anyway, sorry. While the above is probably useful context, the point of this is for me to tell you what eating at Quality Wines is actually like, I know. Forgive me. I last visited just over a month or so ago*, with Imogen and Elise, to get my mitts on the set lunch menu - available on a Saturday if you can believe such a thing (usually these deals tend to just run Monday to Friday) - which costs £27 and is therefore a bloody bargain.

Loads of places are at the set lunch game at the minute and I think that is good news. It helps to get bums on seats at a hard time for restaurants, and also offers an accessible way for people to try out places which might otherwise be a bit inaccessible price-wise. Considering that the Quality Wines lunch I am writing about here happened in January, everything except for like, a fucking slice of toast was a bit inaccessible to me price-wise, but if there’s any restaurant I’ll throw a few bits on Vinted for, it’s this one.

To take full advantage of the parameters of this particular set lunch deal, Imo, Elise and I of course went at the weekend. Here I am on the bus on the way there:

It was probably the first Saturday of the year where there was even a crack of sunshine, and this made for perfect Quality Wines conditions, given the floor to ceiling windows which make you feel cosy and smug when they fog up at night, and like you’re on holiday in San Sebastian when it’s bright out.

The restaurant is a collective favourite of mine and my friends’ just because we’ve been there loads of times together over the years - so much so that a game we play in our group chat when we are all bored involves one person screenshotting and sharing the Quality Wines set menu from Instagram, and asking everyone else what they would eat in that moment (it is a relief to have friends who put up with me, yes). Perhaps, then, you might humour me, by playing that game with me now. Look at my photo of the menu, think about what you’d go with, and then I’ll take you through my choices and rationale:

(I cut off the desserts but it was Portakalopita or cannoli in pistachio, chocolate or cherry flavour)

OK, do you have your answers? Good. Sound off in the comments. Here’s how I did it:

Nibble: Gilda

I have a disease where I can’t look past a gilda on a menu, so I was forced through no fault of my own to get one. The Quality Wines gilda features a big juicy anchovy and an even juicier olive and it is the perfect thing to get yourself warmed up with. A plump and ample runner’s lunge for the tastebuds.**

First course: Caponata

I love veggies and I am very wont to get a veggie starter a lot of the time. I always enjoy caponata for its freshness and lightness, but this one had a gobby sweet-and-sour zing that properly announced itself with every mouthful, and as someone who always gets the mixed popcorn at the cinema (#WeExist), I always really rate that particular combination.

Second course: Tagliatelle

Obviously I got the pasta. If you didn’t hypothetically get the pasta, you’re mental. This tagliatelle was made in house, so it had that delicate-but-firm feel that you only get with fresh pasta, while the Boscaiola sauce was meaty and super deep and earthy with sausage and mushrooms. Kind of a perfect dish for the first month of the year - warm and comforting at a time when warmth and comfort are known to be in short supply. Also the portion was massive and despite the low price I was really full.

Third course: Portakalopita

One of the many unfortunate things about me, however, is that regardless of my hunger level, I will very rarely be given a choice of desserts and not pick the biggest one, and this was the case here. Luckily, while it may have been a little larger than a cannoli, Quality Wines’ version of a Portakalopita - a Greek cake, drenched to the point of a Get Your Own Back gunging in orange syrup - was as light as a fibreglass feather, with such a soft-but-sturdy crumb. Accompanied by a well-judged bit of creme fraiche (which it really needed due to the sweetness of it all), it was a characteristically balanced but fun addition at the end of the meal.

While I may not have shed tears on this occasion (probably for the best because if I did that all the time I’d be staring down the barrel of a ban, which would be perfectly understandable), any trip to Quality Wines is, for me, a good reminder of why there’s so much to be gained from going to your favourite places with your favourite people again and again.

Obviously, I live in London and there is always something cool and new to be seen and queued up for and eaten, but more admirable than novelty is longevity. For years now, I’ve loved going to Quality Wines with my mates - like I say, for me, it’s a place that encompasses so much about what is particular to eating in London, and why that is a good and fun thing to do. For the low, low price of £27, it’s worth going to try for yourself - and if you’ve been before, it’s worth going again.

* I know my reviews used to be more reactive but a) I’ve been away for ages and I’m working to a backlog b) I’ve decided that Dining Out is now no longer constricted by the man-made dimensional factor of “time” and it’s my newsletter so leave me alone.

** No idea why I turned into Jackie Collins with my adjective choice in that last sentence.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month.

Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.

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Dining Out is going to come out on Sundays from now on, mostly because I like the idea of people reading it while they have a chill little coffee or try not to get the egg yolk from their breakfast sandwich on their top. It might take the form of a restaurant review, and it might also just end up being shit like “The Official Ranking of Chicago Town Products,” but either way, I hope 1) we all have fun and 2) it’s at least a bit informative. For paying subscribers, there’ll also be a couple of extra posts per month, so if you’d like those, that option is available to you. Mwah.

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While I was gone, I had a bit of an up and down relationship with restaurants and eating out - I’ve been pretty depressed, on and off, “lol”, which famously limits you from doing the stuff you actually enjoy - but in recent months, I’ve been back at it with a vengeance. So, I figured that for my first post back, I would share with you a bunch of mini-reviews of places I went to - and for the most part really enjoyed - throughout the month of February.

Herein lies pizza, pubs, and the root of my worst hangover in many years, plus some supermarket cookie recommendations (which you should heed because truly I have put in the hard yards). Thanks for reading and see you next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. I can’t wait.

Dinner @ Connie’s Pizza in Peckham

Sir, a third hypey pizza place has hit the Peckham/Nunhead area. Following in the hallowed and much-discussed footsteps of Dough Hands at the Old Nun’s Head and D4100, comes Connie’s, another proponent of the “London”-style pizza I used to write about quite a lot. This style - thin crust NY vibes, but a) usually personal pie size and b) a bit greasier; the sort of thing that only people who grew up getting a £3 margherita from a chicken shop after school could invent - was established at places like Crisp and Dough Hands, and can now be seen all over the city, including, now, in the arches by Queen’s Road Peckham station.

Opened by the same chef who is behind 081 Pizzeria on Peckham Rye - which is a strictly Napoli-type operation, all airy, springy dough and Buzzball-sized burratas as toppings - Connie’s takes on this trendy style and does it incredibly well. I love Dough Hands but sometimes I find the base a bit too blackened and therefore kind of hard to actually eat, but this is a little sturdier. Highlights were the meatball and mozzarella stick starters (not to be like, perversely “cheese pull” about it but they are really gooey in a fun way), the nduja and stracciatella pizza, and the fiorentina style pizza (fuck it more egg on pizza 2026). I personally wouldn’t bother with the vodka one because it’s pretty much just a margherita, and the creaminess that makes that sauce special doesn’t translate onto a pizza, in my opinion.

My only real gripe was that I wished they had a few more fun cocktails on the menu but I’m just a basic hoe who loves spicy margs so I have no idea why anyone listens to me in the first place to be honest. Tl;dr: Great pizza, go eat it.

Lunch @ The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park

Yes, The Plimsoll is really good. You know this, I know this, everyone who has ever been forced by the algorithm to watch Topjaw, Clockwork Orange-esque, knows this. It was, however, very nice to remind myself quite how wicked it is at lunch the other week, because when something becomes received wisdom, you start to take it for granted, right?

The Dexter cheeseburger, obviously, remains the final boss of pub burgers I’ve known and loved, but there’s so much else going on too: there’s a could-be-too-delicate radicchio and pistachio salad made hearty with the addition of a shitload of cheddar cheese, a piri piri chicken thigh confited into submission, with chips so crisp and then fluffy that I temporarily lost all concept of the word “Nando’s,” and my favourite of all, calamari in meltingly light batter, chucked on the plate in a golden pile with a wedge of lemon, hinting at the brilliance of The Plimsoll’s sister restaurant, the seafood-focussed Tollington’s. All killer, no filler, still as banging as ever, Amen.

Dinner @ Eat Vietnam Bar-B-Grill, Deptford

This one has been the subject of a full review before, almost exactly a year ago, and I had just as good a time in 2026. The abridged version is: everything rules, you have to get something cooked on the grill, the quail goes absolutely crazy, the bánh khọt (mini pancakes ft. a singular prawn in each one) is one of my favourite restaurant dishes probably ever, and you should order the wings over the ribs, if you want my two cents. It’s affordable, it’s always packed, and you will leave feeling incredibly happy.

Dinner @ Detroit Pizza, Islington

Following a series of unfortunate events at the opening party for Hot Saint Pizza at the Old Queen’s Head (the unfortunate events being that every time a pizza came out to be served, it was descended upon by about 20 people with more gusto than that of the Brighton seagull who once stole a full doughnut from my hand), Elise and I decided to eat elsewhere, and landed on nearby Detroit Pizza.

We had gigantic frozen margaritas, a hot honey and pepperoni pizza to share and a green salad. You know when a meal is exactly what you’re wanting? This was that. We sat in a booth, kiki’d over these massive “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”-type drinks with fishbowl-in-Tenerife straws, and chomped pizza until we could chomp no more. I’d have preferred a slightly more chunky, less bubbly base - I prefer my deep dish pizza to be more breeze block-like, with hardened cheese down the sides; it’s just who I am - but the overall experience was basically ideal.

Also I should say! Hot Saint Pizza looks ace - similar vibe to Connie’s; I was sad I couldn’t elbow my way to a slice, and I am excited to go back and try it soon - and we got some really cute pics in the photobooth so all was not lost.

Lunch @ The Camberwell Arms

I fucking love eating at the pub and places like The Camberwell Arms are why. The food here is never wanky: it’s just designed to taste good, make you happy, and be bolshy and flavoursome enough to stand up to a decent bit of booze. There was fresh pasta, a super light mussel and kohlrabi salad, the classique Scotch bonnet and pork fat on toast ([Gob Bluth voice] COME ON), plus a stunnique fish dish - flaky, clean - with mashed potatoes buttery enough to rival my mother’s, which is high praise indeed.

Lunch @ Il Bambini Club, Shoreditch

This is the new restaurant inside the Hoxton Hotel in Shoreditch - a very worthy alternative to the B*g M*mma venue up the road - and I have to shout it out for one very specific and important reason that I wish all Italian restaurants would copy immediately: YOU CAN GET A SIDE ORDER OF RIGATONI.

This meant that when I ordered a main of big old meatballs in sugo, which was served with chunks of oily garlic bread (this combo is my longest yea boi ever), I was also able to avail myself of a half portion of pasta, so that no element was missing. Revolutionary!!! Also, they have this green bean salad which is randomly unbelievable.

Dinner @ Mangal II, Dalston

Of all the class meals I ate this month, this was my favourite for a lot of reasons. It is extra-special, always, to go to a friend’s place and see how they run a room - anyone who has eaten at Mangal II knows that Ferhat could do it better than most in his sleep - but honestly, regardless of that, this whole dinner was sooo fucking swagged out from beginning to end, with so much to yell about.

There was silky hummus and a soft, tearable sourdough pide to scoop it up with for every man, woman and child (get the one with added fat and thank me later); cull yaw ribs; poussin made smokier on the grill than I’d thought possible for a bird; a trio of adorable desserts including one which basically tasted like a churro with custard but about seven times as good as you are imagining that to be.

All of that in a buzzy dining room on a busy Friday night, with my two best girlies? I might as well be describing nirvana itself.

72 drinks and no dinner at Forza Wine, Soho

I spent some very cherished time last year as Forza Wine’s brand manager, and I left to take up my current role at Polyester just as renovations were beginning on Forza’s now-complete Soho site, so I was VERY excited to go to the launch party of said restaurant last Wednesday.

Everyone involved in the operation is a true legend and what they have pulled off is genuinely so cool - the finished product looks so sleek and swanky and sexy (there’s even a mirrored ceiling), and I can’t think of anywhere else in central London quite like it. Come summer, there will be handbags over tables on their terrace, mark my words. I wish I could tell you a bit about the food but unfortunately I was too busy drinking frozen apple daiquiris (sweet and tart), ordering from the martini bar (lethal), and chaining Forza-branded cigs that I did not get that far (leave that one with me until a later date).

Did this behaviour result in my getting so twatted that I could not remember the code for my building when I arrived home, meaning that I stood in the street for ten minutes scrolling through my flat’s group chat to try to retrieve it? Perhaps. Was it worth the brutal hangover the next day? You know what, definitely.

Honourable mentions throughout the month:

- the M&S speckled egg cookies

- the Sainsbury’s cereal milk cookies

- the ham and cheese croissant that brought me back from the dead the day of my Forza-inflicted hangover

- the two amazing bottles of blush-red wine me and Hannah accidentally had at Dynamic Vines in East Dulwich last weekend

- You Me & Sushi and chicken wine on a school night with Imo and Elise

- pancakes, chicken wine and the ANTM documentary on a school night with Imo and Elise

- the blue cheese and jalapeno martini that Hannah made to pair perfectly with a buttery Bleecker double cheeseburger

- Mini Eggs

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill. Weekly articles are free to read every Sunday, and you can follow me on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 pcm or £50 annually to get extra content a few times a month.

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An example of the aforementioned dinner salads ^

Some of the salads here are standards – there’s a tabbouleh and a Greek salad, for example – and some are more of the “genuinely big and filling work lunch” school, but they are all excellent and they will all make you actually want to eat something other than a Solero in this mad (but, for me at least, very welcome) heat.

Bayroot

When I’m hungover I occasionally crave burger and nugs because I am but a mere mortal, but more commonly what I want is zest and flavour and something to wake up the inside of my mouth – which invariably, sorry, tastes like something has died inside it on these occasions. And so my hangover go-to order is usually a falafel wrap with all the trimmings, star among these being the largest possible serving of tabbouleh.

I have been resurrected by the specific tabbouleh from Bay Root on the Walworth Road a number of times. Here, they omit the sometimes-included bulgur wheat, and just give it to you straight up: shitloads of parsley, tomato, onion, with lemon and olive oil. It positively zings around your gob, it’s great with Bay Root’s crumbly, porous falafel, and it is so legitimately mouth-tingling (in a good way) that on many occasions I’ve just eaten it with a spoon by itself.

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Okay, so. Dining Out. It has been a little while hasn’t it? I needed a breather, and I appreciate your patience (not that I expect that anyone is actually sitting refreshing their phone lest they miss me making jokes about small plates and calling things “the David Beckham of pie” or whatever else it is I go on about on here, but you know what I mean). I was, however, never going to go away for too long (sorry), and recently I went to eat somewhere great with a friend on a warm evening, which is of course my catnip, so I felt the itch to tell you about it. As such, tentatively, I would like here to cite an ancient adage, if I may: we are so back.

The “somewhere great” in question was Lupa, which is a new Italian restaurant in Highbury that I really enjoyed – it’s compact, with a food offering that punches above the weight you’d expect from a kitchen this tiny, and it is, by all accounts a nice place to exist for a bit: bright on long summer stretches, and little enough that I imagine it’ll feel properly cosy when it gets colder.

You might have read about Lupa so far because one of the partners financing it is Theo James (aggressively hot man from White Lotus season two), and I will be honest: the look of the place is sort of like someone put “what if Theo James had a restaurant” into an AI generator. It’s very understatedly glamorous – the wait staff look like Hollywood actors – in the very literal sense that one guy deadass could have been Austin Butler on first glance – and the decor is pared back and pointedly tasteful. It’s very, like, Aesop, if you get me (like, by September this gaff will hate to see a creative directors on a third date coming)? The food, however, which is billed as “Roman comfort food” is less mannered, and I think that makes for a good balance.

My trip to Lupa was, as I say, on a sunny evening just over a week ago, and after a little hiatus from such frivolities, I was ready to have a vintage Lovely Time, so I put on a pair of stupid gingham shorts and some knee high boots, and was joined by my pal Elise, who is great company when you want to have a laugh because she’s so good at it, it should be her job. She arrived wearing a boob tube with a frog on it and I was like, “hwfg.”

I began with the Father, Son and Holy Ghost of Lovely Times: a little cig, a little focaccia-and-fennel-salami plate, and a little house martini to wash it down (cig: 8/10; bread and meat: also 8/10, a pickle would have taken it over the top; martini: 7/10 because I’m usually a vodka woman and this was gin, and also because I personally take them slightly wet – i.e. with more vermouth to take the edge off – so this was a bit too acrid for me). Once these rites had been performed, we went about the business of ordering: we picked tomato salad and fried courgette flower with ricotta from the primi section, carbonara to share from the pasta bit, plus fish of the day (plaice) for me, and deep fried artichoke for my esteemed guest, plus roast potatoes and a side salad. If there’s one thing I am good at, it is choosing the components of a meal, and I have to say I absolutely smashed this one into the top corner from the halfway line.

The vibe at Lupa is relaxed, and I liked the pacing of this meal – nothing felt rushed, but the waits between courses felt just well-judged enough. Our primi course came out quite quickly – the salad spoke of well-sourced produce (the tomatoes weren’t watery and crap is what I’m saying) and the courgette flower was a sort of declaration that said “you might expect this place to be one thing, but it’s actually another”. The batter was light but kinda cheekily oily, and the ricotta filling, brought to life with herby flecks, was not skimped on, oozing out when we halved the flower down the middle. It told me that though I may have suspected differently from Lupa’s slightly reserved feel, this was to be the type of Italian food I love to eat – hearty, a bit messy, made with satisfaction in mind.

The pasta – a delightfully glossy heap on the plate, dotted with little rubies of guanciale, twinkling in the light with fat – confirmed these suspicions, because the big portion and the sensuality of the sauce passed my all important pasta vibes test first time. Pasta is a dish to be chomped down rather than admired, and the speed with which Elise and I were competitively spearing tubes of paccheri, and swirling them around in the thick, black pepper-heavy sauce was evidence enough of what side of that spectrum this stuff fell on.

Best of all, however, were the main courses. I am a sucker for simplicity done confidently, and that’s what you get at Lupa: a fillet of plaice came with a big old plateful of citrusy butter sauce, artichokes as pretty as flowers were cooked in exactly the way they taste best (deep fried brother), and the mustard dressing on the radicchio salad was so fiery and addictive that it levelled a side order up into the best thing on the table (seriously, get this salad). I could have taken a little bit more of an outer-crisp-to-inner-fluff ratio on the potatoes, but really I’m splitting hairs, because if you thought I wasn’t picking those spuds up and dipping them into my leftover sauce, you would be gravely mistaken.

We ended with a slice of ricotta tart to share, topped with seasonal fruit, which in this case were peaches (and can I just stop for a minute and ask: have you lot eaten peaches recently? They taste fucking sensational. It’s out of this world. I am one more revelatory peach away from mounting Speaker’s Corner and just going “HAVE YOU HAD THESE???” to everyone who passes). The fruit was sweet, the cheese brought slightly tart creaminess, and it was all laid on a thin but substantial pastry which tasted almost biscuity, so the effect was kind of like a hyper Gucci version of a Biscoff cheesecake.

Of course the ambience of a June evening absolutely added to the glow of total pleasantness about the whole endeavour, but as I say, I don’t think that any of this was a fluke: it’ll be just as good in December when you’re bumping elbows as you crack into a gigantic swirl of porchetta over the table. There’s refinement at Lupa – those high shine pasta sauces, for example, are things of ridiculous skill – but there’s room given to the physicality that makes Italian food so irresistible to a lot of us, too. If you want my advice, I think you should go along with someone you fancy, feel smug that you’ve hit the perfect balance between chill and sexy, and then share a cacio e pepe so enthusiastically that you both get sauce on your chin. While it might seem a bit self-serious on first glance, there’s absolutely a good time to be had here – one bite of the food, I reckon, lets you know that Lupa is for enjoying.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.

Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.

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1. As of last Wednesday, Dining Out is officially an award winning publication, which is cuckoo crazy. We won the Self-Published Online Writer award at the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2025. Mad stuff. Thank you all for your readership and encouragement, it means so very much!!

2. You’ll probably have noticed that there’s not been a weekly review for a while. I needed a bit of a break, and I wanted to refocus a bit. While I still won’t be back to a weekly turnover anytime soon (I’m knackered and skint lads), I am going somewhere fun this week, so please expect a write up about that in your inboxes in the near future.

Okie doke*, that is the housekeeping done so now let’s get to the good bit:

Don’t know if you’ve noticed but it’s absolutely boiling. It’s the perfect weather for heatwave behaviour (this is a phrase we used to use at VICE for the deranged shit you do when it’s too hot, like sleeping with your legs out the window or going to work tops off. Heatwave behaviour.), but I have to say: it is not always the perfect weather for going to restaurants.

You are restless you are damp and the only thing you can actually stomach eating is mini Magnums. I understand because I have been in this boat for the past few days too, prone on the sofa crunching ice cubes and little squares of refrigerated melon, and intermittently saying to my housemate: ‘it’s so hot’.

Sometimes, however, it is necessary to leave the house in these conditions – perhaps you have a birthday or a spouse who cares not for your protestations about underboob sweat and would like to actually go somewhere nice – and because it looks like we are in for a hot hot summer in general, I have done a public good and assembled this helpful list of places you should eat, when it’s too hot to eat.

Watandar, Catford

The best thing about being an adult is that you can have ice cream whenever you want. You don’t have to ask your mom! You can just have it! It’s so good. Probably the most delicious ice cream I have ever had in my life is at Watandar in Catford, where they serve sheeryakh, made with condensed milk and and whole milk, in huge, towering portions, it’s own folds lovingly cascading down on itself. Everything at Watandar is amazing – I love their chapli kebab, which is a flat lamb patty style situation – and banging for a hot day, as it’s a lot of grilled meats with rice and salad. But my god. That ice cream, man.

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