Often, I find the best way to ease into a conversation with someone you have just met is to talk about things you both hate – talking about something you both love inevitably can lead to who likes it more or who liked it first. With Sketch love and hate swing dramatically depending on whom [...]

On a sunny day I will tear myself away from a busy schedule of staring out the window and take a stroll through Victoria Park to a bourgeois little tea room in Lauriston village, find myself a good spot by the window and select a large piece of some kind of pie and a cup [...]

Situated on Hampstead High Street, this little Hungarian patisserie has been here since 1963 and so have the waitresses. Staffed by a troupe of old ladies from behind the Iron Curtain they are Hungary’s finest export of communist charm. They briskly usher you to a table (if there is one, otherwise you are sharply and [...]

Hidden at the back of ‘Vintage Heaven’, a vintage china shop on Columbia Road, is the perfect English tearoom. Then again that is the ‘look’ they’re going for; ‘a perfect English tea room’. They serve good tea and coffee and have a selection of the most delicious cakes (the best stodgy Victoria sponge cake I’ve [...]

Situated inside the Heals store, Meals at Heals is so wrong yet so right with a description that can only start with “Once upon a time…”. It resembles something out of a fairytale. It has a pastel colour scheme and tables that look like they have icing dripping off them. It’s very Scandinavian, a fact [...]

Alexa Chung claims to love the strawberry tarts here, we know she never eats a strawberry tart, that’s the kind of crap celebrities say in weekend supplements. If you go here when the rest of Soho ISN’T and you manage to get a little tiny table with a French bistro chequered table cloth, tea in [...]

My friend is late but I’m already feeling pissed off. Fighting your way through Harrods is a depressing experience. It’s full of WAGS, poor families on a day out and rich Muslims laden down with bags of makeup to wear under their burkas that no one will see. Harrods is so tacky, anyone who knows [...]

My favourite thing about America (apart from their ‘no questions asked’ full returns policy which people exploit to the max and is reason enough alone to pledge allegiance to the United States) is that you are never far away from a good slice of pie. There is nothing I love more in the world than [...]

Perhaps a bit out of the way, but if you’re in London on a sunny day then it’s worth a trip up to Primrose Hill for a cup of tea and a cupcake. Half 50s tea room half old fashioned sweet shop, the American retro furniture and cabinet of cakes including cupcakes of every kind, [...]