The worst thing about putting this guide together is every time I find a great place and get excited about it, it either a) closes down, or b) and worse, opens another branch which makes it seems like a chain. Villandry’s flagship on Great Portland Street was once a bit of a one-off slice of [...]

A great breakfast spot, attached to the side of the music studios, the walls at The Premises are covered with pictures of the people who have recorded here. This makes keeping eye contact with the person you are with difficult as I find my eye wandering over the pictures of Nina Simone and Lily Allen. [...]

Drage caused a huge fuss here about not getting enough attention from the staff since Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were there and hogging it all. He dealt with it by shouting at the waiter and promptly getting kicked out. His secretary called up the next day to apologise and explain that there must have [...]

The son of Sir Terence Conran and half brother to Jasper Conran, Tom Conran followed in his father’s footsteps and came up with four of my favourite restaurants including Tom’s Deli, Lucky 7, The Cow and Crazy Homies. Tom’s Deli was the first deli in a now heaving deli area but it is still the [...]

I know I said I wouldn’t give staff a hard time but this place is so badly run, it’s like work in progress. It could potentially be really great. The idea is that for £2.50 you can have as much bread as you like and toast it at your table where industrial Dualit toasters are [...]

You can’t really go wrong with the Breakfast Club: it does what it says on the packet. It does good lunch too – sandwiches, toasties, baked potatoes, salads and smoothies. It has a country kitchen feel, although somewhere hot and mental, like Brazil and it’s unpretentious and relaxed. If you don’t want to make a [...]

Eccles cakes are hard to come by these days, they are so quintessentially British. I came here recently with Carmen and she had three Eccles cakes….THREE. I’ve done some strange things in my time but I’ve always found two to be quite ample. I can’t put my finger on what it is about this place [...]

Modern Pantry could be seen as bland to some or very chic to others – I’m going with chic. It has neat little white tables and exposed brick walls, with newspapers and magazines strewn about. The food here is delicious serving everything from toast and preserves to scrambled eggs with smoked streaky bacon, slow-roast vine-ripened [...]

The first time I came here was to see ‘tranny lip-synching’. The MC was this tall lanky transvestite wearing nothing but a black spandex catsuit and an epic silver Helmut Lang belt. It had a profound effect on me. Bistrotheque is a bar, a club and a restaurant with a very Paris-meets-Shoreditch style. It’s [...]

The Wolseley is like Chanel. This place is pure indulgence and grandeur with a slick colour scheme of black, white and gold and a ceiling that reaches to the heavens. The bathrooms are like that of a plush Las Vegas casino. There is a fair number of tourists here but then again there is a [...]