November 2008

Welcome! This is your guide to the best of London's restaurants, with side trips to good eating and drinking in some of the rest of Europe. It's the only restaurant website that includes wine in any detail while giving you up-to-date, informed reviews. . . . The Restaurants section above provides a pull-down menu of restaurants in London and nearby, by category; there's also a new News section in there (updated weekly). Books shows some of my books, which you can easily order. Wine/Dine has notes on wine culled from tastings here, as well as recipes. Italy features reviews and recommendations for restaurants there, where I visit frequently. Travel covers restaurants, food, and wine in the rest of Europe, so far mainly France, but I'll be building that up as I travel more next year. FeedBack is where I post relevant comments, updates, and news from you. I hope you'll enjoy it.

I’m an American who’s lived in London for 14 years, a Contributing Editor for Decanter, the leading international wine magazine, as well as writing books on food, wine, and travel. When I first arrived here, England wasn’t much of a place to eat in, even London. A few years later, the culinary scene was fired up by a new generation of chefs (led by Gordon Ramsay, whom I was the first journalist to interview at length), and I was in the right place at the right time after all. London is no longer just a place for gourmets to change planes on their way to Paris, Barcelona, or Rome, it's a first-class destination for food lovers, with stylish restaurants, down-to-earth pubs serving good, rustic meals, and wine bars. More than 50 regional and national cuisines are well represented, including a range of beverages, from artisanal beers and ales to an incredible array of wines: London's wine lists are international road maps to pleasure.

I grew up in the restaurant and catering business, then cooked and wrote, in New York and several other places before ending up, happily, in San Francisco in the mid-'70s (definitely right place/right time). I wrote for several newspapers, especially the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times and the Sunday Telegraph in England, Gourmet and The Wine Spectator, the California Wine Institute, and wrote books, some on food. I edited cookbooks, lectured a little, travelled a lot, and summed it up with several more books: A Perfect Glass of Wine is a best-selling all-round guide; The Perfect Match (nominated for a James Beard Award) is a food-and-wine cookbook; and The Wine Lover Cooks Italian is a new cookbook about Italian food and wine, with more usable information on the exciting wines of Italy than in any other cookbook I’ve seen. (More information on the Books page.)

Besides work for Decanter, I’ve spent a year writing a wine chapter for, and helping revise, the newly published 75th Anniversary edition of  The Joy of Cooking. I eat out all the time too--on and off the job--and the best of that (including the best wine lists)  turns up here, for London, some of the rest of England, and some of Italy and France, where I still spend a lot of time. Please let me know what you think--send me a note through the FeedBack page above. Your comments, questions, quibbles, and recommendations are valued, and useful ones will be posted.