Metro, 9 January
Marina O'Loughlin at Beach Blanket Babylon
It says on the menu that it is French Onion Soup with Welsh Rarebit Croutons. I don't think so. It looks like nothing I've ever encountered, a bowlful of gloopy beigeness that seems to move at the touch of a spoon with some kind of blubbery inner life. The croutons are damp, bendy cheese on toast. The soup's taste is beyond extraordinary. It's like someone has puréed a bunch of Krispy Kreme doughnuts with the boiled onion scrapings off a Wimpy burger. I promise you, I am not exaggerating for effect.
Beach Blanket Babylon – Metro review in full >>
The Evening Standard, 9 January
Fay Maschler reviews the food at three London art galleries
Although there was no need to queue for exhibitions, the cafés were packed. Having something to eat with your art is a significant source of revenue for the institutions so you would think there would be better organisation. Standing in a line with a tray carrying a salmon and rice salad in a box with no guarantee of a place at a table, it was hard to remember why, when the Tate Britain Café was converted by John Miller and Partners, there was such excitement. The café was always destined to be the duller cousin of Tate Restaurant with its Rex Whistler mural but it seems to be going the extra mile in its absence of ergonomics and discomfort to point out to punters that they haven't reserved a table.
Evening Standard magazine review in full >>
Time Out, 2-8 January
Will Fulford-Jones visits Prohibition Bar & Grill
The name implies a homage to the US constitution's 18th Amendment, enacted in 1920 and repealed 13 years later. However, the theming of Prohibition, a handsome, glass-walled box under a Tower Bridge office block, doesn't extend to much more than a mocked-up newspaper clipping on the menu. Certainly, if any surreptitious speakeasy cranked its club-ready music to the ludicrous levels that we endured early one midweek evening, the police would sniff them out in seconds. It got softer later, after a guitar-toting duo spent a half-hour trundling sincerely through a bunch of songs you've already heard once too often; this isn't the place for a quiet night.
Time Out review in full >>
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