Place

Hotels, restaurants, bars, houses and the buildings that hold them. Every place here has been visited rather than briefed, and written up against what it claims to be rather than what it costs.

The question is always the same one: is this worth the journey, and for whom? Scores are given at the end of each piece, broken down so you can see which parts carried the result.

Published here

Naked & Famous
Naked & Famous — The Other Side of Portobello Road
Beneath zēphyr on Portobello Road sits a thirty-five-seat cocktail bar devoted to agave spirits and 1970s glamour. We have returned several times, drawn by the room as much as by a list that goes well past the conventional Margarita.
Edit No. 37
Notting Hill Bakery
Notting Hill Bakery — The Bread You Already Knew
For more than thirty years its bread arrived on tables across London without anyone knowing whose it was. Now the bakery has a shop of its own, and a pain au chocolat worth crossing the neighbourhood for.
Edit No. 37
Gold
Gold — Seven Years of the Same Good Idea
A Noughties nightclub impresario took a pub where the Sex Pistols drank, put a River Café chef in the kitchen and lit a wood fire. Seven years on, the best things on the menu are the ones that were there at the start.
Edit No. 37
Pizzeria Casavostra
Pizzeria Casavostra — All in the Family
A family business with roots in interiors and design has created one of Almancil's most enduring restaurants, where the wine comes from the owners' own estates and the vegetables from a plot a kilometre up the road.
Edit No. 36
2 Passos
2 Passos — Fresh Fish, Without the Fuss
A family-run restaurant on stilts above the dunes at Praia do Ancão has spent more than four decades doing what the Algarve does best: serving fresh fish in a setting that needs no embellishment.
Edit No. 36
Darts Farm
Darts Farm — Fifty-Five Years of Selling What the Field Grew
A working farm near Topsham that grew into one of Britain's best food halls, where the produce still comes out of the fields behind the building.
Edit No. 35
River Exe Café
River Exe Café — A Restaurant Worth Taking a Boat For
A floating restaurant in the Exe Estuary, reached only by water taxi, where the fresh fish gives you a reason to make the journey beyond the novelty of eating on a boat.
Edit No. 35
Hanwell Flight of Locks
Hanwell's Six Locks and Three Bridges — Where London's Industrial Past Survives
A short stretch of the Grand Union Canal in Hanwell contains two centuries of engineering history, from Georgian water-saving ingenuity to one of Brunel's final works.
Edit No. 34
The Hawthorn
The Hawthorn — A Neighbourhood Pub That Needs No Reinvention
There is a particular pleasure in finding a pub so busy that you cannot get inside it. At The Hawthorn, on Uxbridge Road, we ended up standing outside with our drinks, the bar full and the pavement serving as an extension of it.
Edit No. 34
Casa Mori
Casa Mori — When Fusion Becomes Its Own Cuisine
Put the chef who coined Mod-Sin in a kitchen with the chef behind one of Singapore's better Spanish restaurants, and the obvious risk is a menu of jokes. What arrives instead is a set of dishes where one tradition keeps revealing something useful about the other.
Edit No. 33
Prévost at the Haycock
Prévost — The Restaurant That Followed the Road
People have been stopping to eat at the Haycock for centuries. The road has changed, the coaches have disappeared and the restaurant now serves tasting menus beneath an artificial olive tree, but Wansford is still doing much the same job it always did: feeding people travelling through.
Edit No. 32
Can Travi Nou, Barcelona
Can Travi Nou — The Farmhouse the City Grew Around
There was a time when Can Travi Nou wasn't an old farmhouse hidden inside Barcelona. It was simply a farmhouse, surrounded by fields and livestock in rural Horta. The unusual thing isn't that the building is still here. It's that almost everything around it changed.
Edit No. 31
El Racó del Cargol, L'Hospitalet
El Racó del Cargol — The Snails Cost Extra
A restaurant named after snails, a short walk from one of the most famous football grounds in Europe, in a municipality most of the people walking past it don't realise they've entered.
Edit No. 31
ROSI, Broadway
ROSI — From Horse Trailer to Broadway
Sian and Roman spent several years serving wood-fired pizza out of a converted horse trailer. In August 2025 they opened a permanent site behind the butchers in Broadway.
Edit No. 30
El Disparate, Seville
El Disparate — Andalucía, With the Windows Open
Seville is very good at preserving its food traditions. El Disparate is more interested in seeing what happens when you let them travel.
Edit No. 29
Botley Hill Farmhouse
Botley Hill Farmhouse — Five Centuries at the Top of the Downs
Bought by a Tudor merchant in 1546, later a tearoom and only relatively recently a pub. Nearly five centuries on, much of what reaches the table still comes from the estate outside.
Edit No. 28
Starling, Esher
Starling — The Michelin Star That Kept Its Nerve
A Michelin star arrived five months after the doors opened. The restaurant didn't change to fit it.
Edit No. 28
L'Aillet, La Teste-de-Buch
L'Aillet — The Bistro Worth Leaving Arcachon For
A contemporary bistro in the centre of La Teste-de-Buch, 250 wines in the cellar and a dinner menu nobody sees until it arrives.
Edit No. 27

From the archive

Earlier place pieces, from Edits 01–26. These were published on Vitae and still live there.