"Scotland Yard Hotel: a handsome but solid red brick townhouse where a sunbeam wouldn’t show its face for fear of getting itself arrested"
"I was distracted by the density of references to specific brands, cuts of clothes, and dialogue plucked from the movies – 'capeesh?'"
"This is the kind of landscape that restores the soul. Briefly, the tawdry business of the Presidential election seems irrelevant to notions of America at its core"
Rebecca Fortey tries out the new Umai menu at Sake no Hana, experiences some hits and some misses, but lives to tell the tale
The upstairs restaurant at Antidote in Soho is serving flawless food, and same day reservations are a doddle. What’s going on?, asks Rebecca Fortey
"Does her close observation of the everyday often tip into the purely mundane?"
"The quieter sadness of some stories made me wonder whether the collection should perhaps have been named after its first story: 'debarking', it turns out, is the process by which a dog’s voice is softened to make it less startling to the human ear"
"If I designed a women-only club, pungent cocktails and meaty tapas would be served up between treatments"
"Skip the hot food, which is not what Italy does in the morning, and instead slice yourself some prosciutto off the bone, grab some of the excellent bread and order a thick, black espresso"
"We are surrounded by clientele of the older, opera-going sort. They have great faces: part lived-in, part experimented-with"
