Tag Archives: The Independent

Taking Subway Down

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Top critic tries and fails to find something nice to say about Subway

I would like to think I'm not a food snob: in my job as a restaurant reviewer I've visited Heston Blumenthal and Pizza Hut and found points to favour and to criticise in both. But I've avoided Subway until now. I'd thought it was a sandwich bar, and a sandwich is a sandwich, right? Wrong. My visit yesterday revealed that these are no sandwiches, that Subway's slogan "Eat fresh" is scandalously misleading, and that it may be fast, but it certainly ain't cheap.

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Cooper Brown: Dinner with Bercow

The Independent
News just in: meat free might make slightly poorly or perhaps that’s just the mead
It’s showtime – the Hollywood A-lister is coming round tonight and I’m still hung over from an amazing night out with Sally Bercow – the new Tory pin-up. She sure is an amazing gal. She likes shorter men – her husband, the Speaker of the House of Commons, is even shorter than the Coop. She is clearly a woman of exceptional taste as well as beauty. I took her to the new Heston Blumenthal restaurant – Dinner – as I know the PR woman and jumped the six month waiting list. Best thing we had was the ‘meat fruit’ and getting her to admit that she quite fancied George Osborne. Personally, I think he looks like some pasty-faced health hazard, but power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, unlike meat fruit, which seems to me to be the ultimate diarrhetic
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‘Naked chef’ to debut on Hong Kong adult channel

The Independent
A Hong Kong adult channel is set to debut a cooking show headlined by a nude host who will prepare Cantonese dishes wearing a transparent apron – an apparent bid to encourage more men to cook. Host Flora Cheung will start each 30-minute show shopping for fresh ingredients in the city’s famous wet markets, undressing once she is back in the privacy of her studio kitchen, the South China Morning Post reported. Cheung, who admits she has never worked in a restaurant kitchen, said she hopes the risque show will draw more men into the kitchen. The first episode is set to air later this month.
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Brasserie Toulouse-Lautrec 140 Newington Butts, Kennington, London SE11

The Independent
It’s hard to know what Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec would have made of Elephant & Castle. Even those of us who hail from south of the river don’t challenge the view that the two roundabouts at its core are the armpit of London. So you’d think an artist as flamboyant as that master of fin de siecle Paris would struggle to find inspiration amid these dreary tower blocks. Perhaps it was their very greyness that prompted Herve Regent to install a brasserie named after the painter here ? next to The Lobster Pot, a 20-year-old fish restaurant he owns next door ? and make it a family business by employing his eldest son front of house, and two others in the kitchen.
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