What we’re reading

Table manners: dining out in the age of TikTok

CODE’s founder, Adam Hyman, owner of The Good Food Guide, weighs on the big debate currently raging across the restaurant industry: how to stop the influencers running roughshod over your restaurant. “Not every viral moment is a win,” says Hyman. 

The Good Food Guide

Markus Thesleff: “50% of my black book has left the country”

Restaurateur Markus Thesleff (Los Mochis, Sale e Pepe etc) has carved a niche serving some of the wealthiest diners in London but that doesn’t make doing business plain-sailing. He speaks frankly about why London’s reputation as one of the world’s great restaurant cities is being eroded.

Restaurant

The Hart restaurant review –’Man, this place was singing’

Giles Coren emerged as a hero to the restaurant industry the other week after his call for the general public to go out to eat went viral. In his column, he writes in praise of his local caff, of Pizza Express, and The Hart, the Public House Group’s new one in Marylebone which Coren describes as “sceney and drunken”, “a little bit 18th-century Dick Turpin”, a little bit Noble Rot, and a little bit 1990s Soho House. Sign us up!

The Times

Who is Chinatown for?

A look at the history and shifting identity of London’s Chinatown by a local guide and academic Xiao Ma: “One day, I tried a thought experiment with a school group from Wales: I asked them what a Wales Town’ in Japan would involve. ‘The Welsh dragon’, ‘Welsh cakes’, ‘Daffodils’, ‘Our flag’ came the shouted responses. But when I asked if any of these things represented them as people, they said no.” 

Vittles