What We’re Reading

Britain’s 12  best pubs reached by train

OK, so you have don’t have the cash right now to go on holiday, but perhaps a day trip isn’t out of the question? A useful selection from The Good Food Guide’s 100 Best Pubs 2025 that includes the number one pub of the year.

The Good Food Guide

Last Orders, London?

A guest essay in the gray lady by Jimmy McIntosh (@londondeadpubs) that neatly sums up “how London’s drinking culture, and” – crucially – “the city itself, is changing”. Could Gen Z drinkers “zebra striping” in old man pubs save London’s pubs from becoming “a sea of quarter-zips”?

New York Times

Do you have the right to film your waiter? – Insider’s Notebook: FT Weekend

“Don’t my colleagues and I have a right to privacy?” asks one bakery worker, who resents playing the “unwilling extra in someone’s Reels”? A polite request to influencers, but not just influencers, to think before they film.

Financial Times

“I was determined to stay”: Grace Dent on leading a new era of MasterChef

One can only imagine the stilettos of steel it must have taken to get Grace Dent from Carlisle girl to national treasure. Here she is now, profiled in Vogue and tasked with “restoring the joy and trust” to MasterChef. Soon Gregg and John will be but distant memories.

Vogue