Theo Randall (ex chef at the River Cafe) recently opened his restaurant at the newly refurbished Inter Continental Hotel at Hyde Park Corner (about time too). The restaurant has a Milanese chic with well spaced tables and Frette table linen.
The food? The simple dishes are done well - spinash with olives, pan
fried squid. Avoid the complicated ones - my Panna Cotta was a weird
grappa flavoured wobbly blob (which resembled a silicone breast
implant, though I have been told they don't wobble) with
not-sweet-enough Chestnut paste.
What was enjoyable? Spacious environment. Not hurried service and genuinely good natured staff. Good simple dishes.
What was not enjoyable? The more complicated dishes - Italian food is about simple dishes made with superb ingredients - it's astonishing how many English chefs try to jazz up La Cucina Italiana ... with weird concoction and tastes.
Those of us London-centric folks easily forget there are great concert halls in other parts of the world. I remember as a young kid buying DG LPs with von Karajan on the front cover conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. So as my first visit to the city, a visit to the Philharmonie to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was a must. Ivan Fisher started the evening's concert with Haydn Symphony 88. A light and delightful work. As I'd expected, the acoustic of the hall was amazing - probably a good 2.5 second of reverberation - and much more generous than the Royal Festival Hall in London. The strings sounded sweet and the timpani came through clearly with definition. The audience was then treated to Béla Bartók's Seven Pieces for Choir and Chamber Orchestra: the Berlin Phil reduced in size occupying only half of the stage while the Netherlands Youth Choir took the other half. These young performers (all female) sang in Hungarian from memory - not easy at all - and rea...
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