Drink, food and travel writer. Contributes to the Washington Post, Daily Telegraph, Caterer and many more. Fortnum and Mason Drink Writer of the Year 2021.
Your ‘Ted Lasso’ itinerary for London: Pastries, pubs and live soccer
Richmond Green is not exactly as advertised. This leafy patch of suburban London is at the heart of “Ted Lasso,” the award-winning Apple TV Plus show about fictional soccer club AFC Richmond, but two minutes strolling around the neighborhood make it abundantly clear that other English games rule the roost here.
Cricket teams use the 12-acre Green in summer, including one representing a local pub called the Cricketers. The other pub by the Green is the Prince’s Head — transformed into...
The Staffordshire market town that’s home to Britain's best pub
You’ve got to be quick if you want a seat at the Tamworth Tap. At just after 4pm on a Thursday afternoon – opening time – the brewpub is filling up fast with a disparate selection of customers: office staff; young couples; men in workwear; older ladies from the charity shop up the road. By 5pm, it seems like everyone in Tamworth is here.
I feel a bit sheepish occupying a small table all by myself, but only a bit. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) recently anointed it the National Pub of The Y...
Social Security — The Hospitality Businesses Offering New Opportunities for Former Prisoners
In a shaded Oxford pub garden, on a calm summer’s day in this most genteel of English cities, a man called Steve is explaining what Tap Social means to him. “If I hadn’t met these people, If I hadn’t come to this company, if I’d have gone back to London, God knows what I’d be,” he says, before pausing briefly, a rueful half-smile, half-grimace playing across his face. “I’d probably be the oldest fucking drug dealer in town.”
Steve, 58, whose last name has been withheld on request, is a sous c...
'I've been to 4,500 pubs in Britain – this one is the best'
Depending how you see it, it took Martin Taylor either 10 hours or 25 years to reach The Taversoe, a family-run pub on Orkney. Ten hours, give or take, was how long he and his wife Christine spent driving from their home in Sheffield; 25 years is the time he has devoted to visiting every pub in the Good Beer Guide, from The Channel Islands to Shetland, ticking them off week by week and year by year until just one remained, on Rousay, a windswept island of just over 200 souls.
In all he visite...
After Soaring Stateside, Hard Seltzer Falls Flat in the U.K.
Hard seltzer arrived in Britain in early 2019 in the form of Balans, an “Aqua Spritz” made by Swedish cidermaker Kopparberg. Launched with a listing in ASDA, the nation’s third largest supermarket chain, it sold itself on its lack of calories. There were just 60, drinkers were assured, in each delicately designed 250-milliliter (roughly 8-ounce) can. “With Balans, we’re helping consumers say no to ‘maybe next time’ and ‘yes’ to embracing 2019,” insisted Rob Salvesen, head of marketing, in a p...
A Link to the Past — Adjunct Lager, Identity, and the State of Beer in Washington, D.C.
Once you’ve visited a few Washington DC breweries, you start to get the message. At DC Brau, the city’s first production brewery for almost 60 years when it opened in 2011, a sign inside demands “Statehood for the people of DC”.
City-State Brewing Co., founded in 2021, has also tied its identity to that of the city, and Right Proper Brewing Co’s glassware declares the beer was “made in the Douglass Commonwealth”—the name DC would take upon statehood.
Politics is everywhere in beer, but rarely...
How Black Brewers Are Transforming Washington, D.C.'s Beer Scene
If Washington, D.C. was slow in catching on to craft beer, then it's quickly becoming a nation leader in one crucial respect: Black representation.
The capital, which welcomed its first modern manufacturing brewery, DC Brau, as recently as 2011, now has three Black-owned breweries, making up approximately 20% of the city's total of 15.
Together with Black Brew Movement, a D.C. organization that aims to bridge the gap between Washington's Black population and craft beer, these breweries (Sanko...
Sie Lieben Auch in Schlechten Tagen — Giesinger Bräu in Munich, Germany
Steffen Marx doesn’t look like the scourge of Munich’s traditional brewers.
On an unseasonably hot afternoon in mid-May, he’s dressed—from the waist up, anyway—in a fluorescent yellow high-vis vest, his gut exposed, his jawline covered with a stubbly beard. Standing in the yard of his brewery, Giesinger Bräu, he is short and solid, with a squat bottle of beer in his hand, a glint in his eye and arms covered with tattoos: a maypole, hops, the brewery logo, the Munich skyline.
Perhaps, though, ...
What I’ve learned about Bavaria in beer gardens
The young man at the beer garden in Munich has his hands full. In one, he holds a liter-size stoneware mug, foam spilling untidily over its rim; with the other, he’s carefully transferring a small, not entirely compliant child from a stroller to a long wooden bench.
It’s just after 5 p.m., and this beer garden, Paulaner Am Nockherberg, is filling up. Chestnut trees cast shade over dozens of long, slim tables. Six middle-aged friends settle in a sun-dappled spot; a pensioner in a fedora and sp...
On the London Tube, the start of a new Elizabethan age
The London Underground train hurrying me toward Paddington station is a bit unusual. In place of the usual riders — harried commuters, eye-contact avoiders and world-weary big-city hipsters — there are pensioners, teenagers, families, all thrilled to be here. It’s May 24, and the Elizabeth Line, the most exciting thing to hit Transport for London since the double-decker bus, opens today. It has been about 30 years in the making, cost about 19 billion pounds (about $23 billion) and is four yea...
Aussie trio's fried chicken business, Coqfighter, takes flight in London
When London's first COVID-19 lockdown began in March 2020, Deacon Rose wasn't sure his business would survive. Coqfighter, the Korean fried chicken concept he launched in 2014 with fellow Australians Troy Sawyer and Tristan Clough, had grown slowly but surely in its six years of existence – but with no government assistance announced at that stage and a period of lockdown looming, things looked grim.
"We didn't have a lot of cash in the bank, [and] we're not a big enough company to go into hi...
Are Danish hot dogs the best? I went to Copenhagen to find out.
It’s 11:30 on a Thursday morning, and a middle-aged woman, her hair in a neat blond bob, is devouring a hot dog in the baggage reclaim hall at Copenhagen Airport. In some countries, that might seem quirky, but it’s perfectly normal here: There’s a hot dog stand next to the currency exchange window, and plenty of others are also eating, attracted by the smoky, savory tang hanging in the air.
Danes love hot dogs. I learned that from my Danish neighbor, Michael, when he dragged his grill into th...
Black by Day, Red by Night — Mild Ale and the Industrial Heartland Where It Never Died
At The Beacon Hotel, a pub in the post-industrial corner of England’s Midlands known as The Black Country, three friends are at the end of their weekly pilgrimage. It’s Wednesday lunchtime and Lyndon Smith, Dave Gell, and John Pagett have driven 12 miles from their homes in Kidderminster to this Sedgley inn to drink their favorite beer, Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild.
Glass dimpled mugs, full of foam-topped, deep red Ale, sit in front of them on a small table in the wood-paneled back room. There...
The Spice of Life — How Bundobust Emerged from Bradford’s Rich Cultural Heritage
After a long day on his feet, Marko Husak has found what he’s looking for.
Spread out in front of us on a large table at the Sweet Centre, a restaurant in Bradford, West Yorkshire, is a Kashmiri feast: chana puri, lamb karahi, biryani, daal, naan and—most crucially—chicken karahi. “That’s the taste of Bradford,” Marko says, emphatically, gesturing at the round metal bowl in which the last dish, sprinkled with coriander, has been served.
My ears prick up. We’ve spent a frost-bitten Friday seek...
A dash of Americana has stirred the London cocktail mix
I had expected to find Shannon Tebay at the Savoy’s American Bar. In August, she became the first American head bartender at this London institution, hired to add a fresh, New York touch to the bar’s historical luster. Given that the American Bar has been serving up cocktails since 1893, that seemed significant. A bold new era, even.
But here we are, drinking coffee at Grind, a cafe-cum-cocktail bar on the south end of London Bridge, on a chilly morning in February. She has left the American ...