#dottys-teahouse

#dottys-teahouse

A Chinese silver-gilt tea service once leapt from a €50,000 estimate to more than €200,000 when auctioned by Sotheby's Amsterdam in 2011.

It's not a house of outstanding art, being a self-taught carver whose skills evidently advanced over the years, as you can see the evolution from fairly rough carving on the stairs to the very skilled work in the living room. He also created the paintings on the walls - talented chap - but never finished the carving in the living room, as his time finally ran out.

Martinis sit at the heart of the Brutes menu, with a martini card allowing drinkers to customise their cocktails according to their preferred base spirit, style and garnish. That means you can have your martini dry, wet, dirty or brutal, and garnished with everything from blue cheese olives and gildas to pickled onion Monster Munch and chicken scratchings.

The most arresting is a dramatic circular void carved into the ceiling, a spatial echo of St Paul's dome, translated from the sacred to the everyday. Below it, a monolithic espresso counter holds the room together, its weight and material language borrowed from Tate Modern's industrial character and the infrastructural logic of the riverbanks themselves.

Princess Diana's favourite was rose pouchong, the black tea with the rose petals, however, she was more of a coffee drinker. If she wanted a coffee, she preferred instant.

Allpress has announced it's opening a new site in Farringdon in early April. Expect the same high-class brews and beans from the cafe's other outposts, including signature blends alongside rotating single-origin coffees. As for food, the obligatory pastry selection and in-house cakes will also make a daily appearance.

The afternoon starts with a tour of the Old Bailey, including the courtrooms, the judges' dining room, and the cells below. If you've booked the afternoon tea, you're taken back up to the richly decorated Great Hall for an afternoon tea surrounded by all the pomp and grandeur that the hall can deliver.

Set beyond a fairly unassuming entrance - save for a red carpet lining the stone steps - Bertrand's Townhouse is a newly opened hotel (just this month, in fact) in London' s Bloomsbury neighborhood. Tucked down a street just off from the pretty Bloomsbury Square, the hotel is named for Bertrand Russell, the renowned British philosopher and writer. He was part of the Bloomsbury Set (sort of - he was considered to be more on the periphery), a network of British writers, artists, and intellectuals.

When we told our accountant what we were planning with Honey & Smoke, he couldn't understand why we'd walk away from something so successful. But we've never been driven by playing it safe. We want to bring something that excite

Daydreamer, named after the brand's signature house coffee, has opened at Cornerhouse on Rye Lane (which is home to Market Workspace as well as Forza Wine, Tonkotsu, and Nativo), with the full range of Elsewhere's specialty brews, all roasted locally in SE London. They're joined by carefully sourced house favourites and a rotating line-up of single origin coffees, alongside a thoughtful selection of baked goods and some retail products from the Elsewhere range so you can stock up.

If you open your kitchen cabinets and want to run away screaming from the tumbling and entropic heap of half-used packages - and you're starting to consider dropping a whole paycheck at The Container Store to finally fix your life (for real this time) - Wait! Let us share with you a far cheaper and more whimsical solution: vintage tea tins.

We were on a level playing field. We put forward our tender based on the criteria we were given. It's very difficult to see how there wasn't transparency in that, she said.

A tipoff to try the Tin Roof Cafe in Maldon came with prior warning: I wouldn't get a table easily as this all-day spot serving brunch, lunches and sweet stuff from the in-house bakery is constant, scone-fuelled bedlam. Red brick walls, greenery throughout, alfresco spaces, allotments growing fresh veg and herbs. Capacious, family-run, dog-welcoming, pocket-friendly. There's bubble and squeak with hand-cut ham, Korean-style chicken burgers and a vegan burger called, rather brilliantly, Peter Egan.

There is an art to a proper meat pie, according to the Seattle chef and butcher Kevin Smith. The American pot pie frustrates him because it lets the pot do the heavy lifting. "The real way of doing it, for me, is to make a freestanding pie," Smith says. The pastry should hold itself up, a technique cooks in England have honed over centuries. "That is so much more theatrical."

This multi-multi-million-pound paean to the black stuff, where Guinness disciples can make pilgrimage, has been on the capital's horizon for what seems like an era. The project has been tantalisingly dangled as an opening for some years, then delayed umpteen times, because, quite understandably, erecting a purpose-built, gargantuan, multi-floor Willy Wonka's Booze Factory in the West End of London for a corporate behemoth is no easy feat.

The best restaurants in South Kensington are no secret to the most cultured among us. This corner of London is more synonymous with groundbreaking exhibitions than a buzzy food scene - but hey, who can compete with the V&A, Natural History Museum and Science Museum as neighbours? Alas, culture vultures require sustenance like everyone else, and there are plenty of exceptional places in these parts ready to tend to those post-gallery rumbles.