Brushing aside worries about the recession, three Soho restaurants launched last week: Aqua, Polpo and Hix.
Polpo, a Venetian Bacaro, has had promising early reviews and seems primed to become a Soho staple. We're yet to hear any real word on Hix, his second restaurant in town and run by chef Kevin Gratton, ex head-chef of Caprice. If you've experienced Hix's latest, we'd love to hear from you on either Twitter or our forum.
The one place that Hot Dinners had experienced is the first restaurant to open in aqua London. The Spanish restaurant, Aqua Nueva, opened last week and quickly garnered a disdainful review from Fay Maschler who visited on the first Monday, something which Harden's own review has taken her to task for. Hot Dinners' experience of the restaurant was of one still finding its feet (a soft launch would really have been recommended), and of decent but not phenomenal food. However, visiting on a Friday night, the place became gradually more buzzier as the evening progressed and we'd imagine that it will only take a few weeks for this to become a key central London destination. You can read more about Aqua Nueva and of our thoughts on the restaurant here. And don't forget to keep watching our New and Upcoming Hot London Restaurants feature.
In other news, Big Hospitality has unveiled its 21 most influential people in the restaurant industry as chosen by 16,000 people attending the Restaurant Show. There are few surprises, with celebrity chefs and restaurateurs mixing with restaurant guide owners and the aforementioned Fay Maschler as the only critic on the list.
While we're talking about the restaurant industry, there was also an announcement from D&D, the folk who took over Conran's restaurants, about dropping the service charge from their bills (on parties less than 8). The Guardian wonders if it's a good idea and fears that this may result in lower wages, while David Mitchell in the same paper was rather fond of the fixed service charge in the first place...
In the lead up to the London Restaurant Festival, the latest news is that Gordon Ramsay's London Eye capsule has sold for £23K to a mystery bidder. We'll try to get news about the other capsules as soon as possible.
Elsewhere in the press, we learned that a kitchen fire has forced Atul Kochhar's Benares to close for up to four weeks. He's hoping to have it up and running sooner and we'll report here when the doors open again.
Finally, in the week when the ultimate pop-up restaurant, Le Tante Claire in Selfridges, opens, the Guardian wonders whether pop up restaurants might be getting too much publicity - and could it kill the format?
