A couple of interesting upcoming restaurant openings hit the hot-dinners.com radar in the past few days – most notable of which is the news that thrice-Michelin-starred chef Heinz Beck is heading to our fair city to open his first restaurant outside Italy. Beck made his international reputation at the Cavalieri hotel’s La Pergola restaurant – it’s the only Roman restaurant to have the coveted three stars. Now he’s heading to the Lanesborough Hotel where he’s opening Apsleys – a Heinz Beck restaurant. Goodness knows how they managed to keep this news secret when the restaurant’s supposed to open on 7th September, but we’ll endeavour to find out more for you as soon as we can. All we do know right now is that it will be Italian fare and there will be a Menu Degustation available at £75 for seven courses.
Across town, the Great Northern Hotel which for the last few years has stood rather forlornly looking on as the rest of King’s Cross St Pancras gets a wash and brush-up, will be turned into a boutique hotel in time for the 2012 Olympics. Caterer Search reveals that the hotel will have 95 rooms and a bar and restaurant.
Elsewhere on the foodie web this week:
- Heston Blumenthal’s magic touch elevates the Popham Little Chef from roadkill to foodie destination as his motorway gaff makes it into the 2010 Good Food Guide.
- British restaurants might wake up to this thing they call the World Wide Web when they hear that internet restaurant bookings soared by 107% last year; apparently just one in 10 restaurant offer online booking at the moment.
- London restaurant Festival tickets go on sale – get your credit cards out and get booking
- We’ve heard of pop-up restaurants, but this beachbound branch of Burger King took three days to create and was gone before the bank holiday weekend was finished.
And finally...a great hooray for the PR team at Morrisons who have come up with the marvellously left-field idea of hiring food laureates to write rhyming recipes for their supermarket.
– for Apsleys.
