In recent weeks, I’ve noticed a miserable new category of body-negative, GLP-1 adverts being repeatedly served all over Instagram. ‘Do your doctors insist that your BMI is too low for weight loss medication?’ they proclaim. ‘Not here!’ Roll up roll up, come one, come all, because everyone – especially those most susceptible to dysmorphic online messaging – can always be smaller.
It is, to state the obvious, a difficult time to resist and revolt; to dig our heels in and choose decadence and a life of pleasure. Which is why Tavern, the recently-opened new Shoreditch bistro helmed by the team behind The Nest and the Michelin-starred Restaurant St. Barts, feels like such a joyful and almost punk-spirited venture. Flaunting a kind of gothically medieval style of branding, from its blocky typeface to the olde drawings of quaffing patrons adorning their website, Tavern wants you to know from its chosen moniker outwards that it is a place for a more ribald kind of fun. If the word ‘tavern’ rightly makes you think of ruddy-faced men chugging ale and having a gay old time, then Executive Chef Brendan Appleby has taken this spirit of hedonism and twisted it for 2026.
This means big flavours, like a fat scallop served in the half shell and pooled with umami-rich cobnut XO sauce, or a Germanic sliced pork and cuttlefish sausage, accessorised with fruity chutney and sauerkraut that makes you yearn for Christmas markets and jugs of mulled wine. Big showpieces are very much the order of the day too, not least a tankard of crispy pig skins that coil and stretch up to the rafters. Each piece of light, puffed crackling is little shy of half a metre long; dipped into its hefty smoked cod’s roe dip, it’s a bar snack fit for Henry VIII.
And then we come to what they’re calling The Chunion Puff: its capital letter menu status indicative of how quickly the dish has already begun to assert its status as a star. What arrives at our table looks like an acid-trip version of a pair of mossy boulders: two rotund balls, absolutely slathered in fine, voluminous clouds of parmesan cheese and dusted with a bright green powder. Stick your knife into the perfectly structured choux pastry and a huge splodge of gooey, cheesy custard will spurt out with pleasingly little decorum. Take a full bite and, inside, the oozing fromage is joined by the unctuous flavours of confit onion.
It’s messy and playful and unashamedly luxurious: a fat savoury profiterole for adults who know that the pleasure of a good dessert need not wait until the final course. Apparently, you’re meant to eat the whole thing in one, which might be a tad overkill but a word to the wise – don’t wear white if you intend to bite.
Elsewhere, if you’re looking for opulence of the kind that embraces quantity as much as quality, then MiMi Mei Fair’s Dim Sum Dynasty brunch has an unequivocal wow factor. In its quaint Chinese tearoom-style dining space, the showstopper is an 11-piece dim sum set that arrives in a basket as broad as your table. Filled with delicate octopus siu mei, crispy radish puffs, duck bao and plenty more, it’s the sort of occasion meal that should impress friends, in-laws or anyone with eyeballs.
Final mention must also go to Cometa on Charlotte Street, an exemplary new Mexican seafood restaurant that’s recently been praised with a Michelin Guide addition. Make sure to order a handful of oysters, served with memorable, piquant house condiments, and then go for the crab chilpachole rice. A cousin of risotto, made with a rich, seafood broth, it comes adorned with a quenelle of smoked eel cream that slowly melts into ribbons. Don’t rush it. Let it do its thing. If we’re eating as well as this, who needs to hurry?