Zoe Williams reviews

Thursday, November 13, 2008 - Hartnett has been put in charge of his new restaurant, Murano, which opened in August, and is a very pleasing space – it's classy, there's grey leather on the walls and you get told off if you play with the dangling crystal objets, though there isn't acres of space between tables.

Sunday, October 19, 2008 - The London Carriage Works is in an exceptionally lovely area of Liverpool - vast great Victorian industrialana converted into café'n'delicatessenerie on wide, peaceful streets, nothing so déclassé as a shop or a tramp. Charming service, lovely high ceilings, exposed brick, an informal sense of space: I had not put thing one in my mouth, and already I was recommending it for a large party. There's a sense of event, but no hint that you might be told off. Amazing how few places I could honestly say that about.

Sunday, October 05, 2008 - I was meeting my cousin J in Sheffield and it was perhaps the sixth and final day of summer, and the waiter at the Old Vicarage had put us in the window with a view on to some greenery and horses, and all was well with the world. This place screams 'wedding anniversary', only in a posh voice. And it's too genteel to scream. It's pretty chintzy, but welcoming and not prissy.

Sunday, September 28, 2008 - My Bristol friend, S, said she started off being infuriated that you could never get a table at Culinaria; then...finally, she reached a place of acceptance, deciding that the opening hours were like English wild strawberries - you didn't demand them, you just took them where you found them. That must be a pretty special restaurant, you might think, to warrant such yearning. Well, it is, but not to look at.

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - I honestly thought my mother had told me everything she knew, 18 or 19 times, but apparently not. Surveying the beige New Yorky interior of Aaya, she said it was a founding principle of interior design that you should have no working space above eye level. Who knew it had principles? But they work - the underlit, eye-height bar at Aaya sets a mood of graceful control...

Sunday, September 14, 2008 - Purnell's is an inviting space, named after its young chef-in-a-hurry, Glynn Purnell, with a fashionable but safe mix of buttery leather, industrial beams, nice light and so much air between the tables you'd have to communicate by semaphore. Though I concede you're not meant to be chatting to other tables, least of all in a financial district. It's not Nando's.

Sunday, August 31, 2008 - I am a sucker for an unmarked doorway that looks like a secret (in this case, a black door with a small silver plaque, to the right of the entrance to Sosho). The East Room treads the line between a highly exclusive members-only joint and a regular restaurant by the surprisingly simple expedient of letting non-members into the restaurant. It is a lovely room - long canteen tables, soft furnishings in intense 1970s browns, high-gloss tiles. It's sexy and retro, a bit like dreaming a porn film through the filter of your childhood.

Sunday, August 03, 2008 - Call me irrational, but in the same way that I prefer a pedigree dog to a pedigree cat, I like a posh Italian restaurant infinitely more than a posh French one. They seem to be able to do serious food without all the pomp. It's a feat; they should run a pan-European masterclass. L'Anima contends with an interior of such stony, city-boy machismo that I felt as if the floor might at any time gape open to reveal a city or a tiger, like in Indiana Jones; and still, for all that, the atmosphere is inviting.