Restaurant: Anzu, Norris St
Time: Monday evening
With: Wist
Stand-out dish: Seafood katsu teishoku
New restaurant in St James market, from the folk behind Tonkotsu. Pristine inside, with that new furniture smell. We visited on their first day of full trading, with the soft launch having finished the night before. There weren’t many customers in, but there were lots and lots of staff on. I wasn’t feeling too well, so plumped for the greasier options on the menu. The prawn korokke was fantastically gooey. And the seafood katsu teishoku was enormously generous. The miso had a deep mushroomy flavour, the pickles were crisp and sour, and the fish was lightly fried and tasty. Nice one Anzu.

Restaurant: Kulu Kulu, Brewer St
Time: Wednesday lunchtime
With: James F
Stand-out dish: Prawn tempura hand roll
Shabby inside. Horse-shoe conveyor at the centre, with primary-school-sized stools following in parallel. Coat hooks line the walls around the conveyor. Staff conversations are minimal; you’ll have to flag one down if you’d like a drink. Many people arrive and leave in the time we’re there – if you’re after a lightning-quick lunch stop, it provides. The most expensive dishes are £4; it appears cheap, but adds up fast. The food isn’t fantastic, but it’s perfectly good for lunchtime sushi. I picked a few wild cards – including something that looked a bit like a Japanese style sausage and mash. Which turned out to be Japanese style sausage and mash. Who’d’ve thought. But the best dish of the day was the prawn tempura hand roll. Lovely.

#7. The Captain Kidd, Wapping High St
The Captain Kidd is a beauty, overlooking the Thames. Its a warehouse conversion (coffee I think), converted in the 1980s,so the details are all surface, but the atmosphere doesn’t suffer for it. From the beer garden, you look directly onto the water. The HQ for the Met’s marine division is to your right, and their fleet is often bobbing up and down in the water. Inside, it all goes a bit nautical. But it’s a friendly boozer and one you can settle into for a session. The pub is run by Sam Smiths – headache beer – so I recommend you only stay for one or two, to take in the view.

#8. Fifteen, Westland Place
Jamie Oliver’s first restaurant opened back in 2002. The space inside is pretty fine, but it’s on this list for its exterior. As you walk up the cobbles of Westland Place, the building juts out at a sharp angle, perfectly framing it against the warehouse buildings in front and behind. It’s a muscular industrial structure, offset with awnings and warm lighting. Red brick, with sandstone banding. And a beautiful circular pediment on the top. For me – it’s the best looking restaurant in London. The area around it has monstrously gentrified in recent years, and I often worry that property developers will decide it will make more money as a bunch of swanky warehouse flats than a swanky restaurant. But so far, so good. The cocktails and food served inside aren’t half bad either.

Popped along to the Edward Ardizzone exhibition at the House of Illustration the other day.
Johnny the Clockmaker was one of my favourite books when I was a child, so it was wonderful to see them roughs and layouts up close.

Here’s Ardizzone’s self portrait.

He was commissioned by quite a few commercial clients, including the Radio Times. I thought this Guinness poster was great. Ardizzone wasn’t so sure. It was his only poster to be displayed on street hoardings, and he wrote to his daughter once it was posted to say ‘London is now plastered with a rash of them, and I creep around feeling rather ashamed of myself. The multiplicity is overpowering and destroys what little virtue there may be in the job.’

I also was excited to see the illustration he’d created of the Festival of Britain’s tin fountain. A guide I’d spoken to at the Southbank had referred to the bucket fountain, but didn’t have any reference for how it looked. Now we know.

Restaurant: Sosharu, Turnmill St
Time: Thursday lunchtime
With: Leo B-J
Stand-out dish: Tuna open temaki
Swish interior. They’ve not dropped any details; everything is beautiful, from the wallpaper to the glassware. The staff are curt but quick. Lots of business meetings happening around us. It’s expensive, but not at the Sushi Tetsu extreme. The chashu pork belly was messy but fantastically tasty. The assorted sashimi was masterfully served and delicate in flavour. But the Tuna open temaki was the stand out dish. It was beautiful – served taco-style (rather than rolled) on a crisped seaweed shell, with spiced mayonnaise and scallion tobiko. Well worth a trip.

#5. St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell
Hidden behind trees, and flanked by two rather ugly buildings, sits St John’s Gate. Built in the early 16th century, it’s one of the few remaining structures linking Clerkenwell with its monastic past. From Clerkenwell Road, its barely visible. But as you walk closer, it rears up all muscular and solid. Inside, a small but well-curated museum about the Order of St John.

#6. Underwood St, Old St
A feature on many morning walks to work, this street never fails to rouse me. Warehouse buildings on either side – once storage for feather merchants and the like, now airy office spaces and swanky flats. A little slice of New York’s Meatpacking district, here in London. Unfortunately its over almost before its started; by the time you hit Nile Street, that Manhattan feeling is gone.

Cocktail #3. Manhattan
Source: Café Royal Cocktail Book, William J Tarling

Recipe:
1/3 Rye or Bourbon Whisky.
1/3 French Vermouth.
1/3 Italian Vermouth.

Stir and strain into cocktail glass, with cherry. A dash of Angostura can be added if desired.

Nairn’s London #11
St Paul’s Presbyterian Church, West Ferry Rd

THEN: I always expect this astonishing little building to have gone by my next visit: it seems such an improbably fierce survival. The chapel committee chose the young Mr Knightley, who afterwards went on to do many other things, including the old Queen’s Hall and the late wild Westminster Bank in Holborn. Mr Knightley in turn chose to recreate Pisa on the Isle of Dogs: a fussy piece of Romanesque, fighting mad, polychrome from end to end. The front diminishes in arcaded tiers, the four bays are given a circumstantial arcaded clerestory, slate-hung for good measure. It is a very loveable firework, and needs to be much better known.

NOW: A little walk from the Cutty Sark, but with influences a long way from London. The building ceased being a church years ago, and now operates as ‘The Space’ – a community theatre and café. But the exterior remains unchanged, and it’s a fine and elaborate structure surrounded on all sides by ugly residential flats. Worth a look.

Nairn’s London #15
Cutty Sark

THEN: Cutty Sark has leapt like a dolphin into a concrete dry-dock next to Greenwich Hospital. The superstructure is impressive enough, but the really marvellous thing is the view from the bottom of the dock, reached by steps from either end. The part of the boat that nobody every saw billows out in a proud copper sheath, as necessary as the shape of an aerofoil. The thing that Victorian architecture missed, and modern architecture has missed also (though modern aeroplane design has reached it because it had to): sheer need, pared of anything inessential. But sheer need on all levels – as much a spiritual need for the figurehead as a functional need for the precise shape of hull. Everything has got to be just where it is, and the rightness is worth more than any artificial tension. Inevitably; and you can try for all your life and miss, like George Bernard Shaw.

NOW: The Cutty Sark site is probably unrecognisable versus Nairn’s day –the entrance and support structure was only built around ten years ago. But the ship remains at the centre, as beautiful as ever. Almost entirely reborn from the ashes of its 2007 fire, the upper and tween decks both have the feel of a new build. But it’s the gleaming copper hull, as Nairn mentions, that is remarkable here. And with a café at the south end, it’s a great place to stop, have a cuppa, and enjoy the passing of time.

Cocktail #26. Vieux Carré
Source: Death & Co Modern Classic Cocktails, David Kaplan

Recipe:
1 ounce Rittenhouse 100 rye
1 ounce Pierre Ferrand Ambre cognac
1 ounce Carpal Antica Formula vermouth
1 teaspoon Benedictine
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 dash House Peychaud’s bitters
Garnish: 1 Lemon twist

Stir all the ingredients over ice, then strain into a double rocks glass. Garnish with the twist.