Friday five: the week's top restaurant stories
- Chef Roberta Hall McCarron will open a café, bar and bottle shop in Leith this May bringing her total number of venues in the area up to three. Located next door to Hall McCarron and her husband and front of house counterpart Shaun's flagship restaurant The Little Chartroom in the space that was most recently home to wine bar Mistral, Ardfern takes its name from a childhood memory of a village in Argyll and Bute. The venture is billed as a ‘truly relaxed’ all-day experience offering brunch, bar snacks and heartier dinners alongside cocktails, draught beer and wine from its bottle shop.
- La Dame de Pic London has received four AA Rosettes at the 2024 AA Rosette Awards, the only restaurant to be given the accolade this year. The two Michelin-starred restaurant at Four Seasons at Ten Trinity Square, run by chef Anne-Sophie Pic, was given the award ‘for its stunning classic dishes, featuring first class, seasonal produce, superb technical execution and flavour profiles’. A further 16 restaurants were presented with three AA Rosettes at the awards, which were held in London this week. Those given the award include Social Eating House, Pavyllon London, Claridge’s Restaurant, The Silver Birch, and Studio Frantzén in London, The Gin Trap Inn in Norfolk, and The Little Chartroom in Edinburgh.
- Chef Dave Myers, who was one half of TV cooking duo The Hairy Bikers, has died at the age of 66. News of Myers' death came this week, two years ago it was revealed he had been diagnosed with cancer. Myers, alongside co-host and friend Si King, spent the past 20 years on TV and was much loved for combining a love of food and telling the stories of the people behind it with a sense of adventure and light-hearted humour. The pair hosted numerous cooking and travel programmes including the 30-part daytime series for BBC Two The Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain, a 40-episode series The Hairy Bikers’ Cook Off, and The Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure. There had been fears that no more episodes of The Hairy Bikers would be produced. However, the pair’s latest TV series The Hairy Bikers Go West, in which the pair travel down the UK’s west coast, began airing last month.
- Pip Lacey and Gordy McIntyre have closed their Islington pub Hicce Hart just over a year after its launch. The pub opened on Penton Street in 18 November and continued the style of food served at the pair’s Hicce restaurant in London’s Coal Drop Yards, which closed at the end of last year. The pair’s pizzeria Little Pizza Hicce, located in Islington, is also understood to have closed having initially launched in April last year at the Goodness Brewing Co taproom in north London’s Wood Green. The pair later moved the concept to Chapel Street across the road from their pub.
- Restaurant closures surged to the highest ever quarterly figure in the final quarter (Q4) of 2023, according to data obtained by Price Bailey. Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows that 514 restaurant businesses entered insolvency in Q4 2023, beating the previous record of 481 set in second quarter of the year. A total of 1,932 restaurant businesses went bust in 2023, equating to an average of 5.3 going insolvent every day. It reflects a 45% increase on 2022 when 1,332 (3.6 per day) restaurant businesses collapsed.
For more of this week's headlines, click here.
