Coconut, black pepper and rum frappé? Why not. Chive and pineapple with vodka? Sure. Maker’s Mark, Angostura Bitters and fig syrup? Hey, we’re so buzzed from the first two cocktails, at this point we’ll try anything. And at around six or seven quid per drink, we can (on rare occasion) actually afford a little frilly drink exploration. The Shish Bar and Cocktail Lounge in exotic Willesden Green (yes, the same Shish with that corner......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break? Edokko 50 Red Lion Street WC1R 4PF Nearest Tube: Holborn 0207 242 3490 12pm-2pm, 6pm-10pm (Monday-Saturday) Expect to Pay: £10+ for mains/set lunches (under £5 for ala carte items) Rating: 8 out of 10 We really wanted to give this Japanese restaurant an even higher rating than a solid “8” and perhaps if our expectations had been a little......

Firefighters rank pretty highly in our list of bona fide, real life heroes. So, news that a fire crew in Deptford rescued and resucitated a 9 month old Staffordshire Bull Terrier from a fire that started in the basement of a Chinese Restaurant yesterday, just makes us go all moist at the edges. Four people were also led to safety by firefighters from Deptford, Greenwich and East Greenwich firestations but it's the image of......

Worrying news for one of our country’s top gourmet icons. Gordon Ramsay’s flagship restaurant in Chelsea, called simply Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, has lost some of its brownie points, according to the latest edition of ‘Harden’s London Restaurants’. Love-him-or-hate-him-Ramsay has been undisputed king of the London restaurant scene for nearly ten years. Take a large measure of chefly talent, whisk it with lashings of colourful personality, and then cook up with a generous helping of......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Latin Square Restaurant & Havana Bar 43-45 Farringdon Road EC1M 3JB Map Expect to Pay: Around £5 for a Daily Lunch Special Rating: 7 out of 10 Londonist needed an escape from all the rain this week and so visited the Latin Square Restaurant & Havana Bar. It's found just around the corner from Farringdon tube and not hard......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Toku Restaurant (at the Japan Culture Centre) 212 Piccadilly W1J 9HG Map Average Lunch Price: £10 Rating: 8 out of 10 Consistently ranked among the best Japanese restaurants in London (usually noted for its authenticity as in this ItchyLondon listing and this LondonTown.com review), bustling Toku is indeed a noteworthy Piccadilly Circus landmark to keep in mind. And it’s......

Call for new writers. Londonist is a collaborative blog, which means we're always seeking out new additions to our team. Unfortunately we can't pay our contributors because any money we do make from advertising etc generally gets ploughed right back into the site. However, there are a number of benefits to writing for Londonist, so here are a few of the obvious ones: It's good experience and good exposure. After all, thousands of people will......

We're all so busy running about preparing for Xmas that it's easy to forgot today is the start of Jewish festival Chanukah. Chanukah isn't really that big a deal holywise in Jewish festival-land, it's just kind of got the most famous reputuation from being near the Christian present-giving festival and lots of Jewish children over the years looking sad without presents. As such it's probably the best known festival, recognisable by the lighting of......

Lord Mayor, John Stuttard, is planning to make London a centre of business education and professional learning. After today's bus strike which no-one seemed to know about, tomorrow will see technical staff behind BBC News walking out of work. So, Al Jazeera have picked a good day to launch their English language service tomorrow with a plan to 'build a bridge between cultures.' Michael Jackson's in town ahead of tomorrow's World Music Awards and......

Township Stories opens tonight at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East after a successful run in the Edinburgh Festival and is the kind of play that reviewers cannot help but describe with words like "sordid underbelly" and "gritty" and "contemporary urban realism." This new play about post-apartheid South Africa and "the moral breakdown of a community" is brutal, violent, shocking and stirring: lots of characters all with their own personal struggles cross paths and collide......

Great local news headline in the Hillingdon Times: 'Bollywood Reservoir Dogs' to be filmed in Harrow "Counterfeit", set in London's criminal underworld, will, according to its makers, be an Asian film to rival western crime movies such as Reservoir Dogs... Sounds cool. Who have we got to rival Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth and Steve Buscemi in the acting stakes then? It will star Stephen Rahman-Hughes. Who? the star of West End musical Bollywood Dreams......

The BBC, police and local authorities are considering blanking out big screens across the country after violent scenes at the Canary Wharf screening of England's laboured 1-0 victory (we did say they struggled in the heat) over Paraguay on Saturday. Police were called at 3:30 pm as around 200 of the 6,000 fans gathered in Canada Square threw missiles and fought, an affray some witnesses said began with youths throwing beer over each other.......

Who do you think will win then, Badger or Michelle? We'll find out who Sir Alan Sugar will be poking his digit at for the last time tonight at 9pm on BBC 2, as the second series of The Apprentice reaches it's conclusion. London's representative in the series (Ansell grew up sarf of the rivah, but has since decamped to 'London-on-sea') crashed out in episode 4, after a nasty experience with chickens, pizza and......

A large red sign saying "eat up everything on your plate - or else" may seem like rather unneccessary decor for an all-you-can-eat buffet - after all, the whole point of going to a buffet of limitless visits to the food counter is to eat up everything on your plate not once but several times. Still, there are some diners who take the concept of all-you-can-eat as a personal challenge and will make a......

American police are searching for a woman who held two British girls as slaves for 13 years. The girls from Southall are now 22 and 18 - "When I was there, I never thought it was weird or bizarre... Now that I'm out I realise she's the weird one, not the rest of the world". Meanwhile police here in London have arrested a man in connection with the death of his girlfriend in Australia......

Did anyone pick up Time Out's Eating and Drinking Guide 2006 when it came out? If you did you might have seen a little editorial comment suggesting that London is one of the most expensive cities in the world to drink wine. Ok, so it's not exactly front page news (Local man pays over the odds for bottle of wine court told) but when you start comparing us to those pesky "other European cities"......

The Firecracker Showcase opens tonight with a bittersweet romance from mainland China. Nuan tells the story of one man's return to the village he grew up in and the people he left behind, most notably the title character, Nuan, his first love. The film follows the few days he is back home coupled with flashbacks explaining how it was he came to leave and how the life of the headstrong Nuan took a very......

The average price of eating out in London has been disclosed today thanks to research published by Harden’s restaurant guide. And, would you believe it, grub is getting more expensive! Restaurant prices across the board apparently rose by 4.1 per cent during the year, with the average cost of dinner for one in London being £36.82, compared with £35.79 last year. But you have to look at the really pricey places to see what's......

Londonist is looking for more writers. Over the past six months we feel that we've really strengthened the editorial output of the site (thanks to our fabulous editorial team), however we do realise that there are some areas in which we are still lacking. Also - the Londonist staff have got it into their heads that they have the right to take some kind of holiday during the summer months so we have to......