Not what you’d call a quiet year, 2024: big elections here and across the pond; endless trouble in the Middle East; Russia and Ukraine still at it. P Diddy. Oasis reunited, while Taylor Swift continued to stake her claim as the most successful musical artist, ever. The Olympics! Remember them — who won, again? AI creeping towards all our jobs. Brat summer. One Day. Chicken wine. “Wellness”, whatever that really is — but also Ozempic. Moo Deng, the Pygmy hippo. Or, given we’re on animals, Baby Reindeer. Hardly very demure, very mindful.
But what have you been reading? Below are the overall most-read articles on the Going Out pages this year.
‘It’s time to ban homemade baked beans for good’
“There are innumerable facets of life that aren’t worth the effort,” wrote Josh Barrie in June, “and making your own baked beans, for a cooked breakfast, is one of them.” In this oddly-impassioned-for-the-subject piece, Barrie raved against the superfluous nature of homemade beans with a fry-up: Heinz will do, is the gist. “So to homemade beans, which are found in pubs and hotels whereby the other elements are cooked well: sausages sourced resourcefully; bacon with fat rendered, medallions free of sacrifice; tender eggs boasting unfussy whites and consciously oozing yolks. But the beans? The establishments must be beside themselves with misplaced ambition.
“What do these people believe they are achieving? The full English is a dish formed in pursuit of hangover alleviation, of grease and desire. It is about finding excellent ingredients and cooking them properly, simply, easily. It is not about trying to win MasterChef.”
Read the full article here.
High style, low spend: London’s best chic but cheap restaurants
Haydon Perrior
Not a surprise, this one: if 2024 was marked by anything, it seems to be a sense of getting poorer. So no wonder Londoners were keen to find high-end places with low-end prices (or, in other words, where to live the Champagne lifestyle on the lemonade budget). This piece, updated throughout the year, offered the Evening Standard’s writers’ favourite places which don’t cost a fortune. Going out shouldn’t mean going broke.
Read the full article here.
‘Please England, phone it in against the Dutch — the Euros are wrecking restaurants’
Mike Daw, this one, pulling no punches. While most of the country were rallying behind Gareth Southgate and the England team to make it to the final against Spain (an agonising loss; the less said, the better), Daw was grumbling. “I enjoy the summer of sport as much as the next person: give me a flat-roof pub and a screen and I’m yours,” he wrote. “But restaurants showing the football? Please, make it stop.”
On it went: “Why on earth would Nightingale — one of the most beautiful cafe-cum-restaurants to open in London this year, the place with the sash windows and the coat rack — elect to erect its own mini football fan zone? Who thinks: “The footie’s on, I’d better surround myself with pastels”? It’s like owning a Raphael and hanging it in the men’s changing room at Wembley.” There was even a dig at the future king. Much fun, this one. Social media was not kind.
Read the full article here.
Why Whispering Angel is naff
Thank God for Joe Bromley. Railing against endless rosé drinking — “hun juice season” — and, particularly, against the baffling overhype of Whispering Angel, “which has hit naff, yummy Cotswolds mummy status”. Bromley is actually kinder than he might be, and offers the very best alternatives out there. “Life is treacherous in the rosé trenches,” he writes. But, as he shows, it needn’t be.
Read the full article here.
Think you really know Guinness? Ask for a pint of semi-skimmed
Read the full article here.
The 50 best pubs in London
Pubs loomed large in terms of what readers engaged with — both this and our guide to the 50 best gastropubs in London. But this piece, which does what it says on the tin, was a true labour of love. Look out for the 2025 update, arriving soon.
Read the full article here.
The Yellow Bittern affair
Lucy Young
Ah, the Yellow Bittern. It came about fairly innocuously; a post on Instagram, offering somewhere for long lunches (well, two hour lunches, weekday only), where cards are refused and booking is too. In went David Ellis for the first review: three stars, full of praise measured with scepticism. “There is an unsettling sense that this is a place of make-believe, or perhaps 1982 (my favourite of the years in which I wasn’t yet born). A doorway to life before everyone dulled,” reads the write-up. “If this is a long lunch place then it is one with training wheels. It offers the requisite sense of mischief without the ruinous side effects. I did not miss any trains, or wake with a head in the vice of dehydration.”
But then proprietor Hugh Corcoran took to Instagram to complain about diners coming in and not coughing up enough. Cue derision, piss-taking, outrage in various shades. “A bizarre and performative act of public self-pity, Hugh Corcoran’s tone-deaf appeal” infuriated Mike Daw, who wrote that the chef “would do well to remember the world doesn’t owe him a living.” Ouch. Either way, readers greedily gobbled up both pieces for a good couple of weeks. The lesson? Don’t tell off the diners giving you a living.
Read David Ellis’s review here.
Read Mike Daw’s piece here.
The 27 best breakfasts in London
As popular as pubs, breakfast was big with readers in 2024. Both news of the Regency Cafe going up for sale and our pick of London’s top greasy spoons were widely read, but none so much as this round-up of the best breakfasts around town, from omelette Arnold Bennett to spicy chicken keema buns. All prices and occasions are catered to.
Read the full article here.
Inside the Lore of the Land
Gritchie pubs
Who said telly was dead? TikTok can boast all it likes, but 2024 had its shape moulded by television shows: One Day, Baby Reindeer, Slow Horses, Black Doves. Evidently, the trick is to limit the show’s title to two words (apart from Rivals, obviously). Another of these was The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie’s romp through the English countryside, with drugs and guns and sex everywhere. But what is Ritchie really like? Joanna Taylor took a look inside his flammable Fitzrovia pub, the Lore of the Land, for clues.
Read the full article here.
Why is everyone so obsessed with Jason’s sourdough?
“Are you obsessed with Jason’s Sourdough? If so, you’re not alone,” wrote Katrina Mirpuri in late November, having noticed the loaves selling out, week in, week out, and popping up constantly on TikTok. But when did everyone decide this was the best bread, and is it worth the hype? Coming from a fourth-generation baker, Jason Geary, it’s certainly more than a cynical marketing ploy, as Mirpuri explains. See you in the sourdough aisle.
Read the full article here.