I roam, grow my own, brave the kitchen heat and know my woozy way around a wine list. Welcome to my (very personal) world of food and drink…
After years of journalistic hyper-activity, lockdowns made me reassess the food and drink I really care about. Refreshed and unrestrained, I started this. Call it a blog if you must, it’s certainly a change of direction. Less about me, more the discoveries I want to share. Read more…
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Neil Sowerby2026-10-14 14:56:182026-10-20 10:44:23Unveiled: the terrific 2026 MFDF Awards shortlist – cast your votes now
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Neil Sowerby2026-09-18 18:55:272026-09-22 14:43:42In Seef hands again – the working class Antwerp beer that simply evaporated
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Neil Sowerby2026-09-15 18:10:182026-09-22 17:26:29Celebrating Mexican Independence Day with Santiago Lastra’s goosegog salsa
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Neil Sowerby2026-08-24 15:36:352026-09-22 17:41:36Northumbrian spirit – Ad Gefrin matches pioneering whisky with ancient treasures
My Italian food trail: Fennel pollen
Finnochio’s, a San Francisco night club, famed for its drag queens, just failed to make it past the Millennium, having traded for decades on the Italian slang word for homosexual, rent boy even. Why the generic name for fennel took on queer connotations I have no idea; I’m just happy to pay upfront for the […]
The UK’s most beautiful beer garden? Just let the Fog settle
Best kept secrets and hidden gems have a habit of finally exploding into the public domain. So Farm Trip may count as a wider coming of age for Rivington Brewing Co. Proof of the pudding? Tickets sold out in a flash for all five days of this craft beer ‘Woodstock’ with over 50 different guest […]
Beet, carrot and radish tops – chuck these beauties at your peril
“Good cooking is a result of a balance struck between frugality and liberality,” wrote Patience Gray in the introduction to her seminal 1986 work, Honey From a Weed, an account of her peripatetic roughing it around various primitive corners of the Med. “It is borne out in communities where the supply of food is conditioned […]
Dishoom Home Feast delivers a gateway to India on a plate
One trip down Manchester memory lane for me is to check my Bhangra Beatnikz beer cocktail recipe remains on the Dishoom website. Still there. It won best cocktail at the last Too Many Critics charity dinner held in the city with seven food writers battling it out in the Manchester Hall kitchens of the newly […]
Modern British Beer – through a glass brightly with Matthew Curtis
This is an epic pioneering tale of brave new frontiers versus folk settled in their ways. Of an award-winning beer named after a 2,000 mile trek in search of a new life… or its champion’s own 200 mile switch from Crouch End to Levenshulme and a kind of ale apotheosis. The day I met beer […]
Bowls and Broths – how I got strung out in my quest for Pippy perfection
Ominous warning for the recipe I was about to challenge myself with. Spicy Mutton and Tomato Biang Biang noodles. What could possibly go wrong? Not the roasted tomato and mutton broth constituents of this adaptation by Pippa Middlehurst of a classic dish from Xi’an, eastern hub of the Silk Road. No, it was the handling […]
Pädaste Manor – our Estonian idyll among the misty marshes
When revolutionaries ambushed and assassinated the Baron of Pädaste, Imperial Hunting Master to Tsar Nicholas II, in 1919 it froze in time the manor house that was his summer home. History, often bloody history, now passed it by. Axel von Buxhoeveden’s heartbroken widow, the Siemens heiress Charlotte, left to live in Germany, never to return, […]
ZeroWater filter is the purest solution to all those H2O pipe dreams
Water-centric news stories (floods aside) usually flow swiftly through my attention span and only two 2021 H20 moments have registered in a glass half empty, glass half full kind of way… Big money guardians of the pour The first? In February global food Nestlé released a substantial amount of its ‘liquid assets’ in North America […]