New York v London: the big debate

Time Out London featured a great article this week on the NY-LON debate. We fully agree with the author’s sentiment that “there’s not a single area where the Big Apple beats the Big Smoke”, but we feel that they missed a trick. Comparing “The Boris” to “The Bloomberg”, they failed to notice that “The Bloomberg” is spending more and more time away from the Big Apple himself in none other than…London. Yup, so great is London that the Mayor of New York is busy sticking his name all over the place – from Bloomberg Place, to the Royal Court Theatre’s Bloomberg Mondays.

Bloomberg is not the only NY icon making waves in London. Restaurant-wise we’ve seen a fair few new stateside imports opening up in London over the last few months. SushiSamba, at the top of Heron Tower, STK at the bottom of the ME London hotel, and, most recently, Balthazar in the old Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. But despite the influx of big NY names, the homegrown London pop-up scene is going from strength to strength, and it is the creativity, quirkiness and diversity of joints as varied as a BYO cocktail bar and a restaurant serving only dessert and cocktails that we think will keep London ahead of the NY curve. So thanks for coming big name, Sex and the City-featured hot spots, but we’re just as likely to pick a Supper Club safari instead. And if you don’t know what that is…well, you must not be from London.