Like so many entertaining scrapes I get into, it was social meeja what done it. I had been to Rita's in its first proper-restaurant incarnation when it opened, and left bemused by the froth and gush of praise it was garnering. The people seemed nice, the place and ZZ Top-alike chefs were cute enough, but the food was little more than the sort of thing you might fancy after a night on the piss: sugary, greasy, easy to ram into bleary cakeholes.
Then Instagram reared its curtain-twitching head. I followed Rita's chef Andrew Clarke, and loved what he was posting: guinea fowl braised with kimchi; plaice with foie gras butter; lamb rump with Thai-style aubergine; Sichuan-spiced barbecue squab. There were sweet pies, and tarts crafted from figs and maple custard, or Oreos, or muscovado sugar and rum. It was a pictorial litany of loveliness. Time to return.
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