London calling
The Peninsula London, Teal by Sally Abé, showstopping claw, Dallas real estate, Babeuf, best Raleigh NC restaurants, MORE
GETAWAYS • London
Upper peninsula
London’s luxury hotel market is — depending on your tolerance for legacy and letdown — either one of the world’s great collections, or a study in diminishing returns. Classics like Claridge’s, The Connaught, and The Lanesborough earn their reputations through accumulated idiosyncrasy and a kind of benign institutional stubbornness. The newer entrants are more mixed: some impressive, others struggling to justify their rates with build quality that doesn’t hold up on close inspection.
The Peninsula opened on Hyde Park Corner in 2023. Sir Michael Kadoorie’s group spent enormously, and it shows in the way that actually matters: the materials. Stone, wood-lined hallways, bronze, joinery — nothing here feels value-engineered. The pool and gym are exceptional, both the kind of amenities that earn the rate rather than merely justifying it on paper. Even the hue of the poolside light makes you forget you’re in a sub-basement in the middle of London.
Arrival is warm and pitch-perfect. The location rewards the decision too: Belgravia, Knightsbridge, St. James’s, and Marylebone are all walkable, giving the hotel a geographic optionality most London properties at this price point can’t match. You’re also surrounded by some of the finest parks in the world.
The tech is its own subplot. Kadoorie’s well-documented affection for Q-branch theatrics manifests throughout. The Toto toilet features a control panel that could plausibly launch a small satellite. Lighting adjusts in barely noticeable increments. A valet appears to collect laundry from a private box at the entry with minimal prompting. Suites have printers, AV, and other electronics connections that most hotels quietly retired years ago. (Most guests won’t use them, but they’re there, which is precisely the point.) Even the lens cloth left near glasses on turndown is high quality. The coffee served throughout the property is exceptional. All of this is the result of someone, somewhere, caring about details well past the point of commercial logic.
The food program has range. The club sandwich is one of those deceptively simple tests a hotel kitchen either passes or fails; Peninsula passes convincingly. Little Blue, the casual spot restaurant on-site, serves dim sum and dan dan noodles at a level that would be notable in a standalone context, let alone within a hotel’s. Canton Blue, anchoring the main dining, channels the group’s Hong Kong origins with real conviction rather than decorative nostalgia.
On departure, the bell team knocked at exactly the requested time. Clockwork, delivered with Peninsula’s characteristic consistency across the brand.
This isn’t cozy or clubby — it won’t feel like an old members’ club with Brompton sofas that have lived several lives. But that’s not the point. Peninsula London is a new hotel that doesn’t cut the corners other luxury brands are increasingly addicted to. In a market where that’s a rarer proposition than it should be, it earns its place at the top. –Colin Nagy
→ The Peninsula London (Belgravia) • 1 Grosvenor Pl • Rates from around £1200/night.
ASK FOUND
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What’s your favorite restaurant that you’ve visited on your travels?
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RESTAURANTS • London
Game on
Sally Abé made her name at Fulham gastropub The Harwood Arms before setting up The Pem, a female-run fine dining restaurant in a Westminster hotel. After a stint at The Bull at Charlbury in the Cotswolds, she opened her first independent restaurant, Teal by Sally Abé, in Hackney last month.
The food is elegant, original, and nostalgic. Abé has revived retro British dishes such as locket’s savoury, a rarebit-like snack of melted stilton on toast with a sweet kick of wafer-thin pear. It’s worth ordering most of the appetisers, including devils on horseback (bacon-wrapped prunes stuffed with thin chicken liver parfait) and the more substantial brawn Scotch egg. Starters are similarly strong: there’s bacon (a theme), thick, pork belly-like slices with tangy crème fraîche, shimeji mushrooms and the most marvellous, delicate sliver of pork scratching. We went heavy on starters and picked just one main: a generously portioned beef sirloin with outstanding, flaky short rib, punchy wild garlic sauce and soft, sweet onion.
Playful, nostalgic and wonderfully original, Teal brings out the best of British cuisine in what is undoubtedly one of the London openings of the year. –Laura Price
RESTAURANTS • San Francisco
Chicken out
New izakaya TBD is a bit of a full circle moment: After nearly two decades of eating across San Francisco, one of my few regrets is never making it to the original Akikos, a Folsom St. omakase trailblazer opened by the Lee family way back in 1987. Son Ray Lee took over the business in 2009. I didn’t exactly have omakase budget back then, and in 2023 Lee moved Akikos to a glittering high-rise in the East Cut, soon after he opened the exclusive Friends Only in Nob Hill. But now Ray Lee has turned the former Akikos space in FiDi into TBD, with Hina Yakitori chef Tommy Cleary running this grill.
TBD has a freshly painted deep blue exterior, opening up into a rich, walnut wood interior. It’s kept its weirdly perfect layout for a Japanese restaurant, with the best seats pulling up to the long omakase counter, and a few tables tucked into the front corners and the back room.
The showstopping hot karaage (above) is a complete claw, outstandingly crunchy and drenched in honey-butter-chile glaze. Cleary told FOUND he’s been ordering whole heritage birds, with less breast meat and dark red thighs. And Lee has gotten him into dry-aging, so they’re hanging those parts for several days. You hate to ever call chicken chewy, but he really pulls out so much flavor and texture into every last tidbit. It’s an exceptional chicken dinner, at a laidback izakaya price. –Becky Duffett
GOODS & SERVICES • Big Ticket
Select answers to the FOUND Routine query, What’s a recent big-ticket purchase you love?
→ COLLEEN BROOKS, co-founder, Moss (NY): Medicube Age-R Booster Pro. This was a no-brainer purchase for me about two months ago. The funny part is, I finally took it out of the box this past weekend, tried it once, and now I can’t wait to make it part of my daily routine. It honestly felt like a legit at-home facial.
→ MATTHEW ACCARRINO, athlete & chef, Mattina & SPQR (SF): My new Ventum racing bike. I spend a dozen hours or more on it a week!
→ VERONICA DEL ROSARIO, co-founder & chief brand officer, Smalls (NY): How big a ticket are we talking? We got a Rivian a few months ago and it feels like a major life upgrade from our Muskmobile. If a bit smaller, these Overland sheepskins made such a cozy difference in our house through the winter. So did our Carepods in our bedroom and the nursery! One more thing: we got this Alice Waters Tuscan Grill to do some fireplace cooking.
REAL ESTATE • First Mover
Three for-sale properties in Dallas that came to market in the last 14 days.
→ 7310 Dominique Dr (Lakewood) • 4BR/3.2BA, 5416 SF house • Ask: $3.25M • classic home adjacent SoPac Trail • Days on market: 4 • Annual tax: $50,158 • Agent: Chris Hickman, Ebby Halliday.
→ 7122 Lakewood Blvd (Lakewood) • 4BR/4.2BA, 6929 SF house • Ask: $4.25M • dramatic staircase, bar, ‘resort style’ backyard • Days on market: 11 • Annual tax: $45,699 • Agent: David Bush, David Bush Realtors.
→ 10920 Strait Ln (Preston Hollow, above) • 6BR/8.2BA, 11,211 SF house • Ask: $9.99M • clean lines, big spaces, 5-car garage • Days on market: 3 • Annual tax: $26,028 • Agent: Eric Narosov, Allie Beth Allman & Assoc. Open house Sun 1-3p.
AROUND FOUND • Other Notable Intel & Recs
→ NY: Chef Hirohisa Hayashi has recast his acclaimed Soho kaiseki restaurant Hirohisa into Soba Ulala, a place that honors Hirohisa’s same principles of pristine hyperseasonal ingredients, but in a more casual à la carte format, and anchored by housemade soba. It’s akin to an unbuttoned kaiseki experience unbound by the rigidity of a tasting menu.
→ MIA: Set on a wild barrier island just north of Jacksonville, FL, Omni Amelia Island spans over 1300 lush acres overlooking Fernandina Beach. It’s an easy place to slip into nature, whether biking across seven miles of resort trails or kayaking and paddleboarding through salt marshes. Fresh off a multimillion-dollar renovation of all its guest rooms and public spaces, the resort boasts a fresh coastal color palette with art to match.
→ ITALY: Perched in the heights of Pigna, the old town of Sanremo on Italy’s Ligurian coast, Babeuf is the project of four friends brought together by a shared desire to create something alive — somewhere between a restaurant, a meeting point, and a rhythm. In the summer, it becomes a kind of shelter, with warm stone surrounding you, the air still, and conversations stretching late into the night.
GETAWAYS LINKS: Inside the new Soho House Tokyo: ‘we just sort of went in for it’ • Anticipated St. Regis Budapest, in former Hungarian palace, opens • 5 new Stockholm bakeries • All things Egypt • The joy of making everything a cafe.
RESTAURANTS • The Nines
Restaurants, Raleigh, NC
The Nines are FOUND’s distilled lists of the best.
Ajja (Five Points), Mediterranean flavors meet North Carolina produce at Cheetie Kumar’s airy inside/outside space, sharp cocktail program
Brewery Bhavana (Downtown), brewery, dim sum restaurant, bookstore, and flower shop in one, set in light-filled, high volume space
Crawford and Son (Person Street/Mordecai/Oakwood), Scott Crawford’s polished neighborhood restaurant, refined American cooking w/ local seasonal produce
Figulina (Warehouse District/Downtown, above), British chef David Ellis’s spot for handmade pasta, seasonal plates, and a tight cocktail list, set in former warehouse
Mala Pata (North Raleigh/Gateway Plaza), masa-driven kitchen, with superb heirloom tortillas and punchy Mexican/Latin cooking; drink before/after at their “minibar,” Peyote
Poole’s Diner (Downtown), Ashley Christensen’s modern diner, cornerstone of Raleigh dining, w/ chalkboard menu and iconic mac and cheese
Sam Jones BBQ (Downtown), heritage whole hog BBQ the Eastern North Carolina way, smoky, vinegary, as local as it gets
St. Roch Fine Oysters + Bar (Downtown), Cajun-inflected seafood, oysters and a lively bar that brings New Orleans energy to North Carolina
Stanbury (Person Street/Mordecai/Oakwood), no reservations, shared plates and a packed room, cult favorite table that is in constant motion, part canteen, part clubhouse