Latest news with #Tanja
Time Out
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
The best café in London has been crowned for 2025
In London, we're lucky to have a bucketload of top tier independent cafés and bakeries. From old school caffs, to hipster hangouts our coffee shops are dishing out coffees, cakes and pastries around the clock that are worth queuing for – and we've ranked our favourites for you here. But a new list of the top cafés in London has just been revealed by the 2025 Muddy Stilettos Awards. Now in its 12th year, each year the awards recognise the best independent businesses in a variety of categories according to public votes. According to Muddy Stilettos, London's best café in 2025 is Swiss Bread Bakery & Café in Richmond. This indie coffee shop is run by best friends Andre and Tanja, who both hail from Switzerland, and is beloved for its fresh breads, croissants, cakes and cinnamon buns. The pair are also known for their Swiss lunches, which include flammkuchen, fondue, sausage boards and weekly specials. Runners up for the best café in London were popular brunch spot Apple Butter in Covent Garden, De Morgan Café in Holland Park, Peggy Porschen in Belgravia and Urban Pantry in Chiswick. Regional winners of each category will go head to head in the awards finals in June this year. The overall winners will be decided by the Muddy Stilettos editors. ☕️ The best cafés and coffee shops in London, according to Time Out.
Telegraph
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Stop satirising millennials – it isn't compelling fiction
About halfway through Allegro Pastel, the fourth novel by the prize-winning German writer Leif Randt, Jerome, a website designer, is on his sofa kissing Marlene, whom he went to school with, while Tanja, a young novelist who lives in Berlin, is going through a frosty patch with Janis, the tattooed guy she dumped Jerome for. A few months earlier, Jerome and Tanja were having 'slightly melodramatic' sex on the same couch. Soon, they'll exchange some tortured emails about missing each other, drop a pill at a wedding, kiss, and ultimately fail to get back together. The first of Randt's novels to be translated into English, Allegro Pastel follows the length of Jerome and Tanja's relationship, from early romantic stirrings – they meet at the premier of the webseries adaptation of Tanya's first novel – through to Tanja's sudden, inexplicable aversion to Jerome when he reveals the website he's designed for her on her 30th birthday. This curdling of their desire into awkwardness and regret is a potentially fruitful story. But the question that emerges is: who cares? For one, Randt doesn't hide how unlikeable his main characters are. Jerome's prejudices are never far from the surface and even Tanja admits her own caprice and vanity. As a narrative gambit, such characters could be interesting if the two weren't so shallowly observed. Tanja's character appears to be based principally on her love of badminton and Decathlon; Jerome's 'inner personality' becomes meaningful when it 'no longer reminded him of the text-to-speech function on his laptop, but sounded more like himself reading an iMessage'. The writing is also astonishingly poor. Randt frequently squashes his characters' thoughts into clunky logical structures: 'On the one hand… on the other'. Perhaps it's simply an awkward translation – or perhaps it's an attempt to scathingly criticise the ennui of a certain kind of European millennial (an endeavour also made by Vincenzo Latronico with his recently published novel, Perfection.) But such impoverished interiority hardly makes for a compelling read. You wonder why Randt bothered with fiction when a flow chart would do. And bafflingly, where there are opportunities for emotional texture, Randt instead delivers extraneous information. That includes the width of Jerome's mattress (1.4m-wide, if you're curious), various emojis, and a litany of brand names. Should we care, for instance, that Jerome serves Skyy vodka to Tanja, that Marlene uses an iPhone 8, that Tanja prefers EasyJet to Ryanair, and that they listen to Spotify in a rented Tesla? Brands can work as a shorthand for a type of person: but that's marketing or cultural semiotics, not fiction. I gave Allegro Pastel the benefit of the doubt for longer than usual, mostly because I wondered whether it could really be so bad. Was it actually a sly pastiche or a smart self-parody? Was there a deadpan humour I wasn't quite getting? Unfortunately, Allegro Pastel simply is an empty book about vapid people. Sentences such as: 'Jerome could link most of his personal characteristics to his upbringing,' show that novels can be pitched as 'ironic' and yet still become parodies of themselves.
