Evening Standard
Jimi Famurewa dined at this new spot from the team behind Newington
Green’s Perilla on just its second evening, and found “not so much a restaurant quickly finding its feet as it is one already dancing a complex backwards bolero in roller skates”.
The atmosphere captured “the pleasurably messy spirit of a raucous Basque taberna”, while menu highlights included a “deconstructed spanakopita… just a two-bite log of spinach and feta, a thin scrim of shattering pastry, and an ephemeral surge of twanging garlic and lactic acidity”.
Jimi was mightily impressed: Morchella “re-imagines loosely mediterranean dishes with both rustic muscularity and a sense of visual drama, [and] traffics in the sort of rare brilliance that it’s hard to keep secret for very long.”
Jimi Famurewa - 2024-03-18The Times
Charlotte Ivers gave this “elegant”, Med-inspired spot four out of five stars despite finding her main course of hake resolutely “dull” – “you could eat half this thing without it troubling a tastebud”.
Enough to ruin a meal, you might think, but her disappointment was offset by plenty of highlights. Panakopita – “rich, creamy spinach encased in the thinnest layer of filo pastry” – was followed by salt cod churros on a red peppery sauce that “look like something your dog would pick up in the woods. This is good, somehow”, along with “a little pot of Spanish stew
with eggs poached into it, the paprika conjuring up a thousand memories of sunny European squares. Now we’re getting somewhere. Big, crunchy croutons; sticky confit tomatoes and onion.”
The meal was rounded off by “the weirdest-sounding of the desserts, the portokalopita: a juicy, crunchy blood orange cake with the olives baked into it and served with a big dollop of yoghurt. ‘Every cake should have olives in,’ I find myself declaring.”
The Guardian
Grace Dent is not the first critic to rave about the Perilla team’s new Med-
inspired joint off Exmouth Market, but she may well be the most
enthusiastic in her praise for the “intense mix of decadent, surprising, weird and usually utterly triumphant dishes” emerging from chef Daniel Fletcher’s kitchen.
Top marks went to the salt cod “churros” – “God bless this earthly meeting of fish and doughnut; so crisp, so hot, so pungent” – while the spanakopita was another “canapé on steroids”, and the short-rib topped with pickled aged mushrooms “looks like something dreamed up by JRR Tolkien… , a rich mix of vinegary, piquant joy and soft, yielding beef”.
A big hit a few weeks ago with Charlotte Ivers of the Sunday Times, the blood orange and black olive portokalopita “will probably make all other puddings in 2024 seem lacklustre… a stubby, fat, dense, glossy lump of what appeared to be sponge but was actually filo dough injected with syrup… Sweet, slightly bitter, decadent and, thanks to the chopped orange, one of your five a day.”
Grace Dent - 2024-04-14The Times
Giles Coren doubled up this week (those Times expenses!) with two new restaurants ploughing similar southern-Med furrows a couple of miles apart in central London – both of which have already been well reviewed by his fellow critics.
The main difference Giles discerned between the two was price. Lita is “a very expensive restaurant in very expensive Marylebone”, with a food bill topping £200 a head backed up by a wine list that “was a bit scary to drink whole bottles from, only briefly wiping its feet at the £70-80 mark before going straight into triple figures.”
His meal started well, with excellent snacks and small plates including “show- stopping Limousin veal sweetbreads (the dish, sautéed by Marcus Wareing at Pétrus in 1999, that made me determined to become a restaurant critic), glazed, pink, sweet, milky, with Tropea onions and pomme puree”.
Grills came off worse: a “dreary” spatchcocked Anjou poussin “tasted more like a First World War carrier pigeon scorched at the Somme than a ladylike lunchtime delicacy”, while a “dull” sirloin of Friesian was “what we who like a chewy old milker have to put up with now that the elderly Galician Rubia Gallega have all been eaten”. The solution? “Stick to the top two thirds of the menu.”
On to Morchella, which is “more gorgeous to look at… with a steepling ceiling, huge windows, enchanting light, wonderful new wood and cute gimmicks like little cutlery drawers built into the tables and eating bar”, and about half the price of Lita, at £100 a head.
Interesting, the menu followed a similar trajectory to Lita’s, with promising starters such as “brilliantly conceived and executed salt cod churros on a braised red pepper sauce” let down by disappointing main dishes.
Giles also noted that the service charge at Morchella was fully incorporated into the food prices with no tip invited, while at Lita it was a 15% bolt-on. “The Morchella route is surely the future.”
Giles Coren - 2024-05-19
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