Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 4th August 2024

Evening Standard

Ibai, Smithfield

Jimi Famurewa headed to a new “City-boy steakhouse” from Basque meat specialist Nemanja Borjanović, the founder of Lurra, which overturns the beamed-farmhouse-with-pintxo-counter stereotype of the Spanish-French border region. Instead, he found a “haute-industrial dining room” that “deals in high gloss and unexpected magnitudes of massiveness”.

Apart from the “big prices” and the fact that the £95 1kg Galician blond T-bone steak was “far, far too much meat for two people”, Jimi felt the extravagance was a welcome “butter-basted middle finger” to notions of culinary restraint.

“The flavours — inspired by the French side of the Basque border — are so big they often land with the super-sized abandon of an Olympic opening ceremony… All that wad-waving maximalism belies cooking with plentiful thrills, rare sensitivity and a kind of unbuttoned, rugged clarity.” 

*****

The Guardian

OshPaz, Regent Street

“Few people in the UK know much about lag-man, samsy pastries and cream-drenched manty“, lamented Grace Dent – a state of affairs former IT student Muzaffar Sadykov is determined to change with his pop-up turned market stall now turned small restaurant near Piccadilly Circus showcasing the cuisine of his native Uzbekistan.

Manty are “roughly speaking, Middle Eastern koftas inside Chinese xiaolonbao dough” – thereby overlapping two cuisines from either end of the ancient Silk Road, on which Uzbekistan sits around the mid point. And as Grace pointed out, “who doesn’t love a dumpling? OshPaz’s manty have thin, wobbly skins holding beef, chicken or pumpkin seasoned with cumin and coriander. They’re wrapped into delicate, pretty, plump packages and steamed for 40 or so minutes, until they’re ready to serve with carrot salad, soured cream and, if you like, chilli oil.”

OshPaz has “huge heart” and plenty of interesting dishes, but for Grace the star dish was chicken lag-man, or fried noodles in a spicy broth: “the advertised broth is nothing of the sort, though. Rather, it is a thick, hearty stew with chunks of pepper, celery, onion and some chilli.”

*****

The Observer

Goat on the Roof, Newbury

Jay Rayner found a “terrace, wine-led restaurant overlooking the River Kennet” in a former banking hall-turned-Japanese restaurant in the middle of town – “it feels like being in a cross between fin de siècle Paris and Renaissance Venice…. a romping wave of bubbling chatter, clinking glasses, laughter and impressive food.”

The wine side of the business, run by founder Patrick Vaughan-Fowler, a former sommelier in London, “manages the neat trick of being serious without taking itself too seriously” – the latter suggested by the restaurant’s odd name.

Chef Sam May’s cooking, meanwhile, is “not just smart and thoughtful. It’s also well priced, like they really want your business. Everything is in the low teens or below, apart from a steak which gets to a lofty £18.” 

*****

The Times and Sunday Times

Boisdale, Victoria

With the holiday season in full swing, there was no sign of Giles Coren or Chitra Ramaswami this week, so we had to make do with Charlotte Ivers enjoying a boozy lunch at “a parcel of an imagined past” – a traditional British (for which read Scottish) restaurant beloved by “social conservatives” (“Nigel Farage had his 60th birthday party at the Canary Wharf offshoot earlier this year”).

Charlotte was annoyed at the sexual innuendo of her starter, listed as a “ménage à quatre” and consisting of four types of preserved fish including “peat-smoked salmon which tastes like a waft of cigarette smoke across a pub garden on a sunny day… If that doesn’t sound appealing, Boisdale probably isn’t the place for you.”

Next came a “cannonball” of roast haggis served with traditional neeps and tatties – with no fripperies, “just crumbly, peppery goodness, a big pile of innards so much greater than the sum of its hideous parts and a lovely smooth mash”. Dessert was a bottle of New Zealand pinot noir on the cigar terrace, and that was that.

*****

Financial Times

Marina O’Loughlin, who gave up writing weekly restaurant reviews late last year after two decades at Metro, The Guardian and the Sunday Times, used a guests column in the FT to tell as what every reviewer is always asked: where do you choose to eat in your own time?

And the restaurant is… Ciao Bella, “a long-standing Italian that’s achieved almost cult status” and which she recently visited three Fridays running.

“Nabbing one of the prized outdoor tables to watch Bloomsbury go by, knowing exactly what I’m going to order (melon and Parma ham; veal Milanese with an off-menu tomatoes and onion salad). I congratulate myself each time for not being sat on a backless stool somewhere with the light of a sex dungeon in anticipation of 15 courses of lactose-fermantation.”

Her other regular spots are Noble Rot’s three branches – but that hardly counts because she’s part of the furniture as contributing editor of Noble Rot magazine. But at least they provide one big perk for somebody who managed to retain a secret identity for two decades as a reviewer: “For once I too wanna go where everybody knows my name”.

*****

Daily Telegraph

Twenty Eight, Chester

William Sitwell was mildly put out by the lower-case name of this small restaurant, which calls itself “twenty eight”, but other than that he found it “breezy and cute” in the extreme.

Confusingly, perhaps, it takes that irritating name not from its address – it is “adjacent to its posher sister establishment, Chef’s Table” – but from Field 28, a family-run farm in the Cheshire village of Daresbury, which provides much of the produce used in its kitchen. 

The tapas-style menu is “littered with beauties from the farm: beetroot, potatoes, peppers, herbs, salad, artichokes, cabbage and leeks. As are the walls, which are covered in framed prints of veg.”

All in all, lunch was “a great-value leap around the world, full of flavour, fun and charm”.