Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant reviewers were writing about in the week up to 3rd November 2024
London Standard
The Yellow Bittern, Islington
David Ellis reviewed a “new Irish-British bistro open only for lunch, specifically lengthy, boozy ones” – although he sniffed at the idea that a proper long lunch was possible in the 12 noon-2pm time-slot he was allocated.
Even so, he warmed to the archly retro atmosphere of the set-up – booking by phone, cash-only payments, and Belfast-born chef/co-proprietor Hugh Corcoran’s very personal opening gambit of asking “Now, would you like a drink?” rather than handing over a conventional list.
The food also had “a touch of the 1982s” about it, and the choice was pretty limited, especially for veggies, while the quality of the cooking varied from “sometimes middling” (in dishes that were under-seasoned) to “very good leek and potato soup” and a “guinea fowl pie with a thick suet crust, plenty of bacon and excellent leeks”.
David’s verdict? For all its shortcomings and eccentricities, “I loved it here, adored it… I get it. But you might not.”
*****
The Guardian
Wildflowers, Belgravia
Grace Dent – with no thanks to her subeditors at the Guardian, who failed dismally to come to her rescue – got herself into a geographical pickle in her review of a new restaurant from former Elystan Street chef Aaron Potter and interiors stylist Laura Hart.
Normally, such an issue would hardly matter in a restaurant review – but Grace’s intro and the posh-teasing thread that ran through the piece all depended on us being with her in “Belgravia” – a locale characterised in her final pay-off line as “full of snobs, it’s like another planet”.
Unfortunately, she (and/or the subs) managed to transpose the action to Pimlico – Belgravia’s significantly less posh cousin on the wrong side of the railway tracks that lead into Victoria station – beginning with her opening quip that “Pimlico is an area I tend to avoid”. Having made a couple more comments in this vein, she suddenly announced half way through the review that “this is Belgravia, where even breathing is expensive” – and we’re finally where we should be.
As for the restaurant, Grace very much appreciated its “hearty menu” of food that was “thoughtful and fancy – but not painfully fancy”, and with “a heavenly absence of tweezers”. The generosity of the portions clearly surprised her in such elevated environs: “I suddenly remembered how many Lilliputian dinners I had eaten recently… This was the sort of lunch when even my tights felt tighter afterwards.”
Her meal ended on a high note, and at the right address, with a slice of lemon tart: “Just like Belgravia, it was sweet, refined and so beautiful that it made me feel shabby and unkempt in its presence.”
*****
The Observer
Mauby, Brockley
Jay Rayner enjoyed himself at an ex-chippy now serving a “short, impressively cheap menu of small plates” from Daniel Maynard, who has both Barbadian and Jamaican heritage, and his partner Heleena. Named after a Caribbean soft drink made from tree bark, Mauby “has exactly the vibe you want of it: relaxed, mellow and bubbling with end-of-week chatter. It feels like a new business that has worked out what it needs to be from the very start”.
It certainly sounded good value: the “sausage of my dreams” cost £8, while ‘homestyle’ stewed beans were £6. “If that’s the style of their home, I want to move in,” Jay observed. “It’s the sort of comfort food that would make any bad day better.”
The most expensive thing Jay ate here was a “heavily sauced jerk chicken thigh and drumstick” costing £10 – a dish you might easily assume would always be available at a Caribbean restaurant, but in fact it has disappeared from the latest menu at Mauby. “The message is this: you should park your assumptions about what must be available at such a place.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Aven, Preston
Giles Coren headed to the home city of Andrew Flintoff, Sir Tom Finney and Andrew Park (of Wallace & Gromit fame) to visit a new restaurant run by a trio with impressive northcountry CVs – chef-director Oli Martin (ex-Northcote and Hipping Hall), head chef Sean Wrest (ex-Roots in York) and manager Sam Haigh (ex-Black Swan, Oldstead).
He was glad he went – and glad he accidentally pre-ordered the eight-course tasting menu (although he struggled to eat everything put in front of him). “These are supremely gifted and thoughtful chefs. This is proper northern hospitality: original, modern, sleek — no foie gras, caviar, lobster, airs or graces…. I loved it. You will too.”
What’s more, it was “the sort of meal I would want to feed to someone who had heard what I did for a living and wanted to tell me that he didn’t understand the point of fancy food (they are legion, I’m afraid). Because this is certainly the point of it: to feed you things you’ve eaten before, without too much fuss, in ways that make you love them in a whole new way.”
McDonalds, North London
In the final days of what he called “this benighted US election of lies and name-calling”, Giles also conjured a hellish vision of his local branch of McDonalds – a far cry from the thrilling McDonalds he remembers visiting around the age of nine in the 1970s, when “it was the future, it was convenience, it was Happy Days and Evel Knievel. It was America. And it was so damn tasty”.
These days, fully automated and involving no contact with staff, “your food is served at the uniform just-off-cold temperature of a corpse’s bum crack an hour after death”, with the famous burger now reduced to a “honking do-it-yourself cold turd sandwich” – “McDonald’s has bypassed the human soul and become no more than a screen hub attached to a dark kitchen. A survival rations outlet for the fat malnourished braindead who can no longer interact socially and don’t want to.”
As “McDonalds’ most famous devotee prepares for the White House again”, Giles can’t help feeling that “Big Mac has sagged and gone cold just as its birth country has sagged and gone cold”: “McDonald’s, this broken, lazy, uncompetitive, foul-smelling, screen-addicted, thoughtless blunderer into modernity, is now, as ever, the perfect metaphor for America.”
***
The Gannet, Glasgow
Chitra Ramaswamy returned to the “grande dame of Finnieston”, a “perfect neighbourhood restaurant” that was a revelation when it opened 11 years ago, combining a warm welcome, relaxed “fine-dining” and a “concise modern Scottish menu”.
Surprisingly little has changed here, much to Chitra’s joy. The kitchen is still led by Peter McKenna, the chef behind its “skilled yet unaffected cooking”, while FOH Kevin Dow is still “charming the socks off the staunchly unpretentious and loyal clientele”. “This is food designed to make you happy, sated and, yes, greedy as a gannet.”
***
It’s Bagels, Primrose Hill
Charlotte Ivers reported from the front line of North London’s bagel war, where a “tiny café bang in the middle of one of London’s most genteel neighbourhoods” is besieged every weekend by “every Instagram lurker from within a 20-mile radius”.
They are here for the New York-style bagels presented by New Yorker Dan Martensen and his business partner, baker Jack Ponting – “large, pillowy and extravagant”. The London version, often spelt ‘beigel’, is, by contrast, smaller, more modest and more austere. Like Giles at McDonalds, Charlotte sees sociopolitical possibilities in this humble foodstuff: “For a metaphor illustrating the difference between our two nations, it’s pretty on the nose.”
Taste-wise, she fell for the invader, reckoning it “as good as any I’ve tried in New York”. Her order was the “the works” filling (cream cheese, salmon, capers, onion, lemon, tomato) with the “everything” seasoning (sesame and poppy seeds, dried onion, salt and garlic). “Excellent,” she declared, “yet far too chunky to eat with any dignity or decorum (again, God bless America).”
*****
The Telegraph
Cornus, Belgravia
Unlike Grace Dent, William Sitwell was hardly bothered that he was in Belgravia, but he was undecided in his judgement of this new restaurant from the people behind Chelsea’s Medlar.
His meal was “dainty, precise, nicely tempered, and deftly cooked and delivered (the service is excellent, of course)”, with dishes (mostly fish and seafood) that attracted a smattering of superlatives: “impeccable”, “accomplished” and “perfectly cooked”.
So why the equivocation? Two reasons: cost – “£30 for starters and £45 for mains” – and atmosphere (or lack of it), in a dining room that is “tame” and “reliable” but “feels like a trip to the private dentist’s treatment room (albeit pain-free and pleasurable)”. William’s conclusion: “If you want hustle, energy, vibe, colour, noise and memories then, er, don’t go to Cornus.”
*****
Financial Times
Trivet, Bermondsey
Tim Hayward was thrilled to announce that he has found a new “local”, four minutes’ walk from London Bridge station, 85 minutes direct via Thameslink from Cambridge, where he lives another short walk from the station. Better still, Trivet is (he believes) the only Michelin two-star in the country to offer a full à la carte instead of a tasting menu – so he can treat himself “without having to endure three hours of some chef noodling through his version of a three-disc concept album”.
Speaking of noodles, his favourite dish was ‘Drunken Lobster’ – a tail “literally stewed in its own juices” and served on a bed of fresh-made hand-cut noodles with a coarse surface, so the broth clings. “This was a superlative dish…. Bloody brilliant”. Chicken breast in a vinegar sauce attributed to Paul Bocuse was also a winner – “it takes a certain amount of self-confidence and no little brio to put poulet au vinaigre on a menu in 2024, but then chef Jonny Lake is richly endowed with both”.
Tim also had good words to say about Isa Bal, the man behind Trivet’s three-inch-thick wine list – “whispered to be an eccentric genius, and I will not argue.” To celebrate his newfound local, he threw in a couple of good words of his own – the sort of chewy locutions that send readers to Google for elucidation: “antiscorbutic” and “toroidal”.
