Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 12th January 2025
London Standard
Nipotina, Mayfair
David Ellis found a lot to like about the latest opening from Mayfair powerhouse Samyukta Nair – an all-day Italian that “exists to assuage stresses that exist only outside its door”. What he meant by this was extremely tasty Italian comfort food served in extremely tasteful surroundings.
Everything about the place was “unmistakably Mayfair” – apart from the attractive prices, which “appear to be from a very different part of town — not quite New Cross, but not far off.” On weekdays there’s a set lunch of two courses for £21, three for £25, and pizzas (“a strength”) start at £12, although as David pointed out, there are plenty of opportunities to spend up on the à la carte menu or the wine list.
*****
The Guardian
AngloThai, Marylebone
Grace Dent welcomed John and Desiree Chantarasak’s decidedly elegant new venture, “where Anglo and Thai influences collide with the requisite levels of pomp and fire” for this upmarket corner of London – and without, she added, losing a sense of fun. “Addictive” hit dishes included jet-black caviar crackers in the shape of a Michelin star and wok-fired long aubergine served with dainty homemade pickles.
“The restaurant doesn’t serve rice, and instead offers up more sustainable British grains – the night we visited, the evening’s starch was barley simmered in a little lamb fat, which was rustic and really rather lovely.”
*****
The Observer
Fonda, Mayfair
Jay Rayner was not the first critic to be enthralled by the new hotspot from Mexican-born chef Santiago Lastra – less ambitious than his high-flying debut Kol, but still a “profoundly comfortable place to be”. In Mexico, a “fonda” is a humble, family-run restaurant, while “this is only a fonda in the way the River Café is a café, which is to say, not at all”.
“There’s a beauty to the dishes here that never overwhelms the imperative of flavour,” Jay purred, as plate after plate met his approval. “This is conversation-stopping stuff. We mutter simple sentences that demand no reply like, ‘This is good’ and ‘Oh my’.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Babbo, St John’s Wood
Giles Coren was all geared up to pour scorn on an Italian originally opened in Mayfair by “two long-forgotten ex-Chelsea players, David Luiz and Willian” (no longer involved), which has taken over the old premises of Harry Morgan’s (RIP), a landmark deli catering to the now diminished local Jewish population. As Giles put it, “Dancing on the graves of my grandparents. And so I came to bury Babbo, not to praise it.”
It turned out he was wrong. Babbo was just the sort of place his grandparents would have loved, with smart and charming service and 70s-style Italian food (aubergine parmigiana, piccata di vitello al limone) that was “absolutely spot-on. Not madly ambitious, but very precisely executed, which is what you want from a glittering local restaurant in a wealthy neighbourhood”.
***
Cornus, Belgravia
Charlotte Ivers enumerated all the terrible dishes that ruined a meal costing £471 for four people at this new venture from the team behind Chelsea’s “really good” Medlar: over-salted roast turbot with under-cooked parsnip; undercooked cod; “gritty and tasteless” mushroom ravioli; gnocchi with truffle that “tasted of pencil shavings”; a “heinous”, too-cold starter of crab, avocado and lime.
Her mood switching from miserable and sad to plain angry, Charlotte let rip with her most savage review to date: “There is a lack of care to this place. I don’t mean the staff. They were lovely, particularly the sommelier, but there are fluorescent fire exit signs and vast amounts of exposed piping on the ceiling that aren’t industrial chic, but instead give a sense that someone looked at it and said, ‘Yeah, that’ll do. They won’t mind. Take their money.’ There’s a veneer of luxury … But it’s all hollow.”
*****
Daily Mail
The Barbary, Notting Hill
Tom Parker Bowles was happily seduced by the “sexy as hell” second edition of Zoë and Layo Paskin’s North African/Middle Eastern-inspired Soho grill, which “stretches languorously over a vast space on a corner of Westbourne Grove”.
Cooking over fire may seem like a cliché these days, he said, “but here it’s taken to a high art” – and there’s a “rather thrilling wine list, too”, with a “hell of a selection by the glass”.
*****
Daily Telegraph
The Touring Club, Penarth
William Sitwell found refuge by the open kitchen of an establishment apparently named after the Patagonian hostelry where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid holed up.
The compact menu was “of no fixed abode… a random assembly of flavours garnered by the owners on their travels through the US, Asia, Europe or Wales” – and William pronounced it a “winner”. A similarly wide-ranging wine list, featuring an exceptional Serbian red made from the vranac grape, made for “a richly esoteric experience”.
*****
Financial Times
Permit Room, Oxford
Tim Hayward overcome his restaurant critic’s disdain for chains to praise the latest, more affordable spinoff from Dishoom (also with branches in Cambridge and Brighton), whose décor he described as a “superbly specific amalgam of Indian/hippy/disco” – whether or not such a time and place ever really existed.
The food was consistently delicious, most notably the Dishoom-derived black daal that “does with lentils and ghee what Joel Robuchon did with mashed potatoes and butter”, and a “remarkable” prawn moilee that tasted of… prawns! In short, “Permit Rooms seems to be managing the complicated challenge of growing without going bad”.
