Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant reviewers were writing about in the week up to 13th October 2024
The Guardian
Café François, Borough Market
Grace Dent hailed “a new London landmark” that “could well turn into Borough Market’s most useful rendezvous point”, given the quality of its food, the number of seats (has taken over a “brick behemoth of a building” that was formerly a Paul Smith fashion shop) and its opening hours, from 7am for breakfast through to last orders at 10pm (Monday-Saturday).
From the team behind the more formal Maison François in St James’s, “Café François is her giddier, multi-floored petite fille, who lives in a permanently hectic tourist thoroughfare and serves crisp frogs’ legs, croque monsieur and three types of éclair”.
As an “all-day, rolling canteen” whose “proper” dining options include sharing plates of lobster, roast chicken and prime rib of beef along with gateaux to “drool” over, Grace reckoned that “Café François is far better than it really needs to be, but this team are proud and diligent types, and far too good to allow their new place to be rubbish”.
*****
The Observer
Stage, Exeter
Jay Rayner ate a “fabulous” meal from a team who met working at Cornwall’s St Enodoc Hotel and started out selling folded flatbreads from a horsebox on Polzeath Beach. They have now graduated to a 20-seat space lined in corrugated iron, with high tables on black steel frames, where they serve “well priced, wittily crafted tasting menus” of six courses in the evening (£55) or four at lunch (£30).
Their stated aim is to produce or make as much of the food on the menu as they can. “Various fruit and veg are described as coming from ‘Granny’s garden’, by which they literally mean the Bodmin garden belonging to the grandmother of one of the chef-partners’ girlfriends.”
They are also pretty experimental, baking “huge, table-sized loaves” of bread and ripping off the crusts, which they grind down to ferment as a kind of miso. One dish Jay ate included “what they call a ‘chicken liver jus’. It is a ridiculously deep-flavoured glossy, liquid chicken-liver parfait. Bring me a mug of that and a straw”. Steak comes on a swede terrine that’s a “buttery, vertical dauphinoise and lifts this ugly bastard of the vegetable world up to supermodel status”.
Every now and then, Jay suggested, they push the boundaries far enough to “tip just over the edge into silliness” – but that was as close as he got to a critical note.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Ambassadors Clubhouse, Mayfair
Giles Coren led a posse of fellow reviewers, including “the original and best London Evening Standard restaurant critic, Fay Maschler (1972-2020), and the newly appointed, indeed self-appointed one, David Ellis (2024 onwards)”, to dinner at the latest venture from the JKS group on an “enormous site” in “now rather Dubai-ified” Heddon Street.
A “baroque hymn to the banqueting traditions of pre-partition Punjab”, it is “another nail in the coffin for the bog standard curry house” – whose numbers, Giles noted, have dwindled from 12,000 in 2011 to about 8,000 today, in parallel to the rise of previous JKS restaurants Trishna and Gymkhana among other smart new-wave Indians including Dishoom and “desi pub” the Three Falcons.
The food was all “fanastic”, from papads and chutneys, via “Bitings” such as chilli cheese pakode, nargisi chicken koftas and mutton keema nan, to a “magical masaledar lamb biryani (£28) which could have fed 12, with its sweet, melting lamb buried like treasure in a rice and onion and pine nut lucky dip” – all served on “insanely lavish” tableware.
All in all, then, for Giles and his party, “a top cuzza boss night”.
***
Mackintosh at the Willow, Glasgow
Chitra Ramaswamy made a pilgrimage that was more architectural than culinary to the only surviving tea rooms created by Glasgow’s great Art Nouveau architect and designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Opened in 1903, the building underwent a £10 million revamp in 2018 and was rescued once again earlier this year by the National Trust for Scotland (although the regeneration of Sauchiehall Street – “sauch” being Gaelic for willow – is “much delayed”).
Chitra and her dining companion sampled both the lunch and afternoon tea menus, but were underwhelmed by food that “could be more adventurous” than “the usual fish and chips, soup and sandwiches fare”, as well as “more trad – where’s the Cullen skink and the clootie dumpling?” (although Chitra’s “1903 Miss Cranston’s curried mince and potatoes” might have fulfilled the latter wish).
But these were mere quibbles. “It’s thrilling just to be here, let alone sit on one of Mackintosh’s high-backed chairs and apply cream and jam (always in that order please!) to scones… It’s a beautiful portal into a century of Glasgow history, design and city life — and we’re lucky to have it.”
***
The Roxburgh, Whitley Bay
Charlotte Ivers headed to a faded but reviving Northumberland seaside resort, where she dined at a “wonderfully chic, tiny, with only five or so tables” establishment that was celebrating its 10-year history with a 10-course tasting menu tracing its evolution from a café, via a standard restaurant to what is now its “fancy phase. A nice parallel to Whitley Bay itself.”
The dishes from this “new luxe era” were the most impressive: Scandi-style beetroot and smoked salmon followed by roast fatty bone marrow – “a St John signature, and just as wonderful here… worth another year off my diminished and diminishing life expectancy.”
The “spruced-up versions” of café classics were not so appealing – in particular, a dish of egg and chips with “breaded and deep-fried boiled egg and tarted-up ketchup”: “It’s a lot of stodge, a lot of starch.”
*****
London Standard
Daquise, South Kensington
David Ellis followed a tip from Charlotte Ivers a few weeks back by visiting the oldest Polish restaurant in London, founded in 1947, for the simple reason that it may now be living on borrowed time. Apparently Transport for London wants to redevelop the potentially lucrative site of South Ken tube station – and, says David, “I’m not sure much can be done. This isn’t a rallying cry to huddle around the place, but a prompt — go before it does.”
As for the restaurant itself: “Change is not wanted here,” he reports. “This benefits the food menu, if not the wine (a Polish chardonnay aside, McGuigan’s is about as exotic as the list dares).”
Among the highlights: “The borscht tastes as pure as good intentions. It is a remedy for all ills; a sip will sieve out the worst of a hangover”, while “Goulash comes rich with brandy and stock and great hunks of beef, heavy on the paprika. It is the culinary equivalent of having one’s hair stroked.”
Some dishes, though, should clearly be avoided: “rabbit in a thyme and mustard sauce read beautifully, but tasted much as kitchen cleaner smells. Puddings are up to you; ours felt like punishment.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
Olivier at the Chequers, Aston Tirrold, Oxfordshire
William Sitwell visited a “gastropub with a French leaning” run by chef Olivier Bouet and his wife Stephanie, who were rescued from closure a couple of years ago by a group of investors: apparently Bouet, “for reasons of total clarification, wanted it called ‘Olivier is still at The Chequers’.”
Among the investors is Tim Henman, reports William, and “a little bird tells me that his non-tennis obsession is wine. So I’ll credit him with one of the greatest assets of this place. It has a seriously wonderful wine list, being both full of gems and fabulously affordable.”
The food was a pretty good match, ranging from breaded pig’s trotter and homemade pasta with spinach and mushroom to a “delectable chestnut and chocolate cake with toffee sauce”, while staff were “collectively, utterly charming in that sort of natural, professional way that can’t be taught”.
*****
Daily Mail
Punch Bowl Inn, Crossthwaite, Cumbria
Tom Parker Bowles found “something reassuringly robust” about this famous Lakeland inn with a “huge leather sofa [that] sits before a blazing wood burner” in the old-fashioned bar; a “solid and comfortable” dining room, with old beams and a well-trodden wooden floors; and a menu “mainly British with a Gallic burr, that makes full use of the magnificent local Lake District larder”.
*****
Financial Times
The Ritz, Piccadilly
In the third episode of his search for the holy grail of ‘fine dining’, Tim Hayward doubled up with former Sunday Times and Guardian critic Marina O’Loughlin for the second of this week’s mob-handed reviews, of a seven-course ‘Epicurean Lunch’ at The Ritz – erstwhile stomping ground of Auguste Escoffier, the chef who, as Tim reminded us, “wrote the book on fine dining”.
The pair agreed on their shared disdain for the present state of the genre – the “absurd menus of flash ‘nibbles with narratives’” paraded by young chefs around the country via “the echo chamber of ‘Chef Instagram’”, and the resultant “total loss of deliciousness”. Marina dated this disenchantment to her second visit to El Bulli, and the “tortured and denatured” food she ate there.
The meal started with an amuse bouche of Coronation chicken that “dabbed every cliché” of this reviled modern gastronomy with “every kind of twattery required, deconstruction, a ‘witty narrative’, a pointlessly novel presentation of a weary classic”… But – and there had to be a ‘but’ – “Also, frustratingly and thanks to the talents of John Williams (MBE), a classically and fully adult chef, it was bloody gorgeous.”
The rest of the meal lived up to this elevated standard, delighting both critics despite their initial reservations. By the end, Tim was left wondering what exactly “fine dining” is these days. Marina suggested a working definition: “Tweezers, multiple complex techniques and hushed reverence.”
