Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 13th April 2025
London Standard
David Ellis claimed to be the first newspaper critic to review this veteran Berkeley Square Japanese (est. 1973), despite its being favoured by entertainment royalty (thank-you notes are on display from George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, Cher and Mick Jagger) – not to mention its regular listing in the Harden’s guide.
With an “everyman anonymity” from the outside, inside it is “the Wilton’s of Japanese restaurants: old school and hush-hush… entirely without embellishment”. The cooking met with David’s approval, with miso soup that “felt like a tonic to all of life’s ills”, aubergine “as gooey as a rom-com and twice as comforting”, and sushi “perhaps as good as any I’ve eaten”.
Places like this are often fearfully expensive, he noted, “but Ikeda can be done carefully; we left at £175, preferring it to £420-a-head Sushi Kanesaka. In that sense, it felt like good value.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent enjoyed a “startlingly good” seaside dinner at a “recently restyled and renamed restaurant inside a blissful, bougie boutique hotel”. Chef Matthew Harris, once of Bibendum and the brother of Bouchon Racine’s Henry Harris, is responsible for a menu that focuses on the heartier, homelier side of classic French cookery.
“Even so, when a humble Barnsley chop comes with a good, fresh, rich hazelnut pesto, you know you’re not really in a place that’s truly casual,” Grace said.
For dessert, St Émilion au chocolat, was “another much-ignored classic” which was turned into “something that’s truly majestic”.
*****
The Observer
Miquita Oliver became the latest TV presenter to guest-review for The Observer (is she perhaps a permanent appointment? She named the recently departed Jay Rayner as “my predecessor”). Her target was the fashionable restaurant that now occupies the site of her first ever employer, Coins Coffee Store, around the corner from where she grew up in pre-gentrified Notting Hill with her mother, TV chef Andi Oliver.
“For three months in 1996 I washed dishes and made scrambled eggs in the very same kitchen where Max Coen and his exquisite team today present a menu of truly refined decadence.”
Dorian, she says, has that special atmosphere – that “quasi holy feeling” – which “as we all know is what makes a great restaurant a truly great restaurant”, the only negative being the “relentless thrum of mediocre dance music” that is endemic to restaurants.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
The Prince Arthur, Hackney
The Lavery, South Kensington
Giles Coren sampled two contrasting venues: a “humming East End boozer” and a “serene, high-ceilinged drawing room” in South Kensington, each of which lived up to its address.
The Prince Arthur was “loud” in both noise (music, laughter, screaming kids) and food – the latter including a big slab of “beef dripping toast piled with richly seasoned flatiron tartare, the chewy shoulder beef full of capers and cornichons and tabasco and all that stuff”, half a pound of rare and charred bavette with real chips and cress and a rhubarb ‘bombe Alaska’ that was “just the thing”.
The Lavery was “gorgeous.. just wow… full of sunlight and soft spring air and gleaming alabaster, mirrors and bas-reliefs”, with food (asparagus, gnocchi, stuffed rabbit leg and Middle White pork chop) whose “quiet” flavours were “precise and sexy”.
Giles declined to choose between the two, declaring: “I need both in my life”.
***
Stockbridge Eating House, Edinburgh
Chitra Ramaswamy sang the praises of her latest discovery in foodie Stockbridge – a “tiny, homespun and honest French-adjacent bistro with just three communal tables (dressed in gingham tablecloths, naturellement)… and a minimalist menu of hearty fare” using hyper-seasonal local produce.
On the site of Bells Diner, a local institution for half a century, the Eating House is run by “one of Edinburgh’s top chefs” in Dale Mailley (formerly of the Gardener’s Cottage and the Lookout, which both closed before Christmas), and offers a set lunch for just £14.95 – “the definition of a steal” for cooking of this quality.
“Expect no gels, espumas, ferments or Japanese techniques here”, Chitra warned. “This is bold, generous European cuisine from the previous century, and the one before… Everything is swimming in so much butter verdant with the first wild garlic of spring that a spoon is requested to ladle it onto our plates.”
***
Charlotte Ivers was spellbound by a meal of “magical touches” in a converted terraced house in a North Yorkshire market town, where young founders Tom Heywood and Laurissa Cook focus on local produce.
“It all tastes as if it was dug up moments ago, as if the deer was strolling past when it met its maker and our plates,” while beef tartare from Castle Howard flavoured with Yorkshire blue cheese was “remarkable: pungent yet delicate”.
The father figure of the burgeoning food scene in this part of North Yorkshire, Charlotte suggested, is Andrew Pern of the famous Star Inn at Harome, the village next door. Laurissa worked there, as did Josh Overington of Mýse, just down the road.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles admitted rather shamefacedly that he had been “a little over-refreshed” when he visited this high-profile restaurant soon after it opened two-and-a-half years ago, so a review had slipped his mind. So he put that right now with a belated but breathless rave.
Even Tom could only snag a table at 2.30 on a Wednesday afternoon, but he feasted happily on rösti and white crab – “hot potato, cool crustacean” – followed by a grilled skewer of rabbit and squid – “exalted surf and turf” – and a main dish of “a vast bone-in ribeye, cooked rare, hewn from a special crossbreed of cattle, born and raised in Yorkshire, and aged on site”.
“Head chef Max Coen is one hell of a talent, ably supported by one hell of a brigade… It’s not cheap by any stretch, but this is precise, grown-up cooking, with a total mastery of both technique and flavour. The whole place pulses with pure, unfettered delight and service is as warm as it is slick.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner paid a visit to what he bills as “the best fancy kosher restaurant in central London” – if only because it is “the only fancy kosher restaurant in central London”. Regardless of the cooking, which Jay found pretty uneven, it was packed on a Tuesday night with a clientele that trusts Tony Page on the basis that he has catered for high-profile kosher events for decades, everywhere from The Dorchester hotel to Blenheim Palace.
The chicken soup is good – “as it damn well should be” – and so is the lemon meringue pie. But a version of Nobu’s black cod is “limp and soft” and arrives drenched in a gummy teriyaki sauce – and it costs even more than the Nobu original.
For Jay – who is Jewish but proclaims himself a “heretic… who has no time for the annoyingly picky eater of a Jewish god” – the worst dishes are those compromised by the need to stick to kosher rules, such as a veal chop served with a risotto “which should contain copious butter and cheese but doesn’t, because of the whole meat-dairy thing… Vegan parmesan is the worst thing in the world, a stinking insult, with all the subtlety of a chemically seasoned Wotsit.”
