Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant reviewers were writing about in the week up to 17th November 2024
London Standard
Canteen, Notting Hill
David Ellis made some very, very big claims for this new Portobello Road spot from the team behind the nearby Pelican and the Hero in Maida Vale: that the in-house pasta may be “London’s best”, and that (just a few weeks into its stride) it can take its place alongside Bocca di Lupo (est. 2008) as one of only two “perfect” Italian restaurants in the capital.
David omitted the River Café from that accolade, while pointing out that Canteen’s two chefs, Jessica Filbey and Harry Hills, are both graduates of its kitchen – and “God, can they cook”. Their fettuccine and ravioli “became the source of the kind of rapturous joy”; their winter tomatoes with oil and thyme demanded “why can’t every tomato taste like this?”, while the whole meal left him in a “euphoric daze”.
The name, of course, is “a conceit” – part of a “wilfully nonchalant” approach that brings the widely hyped Yellow Bittern to mind: here at Canteen there are no reservations, there is no wine list (just red or white from the keg at £47 per unmarked bottle), and “lunch is the thing” (although they have started opening on weekday evenings).
Which means, in David’s reading of the room, a very Portobello Road customer mix of “those who married well, of actors, and anyone who works at night but can afford to dine in the day, like public school drug dealers.”
*****
The Guardian
Fantômas, Chelsea
Grace Dent both enjoyed and suffered an “unforgettable” evening at this new King’s Road hangout from restaurateurs George Bukhov-Weinstein and Ilya Demichev along with chef Chris Denney, formerly of Fiend and 108 Garage in Notting Hill.
Everything on Grace’s plate was “delicious”: “Denney is again reaping his trademark culinary whirlwind. He’s never boring”, while his kitchen team “show flair for flavour in everything they touch”. And the prices are “wholly in keeping with fancy London norms right now, so factor for about £100-plus a head, before booze and service”.
But there’s a lot that Grace found wrong with the place, starting with a menu that is “borderline chaotic on a global level”, flitting across Europe from Ireland to Greece with detours to Japan to Mexico. This chaos is augmented by the “many servers, sommeliers, managers, deputy managers and even the owners, all milling about on the floor and barely two yards from your plate. I’ve seen calmer hokey cokeys”.
Add in an open kitchen on one side of the room and a cocktail bar on the other, along with relentlessly loud music – “tribal house, or thereabouts, in case you’re wondering” – and Grace was left reeling by a “wholly unrelaxing dining experience”.
*****
The Observer
The Yellow Bittern, Islington
Jay Rayner headed to this lunch-only spot a few days before the furore over non-drinking, starters-only customers exploded across the media (see below). Less than a week after it opened, it was already a place of pilgrimage that had attracted a party of chefs from Noma in Copenhagen and our own venerable Fergus & Margot Henderson (of St John & Rochelle Canteen respectively).
Jay clearly approved of Belfast-born founder Hugh Corcoran’s affiliation to the tribe of “chef poets” (as opposed to “tweezer chefs, dude-food chefs or live-fire chefs”), both in naming the restaurant with reference to a 17th-century Gaelic poem and in his romantic attachment to simplicity, to ingredients and to the writings of Elizabeth David and Richard Olney.
The food was “delightful” at its best, with hits including nutty soda bread served with wedges of yellow butter, “neatly tucked” guinea-fowl pies and a “huge glossy, quilted disc of apple pie for dessert” – all of which “make the point about simplicity’s virtues well”. But a “dreary” leek and potato soup, a bowl of “bought-in Cumberland sausages” with potatoes listed as ‘Dublin Coddle’, and a “sludgy” rice pudding served cold all took simplicity too far, and left guests “muttering about having been served school dinners, only at Hackney natural wine bar prices”.
For Jay, there was a big, even comic contradiction about the whole venture. It “sells itself as cool and radical”, having “scythed away at the fripperies of the 21st century, such as credit card payments and a website”, while Corcoran is an avowed Communist with a poster of Lenin on the wall – but what the restaurant actually plays to is “the small-c conservatism of John Major’s wistful speech about a fantasy England of ‘warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and – as George Orwell said – old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Delamina Townhouse, Covent Garden
Giles Coren enjoyed his visit to “the newest and most gorgeous restaurant” from Limor and Amir Chen (who have Delaminas in Marylebone and Shoreditch), this one set in “a lovely old Covent Garden house full of mazy staircases and nooky dining rooms washed through with London winter light. A fresh and friendly place to spend the last Friday of half-term with our children, but no doubt a sexy night-time spot when the sun goes down.”
The menu features eastern Mediterranean/Israeli food of “insane colourfulness”, with contrasting flavours that work beautifully together, although Giles reckoned that dishes including butterflied sea bass with chilli date molasses and grilled chicken with sweet potato “leaned towards the sugary rather than salty end of the spectrum”.
***
Jericho, Nottinghamshire
Charlotte Ivers confessed that she was “in love… utterly enthralled” by the “peculiar slice of English magic” she found in a cosily lit barn – “part Scandi sauna, part Scottish hunting lodge” – outside the village of Plungar, half an hour’s drive from Nottingham, where a small team led by founders Rich and his wife Grace serve a 20-course tasting meal that “you’ll remember forever”.
“There’s a remarkable combination of dishes that display the fiddly, technically challenging stuff that wins awards, and others that are just fresh ingredients cooked simply on the grill. No pretension, dots of pointless sauce or style over substance. Rich tells me he has no formal training. Again, magic.”
At £105 plus £70 for the flight of natural wine, dining here is not cheap – but “you’re paying to experience something remarkable, something that seems to have sprung up from nowhere but is the product of years of graft and expertise”.
•••••
Daily Telegraph
Chalk, Pulborough, Sussex
William Sitwell is remarkably sanguine at the prospect of wining and dining in southern England while the rest of the world burns or floods, after eating at this “magnificent” restaurant on the Wiston Estate – an operation “in the tradition of great vineyards across the world where a dining room gets bolted on to the wine business”.
Did he really believe that a “well-conceived menu … delivered with a Mediterranean culinary dash” can “foster a future of rather beautiful possibility”? Does he really feel “a glimmer of hope, amid the climate change terror, that in the coming years you’ll be able to swan through our southern counties sipping and eating fruits of the land as fine as you can across California or Victoria, down under”?
*****
Daily Mail
Lita, Marylebone
Perfection comes at £200 a head (if you stick to a cheaper wine) at this ‘modern Mediterranean bistro’, said Tom Parker Bowles – not bothered at all that his fellow reviewers trooped through and eulogised in similar fashion six or seven months ago.
“What a place this is, though”, he purred, hailing head chef Luke Ahearne (previously of the Clove Club and Corrigan’s Mayfair) as a “towering talent” combining “great technical skills with culinary nous”. Every dish Tom tasted was a winner, from pan com tomate and gazpacho to Orkney scallop with nduja, Basque sardine fillets and monkfish.
“Best of all are veal sweetbreads, burnished and sticky below a mass of sweetcorn, girolles and charred onion, atop a smear of buttery pommes purée. The dish elevates those splendidly spongy glands into a symphony of mellow fruitfulness, probably the best thing I’ve eaten all year.”
•••••
Financial Times
Bistro Freddie, Shoreditch
A life-long fan of classic French brasserie cooking, Tim Hayward finally made it to a joint hailed for its “bijou romantic authenticity” by what seemed like “the entire culinary world”. Sadly, he had to report that “it just doesn’t work” – in his view, Bistro Freddie has neither the “effortless and total” authenticity of Casse-Croute in Bermondsey nor the “thrilling” subversion of Borough Market’s new Café Francois.
So what went wrong? The steak tartare was “what any competent pothole-filler would have recognised as an aggregate-heavy ‘dry mix’”; no attempt was made to remove the tendons in the leg of the wild duck, so it was “much like chewing a three-inch length of warm armoured cable”, while its orange sauce was over-salted and the plate it came on was cold; polenta was the fine-grained white variety, hence the unpleasant “hot blancmange” effect; and the salad was clearly bought in pre-washed and bagged – tantamount to the kitchen declaring “we couldn’t be bothered”. Finally, his single ile flottante was “moulded, cold and set in a sea of frigid crème Anglaise. I need another 200 words just for the Brexit gags”.
*****
… and in other news
The hitherto little-known Hugh Corcoran became one of London’s most famous chefs virtually overnight as a result of last week’s media furore following his attack on diners who visit his new lunch-only restaurant, The Yellow Bittern in Islington, and order little beyond tap water and starters.
If it was a calculated provocation by the Belfast-born chef, the front-page photos and column inches in The Times and other national papers meant it was the PR coup of the year, raising his own profile, awareness of the Bittern, and even perhaps a renewed appetite for the fabled long lunches of yesteryear. Much of the coverage was antagonistic (Hilary Rose in The Times accused Corcoran of being out of touch, fatuously declaring that “nobody goes out to lunch Monday to Friday any more”), but if only a tiny proportion of the hundreds of thousands of readers take his side and decide to pay a visit to the Bittern, he will feel himself justified.
Much of the restaurant’s retro schtick – booking only by phone or letter (!), cash only – is certainly a pose, but one designed to create an atmosphere and drive enthusiasm for a ‘proper’ restaurant, which seems fair enough. Although oenophiles might feel justifiably aggrieved that the lack of a wine list (Corcoran simply recommends wines at your price-point) robs them of one of the pleasures of eating out.
Perhaps the charge against him that could stick is that his use of social media is hypocritical. For his back-to-future vision to be consistent, he would have to ban phones and eschew social media – but to do that would be to forego the cheapest and most effective contemporary means for a restaurant to attract trade.
