Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant reviewers were writing about in the week to 20th October 2024.
London Standard
Sael, St James’s Market
David Ellis was the first critic to review the latest of Jason Atherton’s current wave of five London openings, finding it “a restaurant for anyone, at any time, on any occasion”.
He reported with approval that “price seems to be a priority for Atherton” (who has recently declared that ‘fine dining’ is just too expensive these days), so wine is sold by the pint (cheaper than a bottle), there are prix fixe meals at £28 for 2 courses and £32 for 3, a “heaving Sunday roast under £30”, and a service charge of just 9%.
The “enormous menu”, meanwhile, is generous and full of “treasures” – “big, heavy, comforting, blanket-by-the-fire stuff”, such as slices of Marmite custard tart “with blow-torched tops and endless umami”. “Hereford snail and ox cheek lasagne billed as ‘100-layer’ might numerically disappoint, but with its honking great flavour — and maths hardly a strong suit — I didn’t give a monkey’s.”
*****
The Guardian
Leydi, Hyde Hotel, Old Bailey
Grace Dent headed with some trepidation to a new hotel beside the Central Criminal Court (“handy if you’re a judge or celebrating winning a trial”) where Turkish-Cypriot chef Selin Kiazim has opened a follow-up to her much-loved Oklava, which closed last year.
Grace need not have worried. “Far from just another tepid hotel dining room, it’s a whirlwind of a restaurant that aims to incapacitate with kindness”, full of “boho flourishes” and “art-deco twinkles” that “makes you feel like Greta Garbo on a day off from filming in Istanbul”.
The food is a good match for the “gorgeous” space. At lunch there are 12 different meze – “please, please order the muhamarra” – and the ‘Leydi Deluxe’ greatest hits set menu is “exceptional value” at £50 a head. There are chicken shish and lamb adana that you might find in any Turkish spot in London, “but here they came on a raised plinth of fat-soaked pide and marinated peppers, as well as a buttered rice pilau topped with caramelised onions”.
*****
The Observer
Maroto, Marylebone
Jay Rayner was “genuinely intrigued” to visit a new Brazilian-inspired outfit next to the Brazilian Consulate, drawn by its promise of serving each main dish with five signature sauces – representing spicy, sour, umami, salty and sweet – for the diner to enjoy mix-and-matching.
Much to Jay’s disappointment, plates of cooked chicken breast and “three meagre slices of beef” arrived with five notably lacklustre sauces “dotted around like splodges on an artist’s palette”. There was no clear connection to Brazil.
“Maroto feels like a restaurant conceived in one long brainstorming session, during which everyone got bored and just settled for ideas which sounded convincing, so they all could go home, regardless of whether they made the slightest bit of sense or not.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Johnny Green, St John’s Wood
Mary’s, Mayfair
Oriole, Covent Garden
Giles Coren launched a triple salvo at three venues that, in the space of a week, had driven him to distraction by shunting him to one of the worst tables in the room when the best tables were lying empty.
First, at the latest venue from the Daisy Green chain of “chichi Australian diners”, Giles was told to sit next to the open kitchen rather than in the sunlit conservatory that he fancied – for the simple reason that it was more convenient for the waitress. Insult was added to injury when his poached egg arrived cold: it had obviously been batch-cooked in advance, despite the café’s insistence that it was cooked to order.
Next, at Mary’s – Jason Atherton’s new replacement for Pollen Street Social – Giles arrived for a pre-theatre meal at 5.30pm to a completely empty restaurant, only to be told that all the desirable tables were booked. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “You’ve been open a week and you’re telling me that 70 people are about to arrive for supper at quarter to six, every single one of them having reserved a specific table except me? Show me!”
It happened once more at Oriole, a “new Latin American cocktail bar and restaurant with pretensions to speakeasy status”, where again Giles was told at 5.30 that all the better tables were booked for a live music package which started at 8pm.“I was too angry to eat. Which was just as well because the waiter tried to tell me that ‘sweetbreads’ meant ‘pig cheek’, they served a short rib bland as cat food, and they took about a month to mix my cocktail.”
Giles placed the blame for this customer-unfriendly approach firmly in the court of the front-of-house managers. “It’s madness, this default ‘no’ they’ve been trained to give to people arriving for dinner. I feel for the proprietors. It’s hard enough making ends meet in this game without your front of house killing every customer’s evening stone dead the moment they walk in.”
It will be interesting to see the FOH response.
***
Mara’s Picklery, Edinbugh
Chitra Ramaswamy headed to Marchmont, where chef Eilish Leyland-Jones and server Pragnesh Patel, who met at a vineyard in New Zealand, have created a restaurant “so devoted to the old art of preservation that it describes itself as a picklery”.
In this tiny kitchen, Chitra said, the technique achieves wonderful results: “The complexity of flavour here is delivered not by lengthy cooking times or fancy kit, but the cunning and thriftiness of pickling, preserving, fermenting, curing and canning.”
Her favourite dish was “the most humble”, and did not seem to involve much in the way of pickling: a plate of “hulking, fat, gnarly carrots, roasted whole, skin on, to intensify their sweetness and softness, laid on a bed of silky whipped feta, drizzled with honey, sriracha and chewy baked chickpeas.”
There’s also a selection of “fantastic” home-made fermented drinks – if you want alcohol you are welcome to nip out to Cork & Cask for a bottle, but Chitra makes clear that would mean missing out on half the fun. She had a switchel, a Caribbean drink made with apple cider vinegar and molasses that is “a bit like a kombucha, though not fizzy”. There are also shrubs, fruit-based syrups blended with vinegar, that are “intensely fruity and tangy (tangy is a word you can’t help overusing here)”.
***
Keep Chaating, Covent Garden
Charlotte Ivers followed a recommendation to a new spot in town tipped by a friend for its “Zone 5 food. What this means is that they serve up the kind of cooking you get in outer London, where Indian people, and indeed people in general, actually live” – which in turn means the flavours have not been turned down central London softies, and the prices have not been turned up.
It’s a tiny place, whose concise wine list – “Casillero del Diablo (red) and Casillero del Diablo (white)” – pushes Charlotte towards the “authentic experience” of a ‘desi aam panna’, “a tangy, refreshing drink made with slow-cooked fresh raw mango pulp…full of ground masala”.
The rest of the menu from chef Priti Prakash, from Surat in the west of India, is “thrillingly varied” and “entirely vegetarian”. Charlotte is particularly taken by the dal makhana – a dish of black lentils in cream and butter that has been subject to a UK “arms race to make the richest. This is the opposite, far less creamy… It’s a revelation: you get much more of a taste of the lentils. It’s deeply savoury, almost refreshing.”
Chunks of paneer cheese and onions in a silky tomato sauce are also “done perfectly”, as are the “butter-soft and tender” chickpeas. “All are hot, none too hot.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
The Waterman’s Arms, Barnes
William Sitwell took one look at the menu at this riverside pub conversion and declared, rather puzzlingly, “There’s absolutely nothing I want… maybe they’ve got some chips”. Exactly what caused him to behave more like a fussy 12-year-old than a food-loving (you would hope) fully grown restaurant reviewer is hard to tell: “pickled cucumber”, “curried scallop”, “fennel, datterini, mascarpone”, “escalivada, butterbeans, goat’s curd”, “duck mince, celeriac, olives, toast” – all par for the course, surely, at a vaguely ambitious London restaurant.
Perhaps it was a fake protest, to set up a punchline: “My revolting-sounding duck mince was a staggeringly flavourful mess… the sort of dish you’d tramp through deep snow for: comforting, warm and a revelation of enticing taste.”
Perhaps William didn’t like the unfamiliar foreign words: ‘escalivada’ turned out to be “a plate of room-temperature roasted veg – peppers, aubergines etc… [that] was magnificently rich and pure, a real treasure chest of flavour”, while stracci pasta of mushroom and potato was “almost a carb dish of the year”.
So there you have it: “The Waterman’s Arms is a grower. It’s like a Coldplay song that you try not to like but end up, seduced by the chorus, singing from the rooftops.”
*****
Financial Times
Tim Hayward concluded his four-part series on his conflicted relationship with ‘fine dining’ by admitting that it must look “a lot like public therapy”.
He checked in with a couple of fellow restaurant critics, who both agreed there was a strong “class element” in his discomfort; one of them was Tom Parker Bowles, a self-recognised “public school toff” (not to mention – and Tim didn’t – the social rank of his mum and step-dad). Even Tom, apparently, has suffered the “We don’t want your type” and “You don’t speak the right way” treatment at certain temples of gastronomy. Cor blimey!
Jay Rayner reckoned that in the post-War austerity era it was “not actually about the food on the plate”: the only way to justify spending large amounts of money on eating out was “if it came with a lot of bells and whistles”.
So has the therapy worked for Tim? The answer is an emphatic “No” –although it has given him a new approach to the topic: “I can’t rekindle a love of fine dining because I can no longer think of it as a meaningful category. I still have to walk past signs, read menus or look at websites that use the words, but I now realise I must ignore them.”
Perhaps we should all follow suit.
