Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 21st July 2024

Evening Standard

Lucia, Hackney Wick

Jimi Famurewa brushed aside the social-media hype attending so many launches to draw attention to a new Mexican spot in east London whose Instagram account has yet to post a single image. “Lucia’s is a diminutive, counter-focused shrine to tacos, mezcal and charcoal-fired cuts of meat possessed of an understatedness that feels almost transgressive.”

Was this refusal to play the game just another PR pose? Jimi thinks not: “Founder Jo Kurdi, who also runs nearby Cafe Mai, has created that rarest of things: a truly under-the-radar find that thrums with cool, craft and an invigorating purity of purpose.”

As for the food, all was excellent – grilled vegetables “breathy with smoke”, black bean and sweet potato tostada with real depth, tacos with “tender, spiced lobes of monkfish” and “soft, succulent beef barbacoa”, and a “gorgeously rare-cooked bone-in pork chop” with vibrant salsas.

As for social media – well, it might even go viral now.

*****

The Guardian

Albert’s Schloss, Shaftesbury Avenue

Grace Dent headed to a cod-Bavarian bierkeller from Mission Mars, the Manchester outfit behind Rudy’s pizzerias. Already a hit in its home city, Liverpool and Birmingham, it has now opened a vast 600-cover operation just off Piccadilly Circus. Grace knew it would be “all about fun: noisy, determined, oom-pah-pah fun” backed up by “wall-to-wall schnitzel, strudel and currywurst”. She also imagined that the food would be “like a Bavarian-themed Wetherspoons”.

A Northerner herself, she was delighted to be proved wrong: “Here’s the thing: the food at Albert’s Schloss is really much, much better than it needs to be, especially this close to Leicester Square.”

There was, she found, “a meaningful drive to establish Albert’s Schloss as a proper all-day restaurant”, with highlights including a “jalapeño pretzel that’s hard not to love”; a “schweinshaxe pork knuckle laden with a huge, crisp piece of crackling, the meat seasoned with juniper, caraway, fennel and black pepper, served with red cabbage, apple sauce and gravy”, and “a very good stacked chocolate cheesecake with raspberry coulis”.

Best of all, though, in a city that is often “expensive, exclusive and impenetrable” to out-of-town visitors, at Albert’s Schloss there’s “No booking required, no credit card deposit, no dress code, no time slot” (it’s open from 9am until 2am).

***

The Observer

Julie’s, Holland Park

Jay Rayner followed the throng of critics who have paid their respects to this revival of a veteran from the 1960s, whose reputation always relied more on its celeb clientele and their louche shenanigans than its cuisine.

He found a place that has been expensively refurbished – “It’s an orgy of padded floral fabrics and wildflower-printed wallpaper. Think Country Living for people who hate mud” – where it is already all but impossible to book a table between 7 and 10pm, and where the menu of comfort food is delivered superbly by chef Owen Kenworthy, previously of Brawn and the Pelican. 

What’s more, it is not ridiculously expensive (apart from a few bottles of wine listed in case Mick Jagger drops by “for old times’ sake”.) “A big bowl of mussels in a brilliantly stinky Roquefort cream sauce, then heaped with matchstick fries, is an awful lot of dinner for £15…. When Kate Moss [who once celebrated her birthday here] said that guff about skinny feeling better than anything tastes, she clearly hadn’t tasted something like these mussels.”

*****

The Times & Sunday Times

Horse and Groom, Bourton-on-the-Hill

Giles Coren opened his review with an imagined dialogue between Romantic poets talking bollocks when out walking, before working himself up to his own pitch of hyperbole and declaring: “The English rural pub is the greatest of all things on earth and the Horse and Groom is perhaps its apogee.”

This was based on his previous experience of the Gloucestershire pub – “a cosy spot with stunning views and lovely people but pretty average food” –  and the knowledge that Nathan Eades and Liam Goff of the Halfway at Kineton had taken it over.

Sure enough, everything the Coren family ate was just about perfect: the Atlantic prawn cocktail, “two layers of fat, aromatic wild prawns in a cut glass whisky tumbler, served with warm, fresh soda bread”; “monkfish scampi freshly breaded and fried with a dark golden crumb”, served with “a glistening saffron aïoli, a pickled shallot and watercress salad and a wedge of Gem lettuce”; “Scotch egg shiny as a brass finial, warm, porky and sweet, the yolk a sunshine gel, with shoots and a pickled walnut puree” and “double cheeseburger, a plain, saladless, hip and sticky masterpiece of its kind”.

***

Thamel, Edinburgh

Chitra Ramaswamy thought she was in for a treat going to this New Town restaurant that is the third and most glamorous in the city from the Gautam family – following Gautam’s in Meadobank and Solti on Drummond Street. What she found was “the Nepalese restaurant of your dreams”.

Her delight was really a tale of two curries, starting with a “deceptively humble” Kathmandu: long-cooked makhani lentils, spinach, pickles and a choice of meat (in her case, chicken tikka). “The sour floral uplift of citrus rind wafts towards my twitching nose. I can tell already: this is going to be insanely delicious. And so it comes to pass. A curry so perfect I’m already trying to stage a way to be in the vicinity of East London Street around 1pm so I can do it all over again.”

Next, Nihari gosht – 24-hour marinated lamb shanks cooked on the bone for six hours with warming Himalayan spices and plenty of garlic and ginger. When one of the shanks is lifted from the plate, “the lamb slips from the bone and lands, with a demure plop, back in the bowl. No restaurant critic clichés required here: this is meat that literally falls off the bone.”

***

ABC Kitchens, The Emory, Belgravia

Charlotte Ivers went to a new luxury hotel where three separate restaurants from New York-based megachef Jean-Georges Vongerichten have been combined. The place had the “beige citizen-of-nowhere glamour you find in Dubai”, with the threat that dinner will be ruined by “the bored children of the global elite”. “Sure enough, on the table next to us a ten-year-old boy sits furiously dipping his pizza in ketchup.”

Sticking to the dishes from the Mexican third of the menu, on the possibly debatable grounds that “good Mexican food is so rare in the UK that you’ve got to take your chances”, Charlotte was happy enough with the food although ABC did “overdo it on the salt. You can take a restaurant out of America, but …”

Finally, the arroz con pollo – a dish recommended to Charlotte by a pal in New York: “She is correct. There’s extraordinary depth: a jalapeño warmth, a shiitake mushroom earthiness. A nice kick to the chicken, but the real standout is its skin: wonderfully salty (in a good way this time), impeccably crispy. So crispy it stands up unaided. A dish to cheer even the sulkiest of oligarchic teens.”

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Daily Telegraph

The Hero, Maida Vale

Settling down to write his own rave review of this universally raved-about revamped pub, William Sitwell sensed another “Bouchon Racine moment” – a replay of the unanimous praised piled on Henry Harris’s Farringdon establishment a couple of years ago that raised suspicions of “some sort of conspiracy of benevolence”.

“But we pile in for good reason. For the style and the confidence, the magnificence and the deliciousness,” William said, reminding us that nobody has yet tested The Hero is all its potential glory because the upstairs “posh” dining room is still out of action.

But the quail, cheese toastie, lamb ribs and roast chicken served in the downstair bar were all just perfect: “honestly, the cooking here is sublime.”