Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant reviewers were writing about in the week up to 22nd September 2024
The Guardian
Köd, Soho
Grace Dent has seen the future of dining out – “once the AI robots rule the Earth and we’re down to bugs, dust and 3D-printed gateaux”. And, following her visit to the new Dean Street branch of a Scandinavian steakhouse group whose first London venue opened near Liverpool Street last year, it’s not a happy future.
The steak itself “was gorgeous, aged in Himalayan salt and cooked to a perfect medium rare” – but almost everything else about Köd (which she said is pronounced ‘cud’) was wrong: service “sleepy and noncommittal”, steak “flown in from all over the world because clearly steak improves with air miles”, beef tacos “crunchy, ready-made poppadoms filled with beef stodge that explode at first bite”.
It was, Grace said, “the oddest place I’ve eaten in all year” – “a place for people who would find an Angus Steakhouse wilfully experimental”, serving “comfort food with little finesse, from a kitchen than is doing the best they can with lacklustre, cheap, ready-made supplies”.
*****
The Observer
Goldies, Soho
Jay Rayner enjoyed himself at a new “grills and frites” operation in Carnaby Street’s Kingly Court, from the Brittany-born brothers behind the bistro Blanchette. Unlike other newish ‘live fire’ restaurants (Lita, Ibai, or Tomos Parry’s Brat and Mountain) this one is not dependent on hugely expensive raw ingredients which push the bill into the stratosphere – which is why Jay urged us to “celebrate the arrival of Goldies”.
It is named after its signature golden ‘pommes frites’ (hence no possessive apostrophe), which are served with four sauces. Jay admired the decision to offer them fried in both animal and non-animal fats, although “it seems like a lot of trouble for not a vast advantage”.
Beyond the chips, he was impressed by “flame and smoke used less to prove authentic caveman credentials and more just because it makes things taste nice.” A slab of aged sirloin comes in at £22 and half a spiced and blackened chicken with smoked yoghurt at a reasonable £15. Good-value hits continued: “fat prawns skewered with hunks of taut-skinned chorizo and grilled until smoky, so that their various bodily juices combine”; beef short-ribs tender enough to be carved with a spoon; rustic ground-pork sausage filled with boudin noir in a sticky, sweet-sour apple cider sauce.
“As propositions go,” he concluded, “it’s not a bad one”.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Taste of Chongqing, Bloomsbury
Giles Coren made his way eagerly to the “new Bloomsbury Chinatown” and a “brilliant” restaurant indirectly recommended by Fuschia Dunlop, the British oracle of Chinese cuisine.
He attempted – and largely failed – to define the differences between the Chongqing (a vast city, “pronounced Chong-Ching”) and Chengdu versions of Sichuan cuisine, but no problem: this is a “Chinese-for-the-Chinese place” whose “exciting menu” means it’s impossible to go wrong unless you turn to the back page and order curry, satay or French fries presumably aimed at Westerners.
All the starters Giles sampled – spicy beef tongue; sliced whelks with chilli; grilled scallion pancakes; fried crispy pork; fried lotus root – hit the spot. He followed up with one of the signature £52 sharing pots, selecting spicy braised chicken with pork intestines; other possibilities were duck and fresh asparagus with peas; rabbit with fresh red and green pepper; and seabass with frogs’ legs.
“When they brought it, I laughed,” he wrote. “It would have fed ten. £52 went from being the most expensive main course of my year so far to the cheapest thing I’d ever eaten. In a tureen no smaller than my car, there were the pieces of at least one whole, large chicken. Possibly a capon. Feasibly a hippo.”
***
Mosob, Glasgow
For the first time in her career as a reviewer, Chitra Ramaswamy passed judgement on a meal from a cuisine she had never tasted before – Ethiopian-Eritrean. She was delighted to find it behind a “grotty” wooden door a couple of minutes’ walk from Queen Street station in Glasgow city centre, where she was greeted by the aroma of “what I now know to be berbere — a complex, warm spice blend made of red chillies, fenugreek, ginger, coriander, cardamom, cloves, peppercorn and spices indigenous to the Horn of Africa”, and sat to eat at one of the traditional communal round tables or ‘mesobs’, that give the restaurant its name.
Food is spooned directly on to injera, a type of flatbread reminiscent of a South Asian dosa, and you eat it by hand, tearing off pieces as you go. Main courses such as ‘zigni wat’, a lamb stew with berbere-spiced butter, arrive in mini clay pots, the juices bleeding into one another and slowly seeping through the tiny fermented holes drilled in the injera.
“Don’t, for God’s sake, ask for cutlery,” advised Chitra, flashing her new-found expertise. “Just get stuck in. Lick your fingers. Wash it all down with a St George, Ethiopia’s most popular lager, brewed since 1922. Afterwards, order the Ethiopian coffee, ceremonially roasted and brewed to order, served in traditional cups with a bowl of popcorn.”
***
The Seahorse, Dartmouth
Charlotte Ivers dined at the Devon flagship of Mitch Tonks’s West Country group, which she is assured by her local friends is “the best seafood restaurant in Britain” – “the sort of seaside restaurant amenable to snobbish city dwellers… with all the luxury comforts of a metropolitan dinner spot”.
As promised, it is “no greasy fish and chips on the beach job”: “Every fish that can plausibly be dragged out of the sea within a two-mile radius has been extracted and thrown onto the coal fire.”
For Charlotte, the big revelation was the tuna steak: “taken from the fish’s collar, [it] is meaty, tender, rich and marbled with fat, as you’d expect from a good wagyu. It tastes like beef. Fatty, buttery beef. Then it doesn’t. The further I get in, the more the tuna taste starts to seep in. Wonderful.”
*****
Financial Times
Sweetings, City
For the FT magazine’s business lunch special, Tim Hayward headed to a City institution founded in 1889 and located just a few hundred metres from the FT headquarters – so old, he was told, that the gents’ urinals are listed and the ladies’ equivalent are something of an afterthought, reached via a prep kitchen.
He loved the atmosphere – “Rigid with tradition, yet noisy, informal and weirdly democratic” in its equal treatment of all diners. Sweetings didn’t really feel like a restaurant, “more a canteen or a mess”, and while its menu is often described as “nursery food”, Tim preferred to characterise it as the food served in “public school refectories, university halls, officers’ messes, gentlemen’s clubs and probably the Houses of Parliament”: the food of the English establishment and “irredeemably the food of men”.
Over two visits, he worked his way through a menu of crab, smoked salmon, Dover sole, halibut and the like – all “good stuff. Solid, not messed with. Decent seafood prepared with this little intervention might just be my favourite thing.” Which sounded a far cry from the stodge traditionally served up at even the most expensive schools – or gents’ clubs, for that matter.
The only bum note was Sweetings’ famous Black Velvet served in a silver tankard, which unfortunately tasted, if only “distantly”, of silver polish. The kitchen’s greatest triumph was a “transcendent” fish pie: “a Euclidean fish pie, a Jungian fish pie, a fish pie of dreams” that left Tim bathed in deep contentment.
*****
Daily Mail
Rochelle Canteen, Spitalfields
In a week when several critics visited long-established restaurants, Tom Parker Bowles reviewed a 21-year-old venture which is very much a “family affair” – Rochelle Canteen was set up in 2004 by Margot Henderson, wife of St John’s Fergus, whose son Hector now runs the kitchen, while daughter Frances is out front.
Tom chose an idyllic late-summer afternoon – “we could be in Ibiza or the Aeolian islands, Paros or the South of France” – and feasted on sweetbreads and devilled rabbit hearts on toast, “a dish that sounds brutally visceral but, like everything else here, shows the lightest of culinary touches”. In other words, like father, like son.
“But it’s not all offal” – a girolle and pecorino tart and a juicy roast Sutton Hoo chicken were “simple things, beautifully done”. The verdict: “Not just an escape from London, but, like all great restaurants, a welcome respite from the daily grind.”
*****
Evening Standard
David Ellis introduced himself as the paper’s new chief restaurant critic, succeeding Jimi Famurewa at a fast-shrinking operation which will be relaunched this Thursday as the London Standard (printed weekly and online). For regular readers, David needs little introduction – he has written for the Standard for 10 years, providing regular holiday cover for Jimi and their illustrious predecessor Fay Maschler.
