Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant reviewers were writing about in the week to 27th October 2024.
London Standard
Fonda, Mayfair
David Ellis headed to Heddon Street, which week by week enhances its claim to be the epicentre of gastronomic Mayfair, to visit chef Santiago Lastra’s follow-up to Kol, the all-conquering and decidedly upmarket Mexican restaurant he opened to universal acclaim four years ago. Fonda is named after homely family-run spots in Mexico and pitched as a more casual operation than Kol, with much of the cooking done on a ‘comal’, or sandstone grill.
Lastra has been “vocal about his determination to change public perception of what Mexican cooking is about”, David noted – but Fonda seems to undermine this intention: “in the end, a meal here amounts to a succession of tacos. There are other bits — like quesadillas — but, well, come on. They’re taco-adjacent.”
So what’s the verdict? Well, David is polite about the place, but it clearly fails to excite him: “It is Kol with the tasting menu cuffs undone. It is cheaper, but still expensive. It is beautiful, and the food extremely good, for the most part” – hardly a ringing endorsement.
*****
The Guardian
The Devonshire, off Piccadilly Circus
Grace Dent devoted her review to “elegant old-school boozer” The Devonshire, in the week leading up to the first anniversary of its launch – on the basis, perhaps, that it is always worth revisiting the most hyped of openings to check that they have delivered on their promise.
In Grace’s view, they have succeeded in spades – not just with the “refined comfort food” served, but in the atmosphere created mixing elements of boho Soho (Colony Room and Coach & Horses), 1980s Groucho Club ebullience and 1970s Kilburn Irishry.
“It’s quite hard to remember that this is just a pub”, she observed. Its founding trio – landlord Oisin Rogers, Charlie (Flat Iron) Carroll and Ashley (Fat Duck and Dinner) Palmer-Watts – “are not reinventing the art of hostelry; instead, they’re leaning heavily on a yesteryear type of fun that wraps around punters like a comfort blanket.”
All said, there’s only one thing Grace doesn’t like about The Devonshire: “the main bar is usually so packed with testosterone-fuelled, braying men in gilets, all necking Guinness like there’s no tomorrow, that you may not wish to linger there long, or even at all.”
*****
The Observer
1 York Place, Bristol
Jay Rayner reviewed another venue approaching its first anniversary, the Clifton restaurant that was the follow-up to nearby Little French from chef Freddy Bird – whose cooking Jay remembered (and liked) from the Bristol Lido back in 2010.
All three of these establishments exhibit what Jay describes with approval as “a determination to fill the plate to the very edge without recourse to daintiness or understatement. Come hungry.” Starting his meal with a “rustling heap of moon-shaped squash fritters”, he also noted that he had eaten “discs of battered and deep-fried pumpkin” all those years ago at the Lido: “I like a cook who cleaves to his own good ideas.”
“It barely needs saying that Bristol is a superb restaurant city, full of independents serving great food without faff or ludicrous ponce. The establishment at 1 York Place sums up that encouragingly bourgeois approach.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Donia, Soho
Sael, St James’s Market
Following his diatribe last week against being given bad tables in restaurants, Giles Coren this week reviewed one restaurant which only has bad tables and one which only has good.
First up was Donia, on the second floor of the Kingly Court food hall in ‘Carnaby’ – so by definition “the worst spot in the worst place on earth”. Once inside, things go further downhill – it’s “like eating in a skip”, Giles suggested, or, warming to his theme, “like eating on a pulldown stool in the galley area of an easyJet to Wroclaw”.
But the food, from the Philippines, was “fantastic”. Giles admitted that he had eaten little, possibly none, of this cuisine before, “but if, when it is at home, it is a precise and sexy interleafing of Chinese, Latin American and Mediterranean influences (in this case all done with British ingredients), then Donia is as authentic as hell.”
Next stop was Sael, one of Jason Atherton’s cascade of new openings, this one in the St James’s Market development south of Piccadilly Circus – “Kingly Court for non-doms”, as Giles called it – where he found “one of London’s great eating rooms, a modern grand brasserie à la Jeremy King”, and all the tables were good.
The food was a good match, too, although Jason’s claim that it was a ‘tribute to iconic British culture” was rather undermined by Giles’s “favourite thing by far… the ‘100 layer’ snail lasagna”. (Still, he did finish with jam roly poly and custard.)
*****
Sesta, Hackney
Charlotte Ivers made sure she got in early to the new restaurant that has taken the place of Pidgin – a “very small, very cool, set-menu place” that everybody was talking about for two years in the mid-2010s. Sesta, launched by an ex-Pidgin pair in chef Drew Snaith and manager Hannah Kowalski, has switched from set menus (“no longer à la mode”) to à la carte, “because the economy is à la toilette” (oh là là, Charlotte!).
“Many of the dishes are almost laughably fashionable” – posh toasties (“Sesta’s comes with beef ragu, chilli pickled onion and a rich brown sauce made from the dripping… so rich you only want a bite or two”); taramasalata (properly “salty, sultry and smoky”, with smoked eel and pickled radishes); prawn and stone bass dolma (“stuffed vine leaves: also highly fashionable”) with black rice and ouzo butter.
“All of this should be accompanied by a glass of ‘natty wine’, as our waitress saw fit to call it. “
*****
The Daily Telepgraph
Da Costa, Bruton, Somerset
William Sitwell was righteously and Britishly irritated in advance by much of the set-up around Da Costa, the new Italian restaurant at Swiss art dealership Hauser + Wirth’s ArtFarm flagship property – billed as a “farmstead” where the current season is “fall” and the bar is a “fully functioning site-specific artwork”.
All of this, though, was rendered bearable by the “gorgeous gobbles” that emerged from the “large open kitchen with a big wood-fired oven”, along with service that was “really bloody nice”.
Salt-cod balls, scallops with Venetian spices, crayfish spaghetti, “utterly beautiful wood pigeon” and a “textbook tiramisu” ensured that William returned to his home on the edge of Exmoor, on the other side of Somerset, in a much better mood.
*****
Daily Mail
Pomus, Margate
Tom Parker Bowles, in Margate to catch “two giants of dance music, Leftfield and Orbital, playing later at Dreamland”, was more than impressed by this newcomer – despite its premises in a shopping centre with views of Poundland, Peacocks and Subway.
He enjoyed some “elegant offal” to start with – “a skewer of chicken hearts, plump, pert and well spiced” and “rounds of tongue, softly robust” – followed by coal-roasted sweet potatoes, hispi cabbage draped in lardo and chicken karaage, all from “a kitchen that roams the globe with easy aplomb”.
The fish of the day’ is “a mighty lemon sole on the bone, exquisitely fresh and exquisitely cooked”, while pudding is rum-poached apricots. “Service is as warm as the early afternoon sun, the whole place splendidly laid-back.”
*****
Financial Times
The Beefy Boys, Cheltenham
After his four-week ‘fine-dining’ odyssey and a couple of days discussing whether or not food-writing was literature (“abso-bloody-lutely not”) at Cheltenham Literary Festival, Tim Hayward was determined to get real at the latest venue from the Beefy Boys, four Hereford lads so obsessed with backyard grilling that they entered BBQ competitions in the US – and won.
“Riffing like meat-jazz”, Tim ordered the “OG Boy, Oklahoma style, medium rare, with bacon, double up”, plus bacon and cheese fries, chilli wings and a local craft beer. It was everything he had hoped it would be, perhaps more: “the best burger I can remember eating since I was about 16.”
As such, it was a meaningful experience for Tim – remember, he regarded his ‘fine-dining’ trek as therapy. For it was eating American-style burgers at places like Peppermint Park, the Hard Rock, Joe Allen’s and Ed’s Easy Diner on teenage trips to the Big Smoke that turned Tim on to the delights of hospitality –- “an affair that’s lasted ever since and only gets deeper with the passing years.”
