Here’s our regular summary of what the national and local restaurant critics have been writing about in the week ending 30 January 2022.
*****
The Observer
“The sort of cookery that makes you pause, mid-conversation, and study the plate.”
Jay Rayner was in Sheffield, debating whether it’s better to eat out at lunch or dinner. “Restaurants make their real money in the evenings, hence that’s when the bigger prices are charged”, but for that “you get the more developed, filigreed expression of the kitchen’s art”. Lunch, on the other hand, is when “the real bargains are found” (“it’s when the grand places offer their cheap but extremely cheerful menus”) and of course allows “more time to digest”.
He ate at Juke and Loe, at lunchtime with that extra “privilege” of not “having to take the day off work to facilitate the decadence of a cheaper weekday lunch”. This small bistro, run by brothers, Luke and Joseph Grayson, offers a bargain where “two courses are £25 and three, £30 as against around £50 in the evening”.
“Initially I thought I had travelled some distance to be fed something merely solid but unshowy,” but then with the main courses, “it stepped far beyond solid to become something delightful and impressive,” and “desserts are equally delightful”.
“It’s bold cooking designed to satisfy rather than impress with its own cleverness. It all reminds me of the crowd-pleasing but luxurious food at Gary Usher’s Elite Bistros further to the west,”; it’s “a very nice place to be”. The evening menu is “slightly longer and more expensive, though there is also more ambition”.
*****
The Evening Standard
Jimi Famurewa reviewed the newly relocated and expanded Carousel Wine Bar in Fitzrovia, “a first permanent operation for the team behind the acclaimed, revolving-door restaurant” that “brings neighbourhood warmth, stealthy ambition and a certain youthful swagger to a part of town not readily associated with those things”.
“Wine bar. Even now, for some the sound of it carries the Brut aftershave-splashed scent of a very specific sort of provincial, Eighties naffness.” But “in recent years, the wine bar has been revolutionised and rehabilitated”.
“Ollie and Ed Templeton… hosted more than 300 guest chef residencies during a seven-year tenure at their former site in Marylebone”; their new space “sprawls across three connected Georgian townhouses”, with “a main guest restaurant… an upstairs workshop, a more casual, counter-focused “incubator” operation… and the terrazzo-floored modernist wine bar” whose menu offers a “supercharged canapé approach”.
They have “clearly absorbed plenty from the international rock star class of chefs that have breezed through their doors” – “you get studious, high-level technique without any of the attendant faff, oppressive seriousness or interminable gastronomic tantra that occasionally accompanies a tasting menu… full-throated hymns to the glory and scope of global drinking food”.
Leave “room for a climactic, sugar-dusted triangle of fried apple pie. Hot, cinnamon-warmed, nuzzled beside lemon thyme caramel ice cream… it is a dish that encapsulates this little Fitzrovian marvel’s irreverent, intensely considered approach”.
*****
Also in The Standard, David Ellis reacts to the news that Corbin & King are “battling with their company’s largest shareholder”; he makes no comment on the (possibly more recent) news that Richard Caring may be lining up to buy out the shareholder.
“The influence of Chris Corbin and Jeremy King on the way London eats — and the way its restaurants run — is almost impossible to overstate”.
“They pack dining rooms day in, day out and it is their achievements that so many try to mimic… The idea that they, of all people, risk their empire collapsing at the whim of an investor is a terrifying thought.”
David Ellis also celebrates “the restaurants reborn and rising from the ashes post the Covid pandemic”, from Richoux and The Ledbury to “A-list favourite Langan’s” and “still-adored Soho Italian” Vasco & Piero’s Pavilion.
*****
The Sunday Times
“What, I wonder, makes a boozer so loved that people are prepared to put their hands in their pockets without getting so much as a pork scratching in return?”
Marina O’Loughlin visited The Marina Fountain in St Leonards-on-Sea, not because of its great name, but because, during lockdown, it was saved from closure by a crowd-funder of locals.
“It’s attractive: sea-facing, with a garden built into the bricked-up cliff caves, its historic exterior hardly touched”, and inside there’s “a pleasing muddle of moody colours, real fire and mismatched furniture, plus a wallpapering of quirky artworks”.
The food, however, is well above the norm, from a well-priced, considerate menu. “The most expensive dish… costs £14. There are snacky, booze-spongey numbers… Then it gets more ambitious” and “it would be easy to eat a meat-free meal here. The kitchen has a lot of fun with vegetables” and “the wine list is a small joy too”. (“That the co-owner and Hastings native Jess Scarratt (with chef Rupert Walton) arrived here via the influential Borough Wines comes as no surprise. “)
“Pubs like this one are worth preserving. And when they have as creative and engaged landlords as Scarratt and Walton, they’re to be treasured.”
*****
The Guardian
“The words are already bubbling, because when you know, you already know.”
Grace Dent reviewed Kibou, the “the third in a chain of beautifully staged, Japanese-inspired restaurants with a loyal following in Cheltenham and Bristol”; “from the outside and at night” it’s “the loveliest, quirkiest-looking new opening London has seen in a while” with “faux Japanese blossom” and “vast murals of Tokyo metropolitan life”. (“Romantic as heck.”)
“This restaurant is very much a place of contradictions”; it’s a “non-serious place – ideal for groups, they say – that’s deadly serious about sushi, as well as, well, many, many other things”. “The menu is vast… and offers dozens of the crowd-pleasing, Asian-inspired dishes you see in chains” but with these large ambitions, the quality dips.
“It is undoubted that Kibou, in its outside-London forms, at least, inspires a lot of customer love” but “Battersea has a lot of room for improvement before it will inspire the sort of adoration and dependability that it gets in its other locations”.
*****
The Times
Giles Coren was in Brighton at Burnt Orange; he travelled and dined “alone to have a look at what the guys behind the awfully successful Salt Room and Coal Shed were up to”. Perched up at the counter, he “noticed the guy at the back look over at me, double-take and nearly chop his finger off”.
Giles had recently watched Philip Barantini’s 2021 film Boiling Point, in which a critic is brought to a restaurant on opening night, “making the wheels come off the evening in spectacular style”. “Everything… in the film seemed so realistic and rang so true that I found myself genuinely believing that chefs still care about one-off visits by well-known critics.”
Burnt Orange is “a beautifully refurbished site on Middle Street… full of wood, stone, leather and umber tones that speak of food grilled rustically over smoking coals”. And despite the clearly rattled staff, “service was seamless, quiet, mellow, respectful and the product quite wonderful, both visually and in the chewing”.
He “snarfed down eight dishes after my server had expressly instructed me to choose two or three, maximum four” so had no room for dessert, but his “overall verdict is, “Hurrah!”” (24/30)
*****
The Mail on Sunday
In the same template as last week’s review of Putera Puteri, Tom Parker Bowles in YOU Magazine reviewed Jin-Da Thai in Ravenscourt Park on the recommendation of a friend, opening with the line “I must have passed it a thousand times” (this time on the school run, not near his office).
Jin-Da “specialises in the food of the north, where the predominant flavours may be hot and salty”. The “room is briskly utilitarian” but “the service is a whole lot warmer”. Tom praised all of the regional dishes, including the nam prik ong dip (was it just so he could write “it’s so rare to see priks on a British Thai menu”?).
For the “brow-beadingly fierce… dishes from the northeast (Isarn) or south”, he recommends the nearby 101 Thai Kitchen. “To find one great Thai regional restaurant is joy indeed. But to discover two, within a minute of each other, is nothing short of a miracle. 2022 is suddenly looking very rosy indeed.”
*****
The Scotsman
Rosalind Erskine reviewed iasg (“the Scottish Gaelic word for fish, (pronounced ee-usk)”) which recently replaced Bo & Birdy inside the Kimpton Blythswood Square Hotel; “the decor remains mainly the same”, including the “beautiful, eye-catching turquoise scallop tiles that adorn the bar”.
The kitchen is headed up by “chef Sean Currie, formerly of No.16 Byres Road”; unfortunately “the kitchen had a major technical fault” on her visit post-launch, meaning that there was only a “limited menu” (“in normal circumstances, iasg’s menu is a celebration of the best Scottish seafood”).
“While our meal was very nice, it didn’t go down as one of my top dining experiences and the prices will be prohibitive for many (although this is dining in a five star hotel).”
*****
The Independent
Molly Codrye headed to Loch Fyne and Inver, the “kind of remote, gastronomically focused getaway that acts as catnip to burnt-out city-siders”. “Arriving at Inver feels like completing your journey to the ends of the Earth – you are truly, magically, removed from modern life.”
“It seems almost unfair to review a place as beautiful as Inver. They could have served me gruel on toast and I’d have likely left happy as a clam.” (Instead she threw herself “enthusiastically” into the five-course chef’s choice menu.)
Chef Pam Brunton and her partner Rob Latimer trained at Noma; “there are whiffs of Rene Redzepi’s modernised Nordic cuisine here”, but it’s no carbon copy. “This is Brunton and Latimer’s own approach to what Scottish food is” and it’s “a concise reflection of the surroundings and celebration of wonderful Scottish ingredients”.
*****
And also…
In The FT’s magazine Tim Hayward reviewed Ombra in Hackney, which he claims “will make you weep… you know how anchovies somehow enhance roast lamb? Yeah. That. To the power of 10”.
*****
On the BirminghamLive website, news that Kibou (reviewed by Grace Dent above) is to open in Solihull in April “inside the Grade II listed high street space previously occupied by Cafe Rouge”.
