⦿ Jay Rayner in The Observer truffled out Umezushi, a 14-seater Japanese restaurant under a Manchester railway arch, with cooks from Korea, Spain and the Czech Republic, which he found “really very good indeed and, at the price, a bit of a miracle”. “Slices of wagyu, sensitively flamed, almost justify the £10 price tag that accompanies […]
⦿ Jay Rayner of The Observer sweated his way joyfully through a chilli-spiced dinner at Thai pop-up-turned-permanent Som Saa near Spitalfields Market, which he described as “an action movie full of crash, bang and wallop.” “The food wanders restlessly from north to south. It is a deliriously fearsome bash of fire and sour and salt and smoke.” ⦿ The Guardian’s […]
⦿ The Observer’s Jay Rayner, perhaps enjoying an August Bank Holiday at the seaside, moseyed happily into Hantverk & Found in Margate, “a tiny cupboard of a fish restaurant, half tiled in the sea green of a Victorian public convenience”. “There are 10 seats up front, plus a few in the garden, and a couple of people in the kitchen knocking out […]
The Observer’s critic-in-chief Jay Rayner asks himself the all-important question at Cliveden House’s new casual operation, The Astor Grill – would he return here and spend his own money? At £196 for two, the short answer to that question is a resounding ‘no’. “The wine list is short and more shameless than a 1960s pool […]
AA Gill heads out to The Woodford in search of Ben Murphy’s cuisine (a young chef of just 25 who trained under Pierre Koffmann) and finds that The Only Way is Essex is in fact a real way of life and not, as the Sunday Times’s columnist previously thought, simply a ratings-courting fiction. Incidentally he loves […]
The Sunday Times’s AA Gill revisits Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy in its new form as Pharmacy 2 in Vauxhall and finds things have changed considerably since the Notting Hill original launched in 1998, when the opening was ‘like a red-carpet premiere, a mob of paparazzi and rubberneckers, double-parked limos, teeth and tits’. “I was surprised at […]
The Times’s Giles Coren is so annoyed by his fellow diners inability to set aside their phones and enjoy the experience of dining at Sartoria (not to mention Francesco Mazzei’s cuisine) that he can’t taste straight… “The lighting is low but the tables are well covered by spotlights for menu-reading, the acoustics are perfect, thanks […]
Well it’s time to say a fond farewell to 2015, and what a year it’s been. The possibility of a pop-up that allows diners to pet foxes, a cereal café causing a riot, celebrity chef spats, and endless controversy as restaurant after restaurant was accused of unfair practices over tipping and service charges. From scathing […]
Last week The Times’s Giles Coren was drooling over his keyboard at the very thought of another meal at Brad McDonald’s new Deep South-influenced Soho haunt Shotgun. This week his colleague AA Gill over at the Sunday Times takes said shotgun and fires both barrels at the place in his Table Talk column… “The first […]
We kick off this week’s review of the reviews with a corker. Everyone should read Marina O’Laughlin’s scathing dissection of NYC interloper Hotel Chantelle in the Guardian, if only to hear the phrase ‘le wanquerie’, from the woman who brought us ‘Mayfair Wankpits’. From the food, to the service, to the very reason behind the […]
