Grace Dent for The Guardian visits The French House in Soho with some reluctance: it’s a “hollow task to review a restaurant that has tottered on already… for more than 100 years”. But with Neil Borthwick freshly installed at the reigns, she felt obliged to check that he was respecting this last bastion of Soho’s […]
1251, London N1 Jimi Famurewa for The Evening Standard ventured to Islington and James Cochran’s new restaurant, who has “once again plundered his Scottish and Saint Vincent heritage (plus the influence of a childhood in Whitstable)”. A “Kentish-Scots-Caribbean” blend may sound like “the stuff of a disastrous ‘fusion cuisine’”, but in Cochran’s hand ” it […]
Marina O’Loughlin for The Sunday Times is already working on a revision of her top favourite restaurants, after irate readers disagreed with her Top 50 list a few weeks ago. First to make the cut is this Birmingham spot: “almost austere in a kind of Scandi-Brum way ” which deserves nothing but ” joy and […]
Marina O’Loughlin visited Andrew Wong’s City newcomer Kym’s for The Sunday Times, “an opening… hotly anticipated by restaurant lovers” (and what she calls his “potentially difficult second album”). Could he pull off his Pimlico triumph (the “electrifying” A Wong) in the “expensive banality” surroundings of the Bloomberg arcade? Despite being “mildly devastated” that there’s no […]
Five stars for Andrew Wong’s new City restaurant in The Evening Standard from Fay Maschler. She admits to feeling “proprietorial” about the chef, having been the first to review his reincarnation of his parents Pimlico restaurant in 2012, delighting in the ” skill, wit, inventiveness, subversion and astonishment” of the dim sum (and, yes, she squeezes […]
Grace Dent paid a visit to York for The Guardian, and the new restaurant from Tommy Banks, “posterboy for British hospitality”, winner of The Great British Menu and chef-patron at the much-loved Black Swan at Oldstead. She declares Roots, in a vast converted Victorian pub York’s “new star attraction” – better even than the Jorvik […]
Kerridge’s Bar & Grill, London SW1 Grace Dent in The Guardian is the latest critic to visit Tom Kerridge’s long-awaited London home, and she “was delighted with everything”, even the fish ‘n’ chips which cost almost £33 but came with “special, once-in-a-lifetime chips… triple-cooked with an ethereal, golden shimmer”. Kerridge’s is “a big, broad and brassy […]
Jimi Famurewa in ES investigated the “impressively long culinary shadow” of Rita’s at their new home in Bethnal Green’s Redchurch Brewery – the original Rita’s “refined deep-cuts from American diner menus” and “a ‘why not?’ embrace of knuckleduster Asian flavours” are now “part of the general lexicon of eating out in London”. The new incarnation, in a […]
Grace Dent in The Guardian visited Hot Manchester Newcomer Tast Cuina Catalana, one of the ” delicate, thoughtful, educational places” that is aiming to bring a true taste of Spain to Britain. It’s “forward-reaching”, “high-end, imaginative, occasionally edgy” – and huge: there’s three “capacious” floors to fill, each offering a different level of formality and adventurousness. […]
Grace Dent in The Guardian rejoiced in the “sheer chutzpah” of chef Alex Bond at Alchemilla even before she ate a bite of the “veg-centric” menu. Bond has turned a huge, “crypt-like space… an abandoned coaching house” that had “sat unloved and festering for more than 100 years” into “a capacious, open brushed aluminium kitchen” […]
