⦿ Marina O’Loughlin of The Guardian reviewed Jikoni 7/10 in Marylebone, the first restaurant from “chic and beautiful” TV chef and writer Ravinder Bhogal, which she found “immensely girly“. “Jewel-coloured saris and handmade Indian tablecloths notwithstanding, the girliest element is the food, which is light years from the usual Brit curry machismo… You can’t escape the cuteness: […]
⦿ Fay Maschler of the Evening Standard reviewed Elystan Street 4/5, Phil Howard’s new restaurant in Chelsea, where she ate some “sublime” dishes but gasped at the prices and missed having a tablecloth. “Smoked mackerel velouté with Porthilly oysters — from the River Camel estuary — with leek hearts and eel toast is a secular […]
⦿ The Observer’s Jay Rayner reviewed the Bull & Ram in Ballynahinch, Co. Down, which opened in a Grade 1-listed former butcher’s shop in June and excels in “tear-inducingly bloody lovely” cuts of Northern Irish short horn beef. “They know what they’re doing here. And what they’re doing is an utter joy. “The beef and the pork are […]
⦿ 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 […]
⦿ Clipstone in Fitzrovia, which is still basking in AA Gill’s ecstatic review in the Sunday Times last week, attracted further praise this time around, the Observer’s Jay Rayner finding its food “delightful, with a few excursions into bliss and ah”. “From the short list of cold cuts and crudos comes a plate of lardo, the cured back fat of […]
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 […]
Five stars for food from AA Gill?! A rare occurrence indeed. The first British spin-off (in Covent Garden) of Les Halles restaurant Frenchie wows the Sunday Times critic… “Frenchie is that thing I’d almost given up hoping I would see again: a really, really good modern French bistro. Not nostalgic or revisionist, but a sensible, […]
