Grace Dent for The Guardian visited yet another home-from-home seaside location, this time in Kent; where she had to invent a new term for the “imperfectly perfect” (so much so that she wanted to “ditch the review to protect it from idiots”) type of restaurant she found there – the “Snuffly-Ligget”. It’s a “small, 26-seat, […]
The Little Chartroom, Edinburgh Marina O’Loughlin for The Sunday Times warily reviewed “small neighbourhood bistro” The Little Chartroom – it’s just the sort of place she’d hate to slate. Luckily, with all credit to chef Roberta Hall and her husband, Shaun McCarron, she didn’t have to. “Exciting soup” to start (“two words I didn’t think […]
Grace Dent for The Guardian travelled down to Penzance to visit the Mexico Inn, a “fun pub for families”, whose name “is perhaps unhelpful if you stop by hoping for enchiladas and tequila” – it’s a traditional Cornish pub run by an ex-Gurnard’s Head couple who have clearly set up “the type of intensely relaxed, […]
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 […]
For The Observer, Jay Rayner recommends that you “find something worth celebrating” in order to eat at Liverpool’s “note perfect” Roski, from former (joint) MasterChef: The Professionals winner, Anton Piotrowski, who Jay remembers judging in 2012. He tried cooking in rural Devon and Plymouth before settling here – all Jay can say is “Lucky Liverpool”. “Care […]
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 […]
