Saf

Press Reviews (9)

• Lucas Hollweg (10th February 2009)
  3/5 stars
  
  You can tell the Sunday Times has a stand-in critic this week, as the review is mainly about the restaurant – a vegetarian affair in Shoreditch. “Saf’s designer veganism is a kind of cooking you won’t have tried before”, says the critic (“even if cooking isn’t really the right word”), and he things everyone should try it once.
• Giles Coren (29th August 2008)
  Score: “pointless”
  
  This new Shoreditch vegan has “done very well in the reviews”, states the critic, and “was positively rammed to the rafters, on a lazy Monday night in high summer, with very thin people, mostly women”. It is a shame, he observes, “that the food most likely to help you live for ever manages simultaneously to deprive you of the will to live”. [W]hat a vicious circle meatlessness can generate”, he observes – “there was not a man among the weeds and waifs [present] who looked physically up to the job of killing a mammoth. Or even a mouse”.
• Zoe Williams (23rd June 2008)
  5/10
  
  The critic does not seem to be spiritually in tune with this vegan Shoreditch newcomer, where everything is oversalted.
• Marina O'Loughlin (20th June 2008)
  3/5 stars
  
  The critic rather enjoys her trip to “London's first gourmet vegan, raw food restaurant”. “What's particularly striking” about the Shoreditch newcomer, she finds, “is its swankiness… Actually, with its cool, pistachio and graphite colour scheme, sleek furniture, designer light fittings and airy outdoor terrace, it's all rather gorgeous [,and the staff] are young, attractive and clued-up”. And the food largely lives up to the setting.
• Terry Durack (16th June 2008)
  14/20
  
  “It's the energy that hits you. Everyone at Saf is full of it. They're off their faces with it. Waitresses can barely stand still long enough to take an order, bar staff shout cheery greetings to everyone who walks in and chefs happily chat to customers who stop by the open kitchen. So that's what happens when you ditch meat and dairy, stick to plant-based foods and add alcohol. Wow.” It turns out that this Shoreditch newcomer offers “inventive, modern, vegetarian cooking that, hallelujah, is fun to eat”.
• Jay Rayner (9th June 2008)
  
  The critic visits the Shoreditch offshoot of a “weirdly international mini-chain of high-end vegan restaurants”, and eats “a few pleasant things” there. Overall, however, his meal includes many horrors. “Saf is an interesting, even admirable idea. They have a pronounced ethical position and they want to elevate vegan food, and there's nothing wrong with that. At the moment, though, they are simply trying too hard. And being too cruel to the poor, blameless nuts.”
• Matthew Norman (28th May 2008)
  6/10
  
  The critic visits a “cultish” Shoredtich vegan newcomer. He thinks it a pretty hellish concept, but the food “wasn't half bad”, and a main course even exhibited “genuine savour and cleverness”. “If this sort of thing is your bag - and, yes, Paul McCartney and Gwyneth, I am talking to you - you won't find it done with more technical adroitness and imagination elsewhere”. (If not, however, “there's always the salt beef bar next door to banish the memory”.)
• Fay Maschler (1st May 2008)
  2/5 stars
  
  This new Shoreditch veggie is a “strikingly attractive restaurant with seemingly impeccable ethical credentials and a lovely terrace at the back”, the critic tells us, but she in not impressed by the “mimsy” starters which cost around £7. Thereafter, her meal doesn’t get terribly much better.
• Jan Moir (17th April 2008)
  
  “[W]hile Munich-Istanbul-Shoreditch may not quite have the same cachet as Paris-London-New York, it suits Saf, which is quirky and unique” – the critic certainly succeeds in making this new vegan restaurant “in the depths of groovy east London” sound worth a trip.