Tom Ilic

Press Reviews (4)

• Jay Rayner (1st July 2008)
  
  Mr Rayner reviews the first ‘name’ venture of a chef who “cooks in the French idiom and in a very specific way”. “He does big, deep flavours. He loves braising bits of animals and serving them with the sort of sauces whose flavours stay with you for days, half taste, half memory. He is a cook for a northern European winter. In short, Ilic has almost no breadth, but he does have extreme, ocean rift-like depth.” This is a place where “[t]he food is what matters, and at around £27 for three courses it is very good value indeed”. Tom Ilic, he concludes, is a smart neighbourhood restaurant which delivers much more than that suggests. It is idiosyncratic, an expression of one man's taste. Happily, that man has very good taste indeed.”
• AA Gill (3rd June 2008)
  3/5 stars
  
  ”There are plenty of critics who rave about this [Battersea] dining room”, notes the critic, but he is not among them. Ilic’s food, he finds, is “precise, well sourced, prettily offered [, has] an honest goodness, and it bored me to tears”. This is a “karaoke menu”, he proclaims, full of “really good cover versions of popular hits”.
• Zoe Williams (17th March 2008)
  9/10
  
  “[T]he local-bistro look belies some absolutely stunning cooking”, says the critic. Tom Ilic’s “superhuman” achievements win a real rave review for this Battersea newcomer.
• Giles Coren (4th March 2008)
  8.75/10
  
  Like Jay Rayner‘s review, Giles Coren’s is of more interest for what lawyers call the obiter dicta (the by-the-way observations) than it is for its verdict on the question theoretically in hand. He clearly feels personally aggrieved by a meal he had at Sumosan, and devotes much of the column to what can only be called a denunciation. “I did have a rotten time the other night at the sub-Nobu, pan-Asian Sumosan in Mayfair, which I reviewed very favourably in 2004 but which is now thoroughly spoiled…”