Hibiscus

Press Reviews (11)

• Zoe Williams (10th March 2008)
  
  Something of a rave review of Claude Bosi’s Mayfair restaurant. “You know when you have a special anniversary, and somehow the very significance of it gives you the yips and you can't think of anywhere to go? Go here.”
• Nicholas Lander (7th January 2008)
  
  There is a bit of reviewing (“For the moment I think Claude is trying too hard”), but it’s really the behind-the-scenes account of this Mayfair restaurant’s move from Ludlow that makes this longish piece well worth reading by anyone interested in the higher reaches of the UK restaurant trade.
• Jay Raynor (26th November 2007)
  
  The arrival in town of Claude Bosi’s restaurant is “Very Big Stuff”, opines the critic, bringing as it does some of the “modernist flash” – which, as he very rightly observes, you oddly tend to find only outside the capital – to deepest Mayfair. His meal is a far from universal success, but he leaves “intrigued”, and wanting to go back.
• Terry Durrack (19th November 2007)
  17/20
  
  hails the Mayfair newcomer as “a small, fully formed, family-run restaurant of great charm"
• AA Gill (19th November 2007)
  4/5 stars
  
  For the second successive week it’s really very hard to tell what the reviewer really thinks, as the rating awarded and the review itself seem to sit remarkably badly together. You’d have thought 4/5 stars was a pretty good rating, but the food is the stuff that “tabloid columnists and stand-up comics used to get such thigh-slapping mileage out of mocking in the 1990s”. “It’s not that the chef doesn’t deserve his many accolades”, he wavers, “it’s just that [his is] not a skill I value as highly as some”.
• Giles Coren (19th November 2007)
  8/10 points
  
  a favourable account
• John Walsh (13th November 2007)
  Food 4/5 stars; Ambience 3/5 stars; Service 3/5 stars
  
  Perhaps, in four words, the Telegraph man has pinned down the all-over-the-show nature of reviews on this much-heralded Mayfair newcomer, which he diagnoses as displaying “slightly over-ambitious brilliance”.
• Guy Dimond (13th November 2007)
  6/6 stars
  
  “This was the most thrilling meal I’ve eaten in a long time”, says Time Out’s long-established chief critic (and Hibiscus is awarded an unprecedented six stars). He is, however, the only scribe so far to have expressed unalloyed satisfaction with Claude Bosi’s Mayfair restaurant, recently transplanted from Ludlow.
• Marina O’Loughlin (13th November 2007)
  3/5 stars
  
  “Bland food-for-rich-people-without-teeth” – it’s quite bizarre how mixed reactions are to Claude Bosi’s Mayfair newcomer, recently transplanted from Ludlow.
• Fay Maschler (8th November 2007)
  
  Mrs M is ‘first with the news’ on Claude Bosi’s much-awaited Gallic newcomer, freshly arrived from Ludlow. That news, however, is not especially good. Some dishes were “delectable”, but the kitchen was erratically slow, which Mrs M thinks may have skewed her experience.
• Mark Palmer (8th November 2007)
  5/10 points
  
  Chef Claude Bossi is either “creative” or “outrageous”, says Mr Palmer, who found the Gallic fare “weird”, “bastardised” and full of “disparate” flavours. The puds, however, were “faultless”.