Great Queen Street

Press Reviews (7)

• Jasper Gerard (18th May 2009)
  4/5
  
  The critic visits a “no-nonsense, manly restaurant in London's Covent Garden that specialises in great chunks of nose to tail meat” (and, most particularly, pork). “[I] you just want to pig-out, get your snout down here”, he advises. “It’s a trough not to be sniffed at.”
• Terry Durack (19th September 2007)
  14/20 points
  
  Somewhat late in the day, Mr Durack concludes that this already very popular Covent Garden newcomer “gives you all the things you need”. The menu offers “rewarding” flavours, and there is a “solid” wine list.
• Matthew Norman (12th June 2007)
  9/10 points
  
  Matthew Norman turns social observer, and notes a return to ’50s values. He may well be on to something when he notes that: “As for the restaurant industry, though it would be stretching things to discern a towering tide of austerity, it becomes clearer by the week that the opulence and pretension of recent years is yielding to simplicity, even a dash of thrift”. Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay “have opened pubs serving ultra-traditional food wildly in contrast to their fancy-dan Michelin stuff”, and “the march of cheap and previously dishonoured cuts of meat under what is known throughout culinary academia as the Dick Emery Principle (“Ooh, you are offal but...”) seems irresistible”.
• John Walsh (4th June 2007)
  Food 3/5; ambience 3/5 stars
  
  The latest critic to check out this “strange hybrid of Soho bar and working-man's café” – the Covent Garden offshoot of the Anchor & Hope – decides it certainly has “a certain je ne sais quoi”. The people behind this stripped-down eatery are “masters of informality”, and the food here “tastes like real home cooking, slow-roasted, casseroled and baked with care and attention”.
• Gills Coren (22nd May 2007)
  Meat/fish 10/10; Cooking 9/10; Green fingers 9/10; Overall 9.33/10
  
  The critic starts by not reviewing Banners N8, Franklins SE22 and Cheyne Walk Brasserie SW3, which leaves just a few column inches to review the “bookable version” of the Anchor and Hope SE1 which this is. Fortunately, not many words are needed, as the critic seems to have enjoyed everything he ate.
• Jay Rayner (22nd May 2007)
  
  The critic finds this Covent Garden offshoot of the Hope & Anchor “swilling in self-confidence”, thanks no doubt to its “impeccable pedigree” (which also consumes much of the Metro review, below). Puddings, in particular, were “beyond reproach”, but “other things were less good”.
• Marina O’Loughlin (22nd May 2007)
  3/5 stars
  
  The critic begins by noting the antecedents of this Covent Garden gastropub, which include the Eagle (“inevitably-described-as-seminal”), as well as the new establishment’s immediate parent : the “unbookable and mobbed” Anchor & Hope. She goes on to imagine that “if you were invited to dinner at Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall's”, it might be like eating here. Even with the occcasional duff dish, this place is – by Covent Garden standards – “a delicious surprise”.