Saf

Fay Maschler, Evening Standard
Rating: 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.


St John

David Sexton, Evening Standard
Rating: 4/5 stars
The Standard’s number two critic (as he seems to be nowadays) also goes to Shoreditch, to visit the path-breaking English restaurant which recently won 16th place in the S Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. It turns out that he has “long loved” it, and he praises the “confident curtness of the menu”, and the food, which “follows through in its clarity and simplicity”. He does admit, however, that there is an alternative view: that this is a “theme restaurant — so devoted to pork, offal and game that it’s as much a macho exhibition as it is an eating house”.


Apsleys at The Lanesborough

Marina O’Loughlin, Metro
Ms O’M kicks off her review of the “overblown pan-Italian” restaurant at the Lanesborough with an account of a dish which “looks as unedifying as it tastes”. Not helped by the fact that she visits with her Italian mother, her account doesn’t improve.

The reincarnation, she proclaims, is “quite spectacularly ghastly”: “[s]tar US-based designer Adam Tihany (responsible for legendary Stateside names such as Per Se and Le Cirque as well as Knightsbridge's Foliage) has spent a reported £2million to strip it of anything resembling charm and personality”, and furnish it with what “appears to be a job-lot of furniture from one of those shops that taste forgot on the Edgware Road”.

All this “international hotel-style nouveau-richerie does”, she storms, “is bellow an intention to part you from as much loot as possible, and she manages, “without even trying, to hit almost a hundred quid a head”.


The Chicago Rib Shack (first major review)

Jan Moir, Are You Ready To Order?
Ms Moir – who is even keener on being first with the news than Ms Maschler nowadays – gives the reader loads of background on the relaunch, after a ten year absence, of the Knightsbridge ‘Shack’. As to its new incarnation, she found “something lacklustre about the… décor”, and the food was “filthy”.


Maze Grill
Richard Vines, Bloomberg
Rating: 4/4 stars
The critic is so swept away by Ramsay’s new Mayfair steakhouse that he makes it the first ever recipent of the top 4/4 star award in his recently-introduced rating system.


Time Out
No restaurant reviews as such in this week’s Time Out, where the ‘review’ space is given over to wine, and places to consume it.