Number One Cafe
Matthew Norman, The Guardian (Rating: 9/10)
“In every regard a magnificent restaurant.” It turns out that this Notting Hill spot offers “[l]arge portions of authentic, sensational and preposterously cheap Thai food with the odd Malay twist”, plus charming service, in “a simple, airy room - paper flowers adorning doorways, open-plan kitchen, obligatory portrait of Thai king, big windows on to adjoining park”. And it’s BYO too.
Aaya
Terry Durack, The Independent on Sunday (Rating: 16/20)
What, the critic muses, is he doing at this smart Soho Japanese on his “self-imposed dining budget of £80 for two”? It turns out that he’s here “because Aaya is irresistible”, and he manages to have a pretty good meal. “With a head chef and three others hand-picked from Kyoto, and a sushi chef direct from Tokyo, Aaya is aiming at London's top bracket of Japanese, undercutting them on price so that I can (just) afford to eat there. But even if I couldn't, I would ask if I could just sit there and admire it.”
Tom Ilic Restaurant
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.”
Eyre Brothers
Giles Coren, The Times (Rating: 6.33/10)
The critic visits this well-established City-fringe Hispanic, and finds a “very good and quite jolly restaurant” that was alarmingly empty on a Friday evening.
Quo Vadis
AA Gill, The Sunday Times (Rating: 4/5 stars)
The critic likes the menu at this relaunched Soho institution, finding it “short without being rude, and sort of new English without being too sclerotically John Bull-ish and Last Night of the Poms… it’s the best food list I’ve seen for ages”. And the results were “humdinging”, with the meat “particularly deliciously hung”. (Oh yes, and he finally gets a clitoris into one of his reviews. All to do with Jeremy Clarkson, apparently.)
The Botanist
John Walsh, The Independent (Rating: Food 2/5 stars, Ambience 4/5 stars, Service 3/5 stars)
This Sloane Square newcomer ‘radiates heat” and “palpitates with excitement”, says the critic. “It is the hippest place in town since Sir Hippesley Hipman opened a hip-replacement clinic, to cries of hip-hip-hooray. It is, indeed, full of Hooray Henries and Henriettas.” He comes rather to the view we did that the “actual restaurant, though it's an attractive room… seems a secondary affair [to the bar]”, and the food “when it comes, has a decidedly perfunctory feel about it”.
Gaucho, Piccadilly
Jasper Gerard, Sunday Telegraph (Rating: 6/10)
The critic visits the “cavernous flagship restaurant” of the steak-specialist chain. No great surprise, then, that if “Bateman were to draw Gaucho, his picture would be captioned: ‘The man at Gaucho who asked for the vegetarian option’.” The meat is “certainly succulent and, crucially, the outer layer does not emerge looking like it has narrowly escaped a house fire. But there is little evidence of the ‘marbling’ that connoisseurs insist is the sign of well cooked, fatty steak”.
Bingham, Surrey
Zoe Williams, The Telegraph (Rating: 7.5/10)
We can’t really summarise this review any better than the critic did herself. “I loved Bingham, a restaurant in a boutique hotel, as soon as I walked in, for its tang of the 1990s… This place belongs to a more innocent time, where you could tell Richmond even from Twickenham, probably, and you could buy fancy velvet furniture and shimmery wallpaper without necessarily having to rip out all the skirting boards. I started off in a glow of approbation, and this lasted me right up until pud.”
And finally…
We all do it occasionally, but some absurdities people write about restaurants really ought to get special mention. We particularly enjoyed Square Meal’s short write-up of Le Café Anglais in the The Times. This "huge" Bayswater restaurant, we read, “takes inspiration from the famous Parisian brasserie that bears its name”. Um. No it doesn’t – it takes its inspiration from a famous Parisian restaurant that closed 95 years ago.
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