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Review of the Reviews - London

The Bingham

Fay Maschler, Evening Standard (Rating: 3/5 stars)

Ms M begins by pronouncing on the new Michelin guide. “Alain Ducasse… got three stars — but then he would, wouldn’t he? And because the named but absentee chef at Apsleys — A Heinz Beck restaurant — at The Lanesborough hotel attracts three stars in Rome, Apsleys got a star despite the almost universally lukewarm reviews the restaurant received in other publications”.

Other stars (not associated with celebs) were, however, “welcome and merited”. Of the newly-starred Bingham, however, the critic had “heard no buzz”, and felt a need to visit. Legend has it that a new Michelin award is a terrific table-filler, but she found the dining room “sparsely populated” on her Thursday night visit. Perhaps it does not help that the room gave an impression “like being inside a mushroom, albeit a mushroom lit with chandeliers”.

Her first taste of the food is an amuse that’s “more daring than delectable”, but overall she proclaims a chef with “intuition regarding pairings, troilism and even shotgun marriages of ingredients [which] is admirable”. The food turns out, though, to have its highlights, and disappointments too, often thanks to dishes whose ingredients “competed for attention rather than complementing each other… [and] all the necessary positioning, primping, pushing and plating was arguably more entertaining for the chefs than the recipients, especially since heat was lost in the process”.

All in all then, a classic Michelin experience.

Empress of Sichuan

Guy Dimond, Time Out (Rating: 3/5 stars)

“Sichuan is flavour of the moment in London”, says the critic, who visits “the former site of the short-lived Keelung in Chinatown. It has retained many of its features: “the photographs of the brat pack on the walls sends mixed messages. As does the menu, which is lengthy, often expensive, and intersperses Sichuan with other dishes, prefaced by a page stating the chef’s credentials”. The food is rather up-and-down.

Wheeler's

Marina O'Loughlin, Metro (Rating: 3/5 stars)

Well we’ve heard it all now. David Sexton gave MPW’s new St James’s Fish Parlour 1/5 stars (which we think was right). Jasper Gerard (in our view, astonishingly) gave it 4/5, and now we have the usually reliable Ms O’Lochlin storming in with 3/5. Even though she had sharpened her claws, knowing this was an MPW restaurant, she feels obliged to pronounce it “not bad at all”. The market, however, is perhaps the safest guide: “[a]part from a handful of vaguely bonkers-looking tourists of extreme age and vast wallet, the place is sparsely populated”.

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