Allen & Delancey, New York

Jay Rayner, The Observer

The critic ventures to the Downtown venture whose chef originally launched Gordon Ramsay’s Midtown flagship. He thoroughly likes Neil Ferguson’s new establishment, and his sacking by Ramsay – after the flagship’s initially poor reviews – is hailed as a liberation.

Rayner, incidentally, has clearly now joined up to the critical club that is close to finding Ramsay, culinarily speaking, a spent force nowadays. The Sweary One’s “increasingly outmoded brand of safe neo-classicism”, he wryly observers, was “always going to be a tough sell in New York”.


Tom Ilic

Giles Coren, The Times
Rating: 8.75/10
Like Jay Rayner‘s review, Giles Coren’s is of more interest for what lawyers call the obiter dicta (the by-the-way observations) than it is for its verdict on the question theoretically in hand. He clearly feels personally aggrieved by a meal he had at Sumosan, and devotes much of the column to what can only be called a denunciation. “I did have a rotten time the other night at the sub-Nobu, pan-Asian Sumosan in Mayfair, which I reviewed very favourably in 2004 but which is now thoroughly spoiled…”

In contrast, he hails the “good news … that Tom Ilic, cheeky Serbian whiz with the inner organs of beasts and fowls … finally has his own place and is serving unpretentious but undoubtedly top-end scoff for prices that take you back to the days when, um… unpretentious but undoubtedly top-end scoff cost less than it does now”. As he notes, though, Ilic is going to have his work cut out to make money in this “daggy” Battersea location.


Texture

Zoe Williams, Daily Telegraph
Rating: 7/10
The critic likes a place “so confident of its own luxuriousness that it doesn't feel the need to be all that comfortable”. It helps that the chef and sommelier of this ambitious spot north of Oxford Street – both ex-Manoir – “came away with the ability to inspire awe”. The cooking, though, is “a pretension/tastiness tightrope”. There were dishes which were “just underwhelming” and others which were “utterly stunning”. “So, in conclusion, yes and no; but the yes moments were just delightful.”


Oslo Court

Tracey MacLeod, The Independent
Rating: 3/5 for food
“This isn't just a restaurant, it's an experience.” “The huge laminated menu is an international round-up of forgotten treasures from an era when nouvelle cuisine was just an absurd rumour”, she notes, “and eating out meant beef, chicken, lamb or fish, preferably in some kind of cream-based sauce”. There’s “something very relaxing“ about this St John’s Wood institution too. The atmosphere is “truly extraordinary”, with “much table-hopping and general air of back-slapping enjoyment is seldom seen outside The Wolseley”.


Quilon

Terry Durack, Independent on Sunday
Rating: 14/20
The critic goes with low expectations to this “ominously bland” Indian off Victoria Street, which he is visiting simply because it recently got a Michelin star. Quilon, however, “almost manages” to convert him, but for every plus point he also finds a minus. Overall, “Quilon is just plain annoying, doing some things so well – the yoghurt! the appams! – that you almost forget you are sitting in a boring room paying high prices for overly refined cooking”. “What, then, got it the Michelin star”, he muses, “doing things properly, or the boring room, high prices and overly refined cooking?”


Terre à Terre

Jasper Gerard, Daily Telegraph
Rating: 5/10
Perhaps you can’t expect a sensible review in the Telegraph of a veggie restaurant? This one kicks off with some supposedly amusing thoughts on vegetarianism generally, before making “an undercover raid, deep behind enemy lines, to… one of Britain's best regarded vegetarian safe houses”. “Terre à Terre is leading the [no-meat] debate”, concludes the critic, “but it needs to hone its argument”.


The Red Sea

Matthew Norman, The Guardian
Rating: 6/10
Perhaps it’s a penance for all those trips to Mayfair of late, but the critic finds himself reviewing a truly local restaurant. “A few months ago, the launderette at the end of our street, which never recovered from being hit during a 2004 drive-by shooting, vanished. In its place, by way of a biblical miracle, appeared The Red Sea, a restaurant offering cuisines from the various countries surrounding [the Red Sea]”. “[F]or all [its] foibles”, he does “love it”.


Food and wine matching menus at NYC’s ‘Big Four’

Dorothy J Gaiter and John Brecher, Wall Street Journal

“Ordering the Tasting Menu Can Mean Being Treated Like a Rube [bumpkin]” – the headline tells the story of this interesting peregrination round the wine-matching menus at the four biggest-name New York restaurants – Jean Georges, Per Se, Le Bernardin and Daniel. The piece – as interesting for its implications about the spirit of the times as for the specifics of the Big Apple’s top-end dining scene – concludes that “[n]ow that pairings have become routine, some restaurants see it simply as a way to move some wine and move along the diners”.