Dean Street Townhouse
David Sexton, Evening Standard (Rating: 4/5 stars)
“You have to admire a restaurant that makes its signature dish mince and boiled potatoes”, says the critic, and this latest addition to the Soho House empire “delivers an object lesson in how to write a menu full of the straightforward things people actually want to eat and then deliver it all superbly well, with good service, in pleasing surroundings.”
“How hard is that to pull off? [Owner, Richard] Caring and his crew make success look easy, even a bit obvious. But then look at how many other people fail when they try to create restaurants, guess how much it costs them, and you know it can’t be”. “The wine list is full of attractions”, too, and begins at “moderate prices”. In the first week, though, service still seemed “a little disorientated”.
Chinese Cricket Club
Fay Maschler, Evening Standard (Rating: 1/5 stars)
A real panning for this new City-hotel Chinese.
Proud Cabaret
Marina O'Loughlin, Metro (Rating: 2/5 stars)
“Alas, what they’ve given us is about as dissolute as a Romford hen party, but a smidge less entertaining. And with marginally better food.” The critic is not very impressed by this new City cabaret.
Bistro K
Euan Ferguson, Time Out (Rating: 2/5 stars)
This is the successor to a “spectacularly ostentatious fine-dining French restaurant that cost its backers more than £2.2 million to open, yet lasted little more than a year”. (As the critic sagely notes, “[t]he fact that it was so intrinsically French probably didn’t help”.)
The owner has now spent “what looks like another small fortune refurbishing the site into an all-day, supposedly more casual dining destination”. “It seems that old habits die hard, though, because Bistro K now occupies a rather uncomfortable place between uptight fine dining and the informality it aims for”, and the food – though sometimes “very good” – suffers from an “identity crisis”. The “main caveat”, however, is the bill.
Mennula
Guy Dimond, Time Out (Rating: 4/5 stars)
The critic visits the new Italian restaurant on the site formerly called Passione, and finds a “rustic, regional, [and] refined” establishment that’s “self-consciously smarter than London’s other Sicilian restaurants” (Really? We recall the décor as Dulux-simple.) “Our visit was in the early days and some aspects of the service needed some smoothing out, but Mennula’s already showing great promise and reliably good cooking.”
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