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Review of the reviews - National

Launceston Place

AA Gill, Sunday Times

Rating 2/5 stars

Musings on pennywort take up much of the critic's review of D&D's relaunch of this Kensington back street restaurant. He concludes that it is “a restaurant that wants to be taken seriously by the sort of people who take restaurants seriously”.

Not by this critic though. You know it's not going to be good when you read that the complimentary shot of cauliflower soup was served at “insemination temperature”. Or that liquidised cauliflower “tastes like fat boy’s farts”. Or that “effluent cauliflower with added truffle oil tastes like corpse bloat”. One can only marvel at the research Mr Gill puts in to his reviews.

Overall, however, he finds nothing wrong with the ingredients or the skill of the chef. It's just that the culinary style is dated, “like eating repeats of To the Manor Born”.

Terry Durack, Independent on Sunday

Rating 16/20

The Independent on Sunday's man seems to have been to a different restaurant from the one AA Gill visited. In fact, he checks out both Launceston Place and its sibling Kensington Place. He finds “two icons of the 1980s... back, and better than they have been for some time, with cooking that has something I was not expecting: real personality”.

The Loft

John Walsh, The Independent

Rating 2/5 stars for food

The Indie's man visits a large new bar/restaurant on Clapham's main drag. Perhaps it's no great surprise that he finds it “a place for trendy drunkards rather than discerning noshers”.

Café Bohème

Giles Coren, The Times

Rating 6.75/10

The critic visits Nick Jones's recently-relaunched Soho bistro. He finds that the classic Gallic starters generally hit the mark, but that “mains were not absolutely as we might have anticipated”. However, Henry Harris, the group's executive chef, is - the critic opines - “too good for the quality not to keep on rising until he has the simmer he wants”.

L'Autre Pied

Matthew Norman, The Guardian

Rating 7/10

Rather like AA Gill's review this week, it's largely on issues of culinary style that the Marylebone offshoot of Pied à Terre finds itself being marked down. Fortunately, however, “so much about L’Autre Pied is right that this foolishness [all the emulsiions, foams and so on] is cause for regret as well as irritation”.

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