Apsleys

Fay Maschler, Evening Standard
Rating: 2/5 stars
“[Why did] they name it after the London house of that famous Italian the first Duke of Wellington?”, muses the critic, bemused by the mismatch between name and culinary style of this new grand hotel dining room. Indeed, she thinks it may be fortuitous the extent to which the extravant décor has little particularly Italian about it: “if, in a little while, the management decide to re-style the restaurant as Russian or Belgian or Lebanese or Las Vegas or even English, the surroundings will still do their duty in predicting and producing formal service, expensive wines and large bills.” This lack of focus contributes to an establishment which, overall, she finds something of a “muddle”.


Gordon Ramsay Plane Food

David Sexton, Evening Standard
Rating: 2/5 stars
The critic finds “small, canteen-style tables … grimly close together” and a lack of “random generosity” at the latest venture from “the formidable catering company that is Gordon Ramsay Holdings”. Service is “haphazard”, too. The menu, however, is “short and appealing”, and – though it had its faults – “this was much the best food I’ve ever found in [an aiport]”. “But”, adds the critic, is an ambitious full meal what one needs in transit?”

The customers, apparently, are “surprisingly chavvy” (“the nouveau gastronomes created by TV, homing in on the celeb name”). Surely, the only surprise about this is the fact that that the critic found anything surprising about it? Isn’t that what the Gordon Ramsay business plan is all about?



Café Bohème

Marina O’Loughlin, Metro
Rating: 3/5 stars
The critic finds Nick Jones’s relaunch of his Soho “cash cow” to be “a savvy, all-things-to-everyone operation”. “[W]hat was a passable pastiche has been turned into the platonic ideal of a Parisian neighbourhood brasserie, so evocative, so theme-park French, that it could have only been dreamed up by a foreigner.” “Oh, sure, it's not groundbreaking but it's a bustling, good-looking restaurant, full of well-dressed, happy, interesting people eating the kind of reasonably priced food almost everyone likes to eat. And it's well cooked and presented by friendly, accommodating staff”.


Clissold Arms (First major review)
Jenni Muir, Time Out (not yet online)
4/6 stars
The décor may be “bland”, but the critic finds almost everything else right at this Muswell Hill gastropub. Dishes are “largely well executed” and, “most importantly, everyone seems to have a terrific time”.


Iznik Kaftan (First major review)
Guy Dimond, Time Out (not yet online)
TO’s head man is impressed by the “delicacy” of the cooking at the new “upmarket” Brompton Cross sibling to a long-established Turkish restaurant in Highbury.