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Review of the Reviews - National

Fino

AA Gill, The Sunday Times (Rating: 1/5 stars)

A surprise panning from Sunday’s most-read critic for the Hart brothers’ Fitzrovia tapas bar, recently relaunched. The ham was good, as it should have been at £18.50 a plate, but the tapas were “familiar in a boring way – a bland omelette, phlegmy croqueta, tough cutlet, penile razor clams”. (Don’t they always come that shape?) “The trouble with tapas is that it comes in fits and starts, you forget what you ordered, it’s never enough, then, all of a sudden, it’s way too much. It’s deceptively expensive and it doesn’t measure up to the sum of its parts.”

Min Jiang

Zoe Williams, The Telegraph (Rating: 6.5/10)

“Commanding spectacular views over Kensington Gardens, the room has been crammed with ersatz Ming-ness, fashionably up-lit but otherwise oppressively old-school” – from the beginning you can see the critic didn’t especially like this Kensington Chinese (which opened some time ago). Dim sum was good but “there seemed to be nothing here except the price that corresponded with the poshness”. The main attraction turns out to be the multiple-serving “duck fest”.

Whitechapel Gallery Dining Room

John Walsh, The Independent (Rating: Food 4/5 stars, Ambience 2/5 stars, Service 4/5 stars)

“The gentrification of east London gallops onward. You can hardly move in Shoreditch or Hackney these days without encountering a new private club or school-of-Mark-Hix restaurant”, says the critic. The dining room at this relaunched gallery is “pure Primrose Hill, clean and new, tasteful and sweet-smelling”. “The Gallery Dining Room is absurdly small, but it's got a big heart for both flavour and invention.”

Soho Japan

Giles Coren, The Times (Rating: 7/10)

Not an establishment which requires much description. Broadly speaking, it left the critic impressed.

Il Baretto

Terry Durack, The Independent on Sunday (Rating: 13/20)

This Marylebone newcomer “has been called more names than a Gordon Ramsay apprentice: Sol e Stella, La Spighetta, Giusto, and now Il Baretto”, says a critic who has clearly done his research. Although it’s owned by Arjun Waney (Zuma etc), he finds it “a simple place, pumping out fresh, colourful, crowd-pleasing Italian food in a smart-casual room to which you could just as happily take your kids or your colleagues”.

Madsen

Matthew Norman, The Guardian (Rating: 8/10)

The critic, it turns out, is a Danophile (if that’s the word), and he leaves this new Danish restaurant in South Kensington with with his love “fiercer than ever”. “This joint will not join Copenhagen's Noma in any future list of the planet's top 100 restaurants, but it’s a total charmer all the same”. “What a country Denmark is (if the tourist board cares to offer an all-expenses paid trip to confirm this, it might be rude to refuse), and I can pay Madsen no higher compliment than that it does its homeland proud.”

Gandolfi Fish, Glasgow

Jay Rayner, The Observer

“You can tell a lot about a restaurant by its fish pie”, observes the critic, sagely, and “[i]n the case of Glasgow’s Gandolfi Fish, you can tell almost everything you need to know”. “The Gandolfi Fish version, like the restaurant itself, is so very almost, but not quite.” “Gandolfi Fish, a spinoff of the nearby Café Gandolfi, a Glasgow landmark these past 30 years, has almost everything sorted. The black-tabled, mirrored room is made for chatter. The service is impressively efficient and engaged, given there are just two of them for a bustling room. The menu is mostly sensible without being overwrought, and makes enough of good Scottish seafood without you fearing that something unspeakable involving bagpipes might be about to happen. And most of the food really is fine.”

Mya Lacarte, Caversham

Belinda Richardson, The Sunday Telegraph (Rating: 4/5)

“Mya Lacarte”, the critic helpfully tells us, was “voted ‘Restaurant of the Year’ at the Pride of Reading Awards in 2008”. Turns out the award did not lie – “the food is fabulous, the service slick, the atmosphere as soothing as the sound of gentle rain and the bill very reasonable”.

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