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Review of the Reviews - London

Restaurant Michael Nadra

Fay Maschler, Evening Standard (Rating: 3/5 stars)

The critic visits a new Chiswick venture, where the cuisine is “heartbreakingly effortful”. This degree of “ambition, dedication and graft”, however, can lead to “long waits between courses”, and the elaborate conception of the main courses can “risk inducing taste bud exhaustion”. The dining room also leaves a lot to be desired: “No amount of tra la la on the plate can make up for skimpy bare tables, dismal photographs of octopus suckers and other fishy detail and intermittent bursts of canned music”.

Golden Day

Time Out (Rating: 3/5 stars)

A review of a Chinatown Hunanese, which offers “intriguing” and “chilli-hot” dishes from a lengthy menu. Due to poor English translations, however, much of the menu is “unfathomable”, and as “the staff speak so little useful English, it becomes even murkier unless you read Mandarin and already have a good knowledge of Hunan dishes”.

Brasserie Blanc

Marina O'Loughlin, Metro (Rating: 2/5 stars)

“What is it with the ‘celebrity chef’?”, the critic wonders. “There they are on our tellies, relentlessly telling us what we should do and how we should do it. And yet their restaurants – the ultimate showcases of what they can actually deliver – usually turn out to be, well, a bit pants”. (Welcome to the club, Ms O’Loughlin – we, on the basis of the survey, have been pointing that out for the past decade. Michelin, of course, has yet to cotton on.)

This is a review of visit to the City branch of the chef’s eponymous chain, where “Raymond has got the crowd-pleasing thing down pat – one of those menus where everything sounds like a goer”. Service is “super-helpful”, and the chef's “attention to detail is evident throughout”. Shame, though, about the food: “Retro dishes such as slow-cooked veal and beef stroganoff suggest indifferent meat; the stroganoff’s sauce tastes of UHT cream. A fishcake is mostly padding. Worst of all is a woolly chicken breast atop a shocker of a risotto: tasteless and gluey”.

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