Maze Grill (first major review)

Fay Maschler, Evening Standard
Rating: 4/5 stars
Jason Atherton is the best chef in the Gordon Ramsay empire, , opines the doyenne of the critic. She has followed him since his days at the former Anis in Kensington. Her review of his new Mayfair steakhouse – inspired by Brooklyn’s Peter Luger (and its trendier Manhattan descendants) – is an unusually consistent hymn of praise.


Saf, London (first major review)

Jan Moir, Are You Ready To Order?
“[W]hile Munich-Istanbul-Shoreditch may not quite have the same cachet as Paris-London-New York, it suits Saf, which is quirky and unique” – the critic certainly succeeds in making this new vegan restaurant “in the depths of groovy east London” sound worth a trip.

Oddly for the area, the venue is “expensively kitted out in the latest fashions”, with a bar running down one side of the “clean-limbed, rectangular room”, and a “glass cube kitchen at the end”, where “a quartet of white-coated chefs bend studiously over intricate creations with the intensity of nuclear scientists”. “The raw materials used are 100% botanical and organic with no animal products, dairy, refined or processed elements”, and everything from “the vegan chocolates to the nut milk cheeses is prepared on site”.

“It’s like a religion”, suggests the critic, “almost too happy clappy for comfort”, but “[m]ost of this stuff is delicious”. In fact, “[n]early everything… tastes quite amazing”. “Saf are brave to launch their plant-based cuisine in London in the teeth of a big and beefy recession, but it is a singular restaurant offering an eating experience to be found nowhere else in the city”.


Gazette (first major review)

Guy Dimond, Time Out
Rating: 4/6 stars
“[T]he menu might be short, but they do it well”, says TO’s head critic. “All the staff are French, which may explain why they got so many things right at this new Balham spot, which “captures the feel of France better than the many faux-French brasseries in central London”. Indeed, on the basis of this review, it sounds as if it may rather more interesting than the Battersea original.


Franco Manca (first major review)

Charmaine Mok, Time Out
Rating: 4/6 stars
“Well-sourced, quality ingredients (many organic), top-notch equipment and good, chummy service” are all part of the formula which makes a “real gem” or this “tiny, very modest restaurant”, on the former Brixton site of Eco, and before that of Pizzeria Franco. There is also a “formidable, almost monstrous-looking wood-burning brick oven looming from behind the counter” - “an authentic Forno Napoletano shipped here by the new owners from an artisan producer in Naples”.


Tom's Place

Marina O’Loughlin, Metro
Rating: 2/5 stars
[C]lunky, solid and disappointing frying is part of a formula that leads to the critic being generally underwhelmed at this fashionable Chelsea eco-chippy. “Call it Frying Tonight and transport Tom's Place to say, Holborn, right next door to the sizzling, beef-dripping-tastic Fryer's Delight, and nobody would give it a second glance”. “In SW3”, however, “its role seems to be to deliver the assorted clientele of posh oldies, rah 2.4 families and hair-swinging semi-It girls a frisson of proletarian reality”.


Fig

David Sexton, Evening Standard
Rating: 2/5 stars
A rather negative review of this “cosy” Barnsbury spot. “Fig delivers an awful lot of fuss on the plate for a relatively modest bill — and a lot of mouth entertainment for a relatively small caloric intake. That’s not my idea of a neighbourhood restaurant or indeed of good-taste cooking”.


Adour, New York

Frank Bruni, New York Times
Rating: 3/4 stars
After two lacklustre ventures in the Big Apple in recent years, Alain Ducasse is making an act of atonement to the city, according to this critic. His new outlet, in the swanky St Regis hotel, may not not trying for the fireworks he went for at Essex House, but it is “a qualified victory… not through-and-through rapturous, but… first-rate”.