The River Café
Richard Vines, Bloomberg (Rating: 3/4 stars)
The critic neatly summarises the recent physical changes at this famous West London Italian. “The restaurant looks beautiful. It's the same long room as before, but there's a smart new reception area, with a cheerful yellow front, while at the other end of the space, a wall has been removed, so the kitchen has become part of the dining room. There's now also a bar at the entrance, where you can sit and eat snacks. There's a large wood-fired oven whose flames you can spot as you enter and the familiar large, projected clock is behind it.” The food is “fabulous”, but the financial service’s man notes that the prices are high.
Fay Maschler, Evening Standard (Rating: 4/5 stars)
She admits the prices are high, but the doyenne of critics receives the revamp of this west London legend with something of a hymn of praise.
Time & Space
Guy Dimond, Time Out (Rating: 3/6 stars)
The only mystery arising from this review of the new dining facilities at this relaunched Royal Institution, in Mayfair, is why it deserves a heady three stars. “The building's new £12 million refurb is as aesthetically discordant as a physics teacher’s tie collection”, says TO’s head critic, and the dining room – run by Digby Trout – has “a slight air of desperation and gloom” about it (where “the lighting in particular is as unflattering as laboratory strip lighting”). The food? It “was fine, but… no reason for ever wanting to return”.
Arch One
Richard Vines, Bloomberg (Rating: 3/5 stars)
Ex-Ramsay chef Gemma Tuley, 25, is – notes the critic – “a young chef with the kind of resume most rivals never build up in a lifetime”. Her new joint, by Waterloo station, “feels more like a wine bar, with slightly hit-and-miss service and music that plays just a bit too loud”, but her food almost invariably satisfies. “[A]s Ramsay and other chefs start to focus on more casual dining, they might take a look at what Tuley is doing, and learn.”
St Pancras Grand
Marina O'Loughlin, Metro (Rating: 3/5 stars)
“With the exception of a wonderfully retro seafood cocktail and a gorgeous custard tart – thick layer of creamy-dreamy custard on crisp pastry base, bathed in butterscotch sauce and crowned with a surreal flourish of improbably long and thin Garibaldi biscuit – almost everything we eat at St Pancras Grand is disappointing.”
“So why the three stars (‘good’) then?”, the critic asks herself. “Well, because I love the new St Pancras station, and after the plummeting bathos of 'the longest champagne bar in Europe' – actually, a weeny bar that looks like a Costa Coffee concession flanked by Europe's longest seating arrangements – it's great to see this magnificent station getting a restaurant that, visually at least, is worthy of its world-class status.”
1 Lombard Street - the Brasserie
David Sexton, Evening Standard (Rating: 2/5 stars)
The critic goes to a grand and famous place in the heart of the City (where the restaurant proper has a Michelin star) looking for “comfort food, as cheap as we could find it, just a plateful and a glass”. You might think he was looking in a rather odd place? Well, so it turns out: “[o]rdering as modestly as possible in marble halls remains one way of crunch-eating — but maybe it’s a bit pointless when you can eat just as well, more casually, in many a good gastropub?”.
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