The Salisbury
AA Gill, The Sunday Times (Rating: 4/5 stars)
The décor at this Fulham restaurant is “too happily corporate for Gill’s taste” but “the menu is wonderful”. It offers “fresh and perfectly conceived” food “that takes the simple and nice things about English pubs and does them better than you'd expect, with a light good humour.” But despite its good food, “reasonable” prices and “attentive and friendly” service, he worries for the future of the Salisbury, as, like so many he has visited recently, the room is empty.
Boundary
Giles Coren, The Times (Rating: 8.67/10)
According to Giles, having spent “100 years as a restaurateur”, Sir Terence Conran “knows exactly what we want”, and the result of this experience is the fine dining room of this Shoreditch ‘project’: “a stunning restaurant. Pretty much impossible to fault. Beautifully executed in every way.”
Cinnamon Kitchen
Terry Durack, The Independent on Sunday (Rating: 16/20)
The critic dislikes the trend of ‘modern Indian’ cuisine becoming “more modern and less Indian”. Indeed, some of the dishes sampled at the city offshoot of Westminster's Cinnamon Club “look like refugees from a groovy gastropub, but again, there is an integrity to the spicing, a sensitivity to cooking time and an attention to textural contrast that raises them above their Western plating and passé rice timbales.” He leaves satisfied that the “food here is as Indian as it is modern, something I had never been convinced was possible.”
Bob Bob Ricard
“There is much that is absurd” about this all-day brasserie, but, due to “a steady hand at work both in the kitchen and front of house” the Observer’s man has an enjoyable meal here. In an ideal world, BBR “could be all things to all people”, but in reality “it's comfort food at prices that can only ever be aimed at people who are already very comfortable indeed”.
Rasa Sayang
Matthew Norman, The Guardian (Rating: 3/10)
Apparently, Rasa Sayang means “feel the love”, and according to Matthew Norman’s experience, it is “the planet's most sensationally misnamed restaurant”. The food is up-and-down and the “ultra utilitarianism” of the interior does not impress, but its the service that he finds actually offensive. Long waits are followed by almost violent service, at one stage plates are put on the table “with such delicacy that [the “bad cop” waitress’s] elbow missed my head by 0.03cm”.
Lasan, Birmingham; Tayyabs
Jasper Gerard, The Sunday Telegraph (Rating: 3/5, 4/5)
“[T]he perpetual search for great curry” leads the critic to Birmingham’s upmarket jewellery quarter, followed by London’s East End. At his first stop, he seems more impressed by how much culinary progess Birmingham has made in the last few decades (“[i]t boasts three Michelin-starred restaurants. In the Seventies, it hardly boasted three tablecloths”), than the “award-winning” Lasan itself. In London, he “boggle[s] at the bargains” at a restaurant that is “a very English success story”. “It isn't Amaya, but then nor are its prices.”
Piazza by Anthony, Leeds
Tracey MacLeod, The Independent (Rating: Food 4/5 stars, Ambience 3/5 stars, Service 3/5 stars)
“Colonising the cavernous ground floor of the city's grand Victorian Corn Exchange, Piazza is an ambitious and elegant temple to all things foodie, containing produce shops, café, bar and private dining rooms, with a 125-seat brasserie at its heart.” The critic is impressed by her meal the Flinns' latest venture, and appreciates that “deliver[ing] food of this quality at a reasonable price in a setting this spectacular is not easy to do”.
Zoe Williams, The Telegraph (Rating: 6.5/10)
Zoe Williams’s meal ranges from “an incredibly memorable, delicious” main course, to a desert (crème brûlée) that was so wrong “it was like eating with dirty teeth”. Her overall experience sits between these extremes; “it was a B+ meal” where “almost everything fell one notch short of where it was aimed”.
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