Empress of Sichuan
Giles Coren, The Times (Rating: 9)
“Compared to the much improved modern London restaurant norm, most Chinatown restaurants are so unwelcoming”, says the critic “They don’t even look like restaurants do now. They are brightly lit, foggy, not hugely clean, have no interest in produce quality and are very aware of catering principally to tourists.” Ouch!
Here, however, he finds a new Sichuanese restaurant where the staff are “friendly, knowledgeable and fluent in English”, and it turns out that this is “a top-class Chinese restaurant which for once hides none of its scarier secrets from us Anglophone losers”.
Mansons
Zoe Williams, The Sunday Telegraph (Rating: 9/10)
“You have to be impressed when a restaurant is full, midweek, on a miserable night in the middle of February”, and – certainly on the food front – the critic finds the popularity of this Fulham operation fully justified. Impluasibly, a Jerusalem artichoke cheesecake – “incredible from top to bottom” – is a particular hit.
HUNter 486
Tracey MacLeod, The Independent (Rating: Food 3/5 stars, Ambience 2/5 stars, Service 3/5 stars)
Near Marble Arch, the critic visits a dining room located among the “designery opulence” of a townhouse hotel. The room itself, though, has the air of a “mini-canteen”, with certain features “as seen in Zizzi”. “Imagine a business lounge that has mated with a Shoreditch diner, and you'll get the effect; it doesn't know whether it's Horace or Doris.”
The menu similarly “hasn't quite made up its mind”, but the main courses were “reasonably priced and generally well put together, if unexciting”. Service was “erratic”. “If you are looking for a stylish townhouse hotel in central London, The Arch looks like an excellent bet. If you were a resident, you'd probably be delighted to find a restaurant this good downstairs. But as a destination in its own right, it hasn't quite found its USP.”
Dean Street Townhouse
AA Gill, The Sunday Times (Rating: Food 3/5 stars, Atmosphere 4/5 stars)
The critic visits the mega-successful new addition to the Caprice group, where he finds the food “good enough, in a collegiate, common-room way”.
Le Relais de Venise
Lisa Markwell, The Independent on Sunday (Rating: 13/20)
The cooking may be “skilled amateur rather than dazzling professional”, but the critic still “rather like[s]” this Marylebone outpost of a Parisian steakhouse.
Tike
Jasper Gerard, The Telegraph (Rating: 6/10)
A moderately upbeat review of a brasserie by Fenchurch Street station. “Turkish feasting is all about the rich aromas of the meats and this is too sanitised. Maybe Tike reckons its suited City clientele couldn't handle the heat, but why? The British love Indian spices, so why not Turkish? To me the attraction of Turkey lies in its Eastern strangeness, but this is familiarly Western. Still, it's not bad for a light snack…”
The Pipe & Glass Inn, South Dalton, East Yorkshire
This turns out to be a “nice, unpretentious country pub serving quality food with inspired touches”. It has just won a Michelin star, though, and he finds his appreciation muddied by his “relationship with the bloody guide”, which he (correctly, in our view, biased as we may be) finds “horribly Francophilic, … inconsistent and scattergun”. “[T]oo often it can get in the way of seeing clearly the restaurants we eat in.… [H]ad I gone to the Pipe & Glass without there being a star in place I would have instantly thought it terrific, but because of that star I was measuring it against an irrelevant scale”. He “hopes [the award] doesn't bring is battalions of fork-wielding, napkin-sniffing, dish-photographing Michelin pervs”, like – he has the candour to admit – himself.
The Evesham Hotel, Evesham, Worcestershire
A visit to this well known hotel dining room turns out to be “endlessly bewildering”, not least because the host thrice refers to him as “you bloody fool”. It does however boast “one of the best wine lists” he had ever seen.
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