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Review of the Reviews - London

The East Room

Marina O'Loughlin, Metro (Rating: 3/5 stars)

Marina, she tells us, is so over clubs, but she warms to this place that “fulfils all the necessary requirements” of such establishments: “you can’t find the entrance and, once you’re in, you're met with a blast of you’re-not-invitedness”. She likes both the restaurant staff (“no elitism”) and the décor (a “mix of bare brick, late 20th-century furniture and geegaws from the chic to the unabashedly kitsch”). Foodwise there’s an “organically inclined” buffet and a “multicultural mishmash of a menu” that is “all kind of better than you’d expect but not as good as you’d hope”.

Tsunami

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

Fay’s review (based on a couple of visits) of this spin-off from the Clapham original (of which she has “fond memories”) reads along the lines of: nice food, shame about everything else. On the former, “the Nobulicious dishes are mostly very well prepared and presented” and her only gripe is expensive edamame. A wide variety of dishes are “excellent”… “in true Peruvian/Japanese style”… “delicate savoury”, or “shamelessly easy to like”. On the latter, though, the “narrow, tunnel-vision site” has an “awkwardness” with staff “forced to congregate … [by] the dumb waiter, which occasionally they emulate” [nice one!]. Potential customers arrive to “Haveyougotareservation”, which is “so inhospitable, so lacking in understanding of what restaurants should be there for”.

The Marquess Tavern

Anne McElvoy, Evening Standard (Rating: 2/5 stars)

The Standard’s editor visits “one of the finest old gin palaces in London” – a haunt she’s “frequented it in all its incarnations” that’s now been “re-re-launched with... [a] less gritty menu”. Other members of her family liked it more as a pub, and she concedes it’s “a difficult space to make work, being very high and thus extremely clattery”. She seems to feel unlucky about her menu choice and “suspect[s] there are some good things lurking”. In her case, though, a partridge suffers “turboblasting… to death” and the meal gives rise to the extremely valid general complaint that “gastropub chefs do seem alarmingly fond of the salt cellar”. Still, service is “obliging” and prices such that “it should be a real credit crunch tip for Islington gentlefolk fallen on hard times”.

Tierra Brindisa

Charmaine Mok, Time Out (Rating: 4/6 stars)

The “civilised” style of this new Soho Spaniard with its “muted – almost solemn – diners” seems to the critic at odds with “tapas bar-hopping in Spain”. It is also, she notes, “far more formal” than the Borough Market original and she tips the “buzzing bar at the back” over the “impersonal and clinical” dining room. Much of the food is “daisy-fresh” and the sherries slip down well, but an “obsecenely oversalted” cod carpaccio isn’t nice, the tortilla is “too dry, too cold”, and ham croquetas are no match for nearby Barrfina’s. Perhaps surprisingly, given the fair amount of criticism in the review, it concludes that “with such a high calibre of cooking”, the difficulty of getting a reservation is “to be expected”.

Inamo

Charmaine Mok, Time Out (Rating: 3/6 stars)

With its “hi-tech hijinks” (not least “individualised computer screens set into the tables and projected by giant, silkworm-like monstrosities”), this Soho newcomer is, according to Ms Mok, the “ultimate experience” for “unsociable” diners. There’s some praise for the “interesting menu of Pan-Asian dishes”, but the meal left her “unsated and unsatisfied”.

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