Tom's Place

Mark Palmer, Daily Telegraph
Rating: 7/10
The feel may be “like an American diner… [or] the café at a municipal leisure centre… [or] the bottom of a swanky swimming pool, but the critic finds “a good atmosphere” at Tom Aikens’s new Chelsea eco-chippy. For a “jolly bite to eat in a fashionable part of town”, the place gets a comprehensive thumbs-up.

AA Gill, Sunday Times
Rating: 3/5 stars
“New York must have more places to eat than any comparable city,” begins the review. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Most particularly, it makes you think “nonsense”. Of the three undoubted ‘world cities’, the clear winner in restaurant number (both in absolute terms, and on a per head basis) is Tokyo. As so often, Gill‘s big propositions don’t bear too much consideration. So it is with his description of Monkey’s, the former occupant of the site of Tom Aikens’s new chippy. Far from being“a sloaney, date-grope last resort”, it was in fact a Anglo-French restaurant, specialisting in game, of unusually high quality. Only in the most personal sense – bad memories for Gill? – could it be said to be any sort of ‘last resort’.

He find the menu at the new chippy “commendably short and au point”. “The prices are average for Chelsea, and expensive for fish and chips. All the workshop parts are right: the batter is good, the chips are the right size and consistency, the vinegar is malt, the fat is beef. What lets it down is… the fish.” “Battering and deep-frying were designed for cod and haddock. It’s passable with plaice and dogfish, and with all your best will and good intentions, if it ain’t your cods, it’s pollocks.”

Foxtrot Oscar

AA Gill, Sunday Times
Rating: 2/5 stars
Most of Mr Gill’s review is taken up with a rant against a certain style of ancien-régime restaurateur – such an occupation being, apparently, one of “the meagre handful of occupations that minor public schools equip you for”. As the former proprietor (and manager still) of this Chelsea diner is – famously – an Old Etonian, it’s slightly difficult to see quite how the rant ties up with the restaurant notionally being reviewed.

Market

Terry Durack, Independent on Sunday
Rating: 16/20
Another very positive review for this no-nonsense Camden Town bistro. “Market has a more independent voice than the (very welcome) rash of modern British gastropub/bistros – British, certainly, but not relentlessly so. It's strong, sustainable and sustaining, and I find it more exciting than the last 20 glitzy, exploitative, upmarket restaurant concepts to have come along. Note to self, in case I forget: come back as soon as possible.”

Sotheby's Cafe

Matthew Norman, The Guardian
Rating: 7.75/10
Mr Norman seems – oddly for a Guardian man – to be getting a bit of a taste for Mayfair, and his latest venture is to the café of the Mayfair auction room “where the obscenely moneyed and their agents fortify themselves for a fatiguing afternoon's arm-raising. “For those who enjoy a gawp at humanity's more exotic subspecies, this place is a voyeuristic treasure house”, says the critic “but against all initial expectations I must also recommend it for the food”. (Mr Norman, unwisely, is clearly not consulting his copy of Harden’s before dining out!)

Water House

John Walsh, The Independent
Rating: 2/5 stars
“The path to hell is paved with good intentions”, begings the review, so you know it ain’t going to be especially positive. It turns out that this Shoreditch eco-newcomer is “a welcoming room” (albeit with “a dispiriting view across the Regent's Canal”), but the culinary experience on offer is very up-and-down.

The Fountain

Jay Rayner, The Observer

Jay Rayner has a “rather nice lunch in the Fountain Restaurant at Fortnum & Mason on London's Piccadilly”, but “can't for the life of me imagine ever going back”, as this is a “casual lunch joint at wallet-torturing dinner prices”. Let’s face it, though, this is just not a Rayner sort of place, and this is one of those reviews which – we couldn’t help feeling – says more about the writer than it does about the establishment notionally being written about.