Café Bohème

Alex James, The Sunday Times
Rating: 2/5 stars
Mr Gill’s stand-in this week is rather underwhelmed by Nick Jones’s relaunch of this Gallic institution, on Soho’s main drag. “It’s a shame that one of England’s most bankable restaurateurs couldn’t have dreamt up something more demonstrably English or imaginative or new for one of our finest streets”.


The Ledbury

Matthew Norman, The Guardian
Rating: 9.25/10
The Guardian’s man picks up on the obvious theme of the moment: “there are few substrata of the business world for whom such an economic downturn is scarier than for the owners of fancy restaurants”. “In whatever time remains before reports of big-name closures become a news page staple”, therefore, “nervous nellies in the catering world may care to study the lunchtime work of that outstanding restaurateur Nigel Platts-Martin”, of which this Notting Hill restaurant turns out to be a splendid example. “What sets Platts-Martin apart from the Michelin pack is that his restaurants replicate the intricacy and lavishness of the à la carte stuff in set menus at a fraction of the cost.”


Latium

Nicholas Lander, Financial Times
A positive reivew of the restaurant just north of Oxford Street where “Maurizio Morelli, the Roman chef… has created a successful alternative to the ‘signature dish’ of which so many chefs and restaurateurs dream… Morelli’s approach is to take one ingredient, ravioli, and adapt it to whichever course the customer would like to eat. It appears most obviously as a first course; in several instances it reappears with different fillings as a main course; and then, most unusually, as a dessert”. “What allows Morelli and his team to succeed with this ravioli-mania”, he opines, “is that these dishes are only a part of his culinary repertoire in a well-run restaurant with very keen prices”.


Gordon Ramsay Plane Food, Heathrow Airport

Jasper Gerard, Daily Telegraph
Rating: 7/10
Having finally gained access to this airside restuarant, the critic is “pleasantly surprised that Plane Food is (a) finished and (b) a proper restaurant, off the main drag and bursting with light”. (“Ramsay, apparently, was equally surprised when he saw it on a fleeting tour of his restaurant: really it is becoming another day, another opening of a McRamsay's”.) And, by airport standards, he’s impressed by the food too.


Osteria Stecca
Cruse9
The Crab at Chieveley, Newbury
The Old House at Home, Newnham

Giles Coren, The Times
Rating: 6/10
The critic reviews wholesale this week, assessing two London establishments and two in the provinces. The common thread is that they have all inspired something rather less than total satisfaction.


Lakelands first floor café, Windermere

Zoe Williams, Sunday Telegraph
Rating: 6/10
The critic has a rather up-and-down experience in the popular dining facility of the well-known Lakeland kitchen shop.


Artisan, Hull

Jay Rayner, The Observer
For once, the critic’s good deeds – in seeking to unearth good provincial restaurants – are rewarded. “If Britain really is to boast about its growing restaurant reputation”, he concludes, “it doesn't need more gastro palaces and designer food temples. It needs more places like this.”


Hélène Darroze, Paris

Terry Durack, The Independent on Sunday
Rating: 18/20
Inspired by the news that Ms D is to take over at the Connaught in June, the critic ventures to her Parisian base. He decides, in short, that he “like[s] madame's cooking. It is high craft, but the craft is designed more to maximise flavour than be decorative”, and his meal is “genuinely dazzling”.