Evening Standard
David Ellis gave a stinker of a review to a Georgian (Black Sea, not US South) restaurant that has taken over the Heddon Street premises where Fallow and Manteca started out – revenge, perhaps, for being told “you stink” by the owner as he arrived.
David liked the “tiny skewers” of lamb with onions, parsley and sumac, but nothing else. A deep-fried king oyster mushroom “tasted of batter, but nothing more… It might well have been a deep-fried elastic band”. Cornish bream crudo was “boring, a dish done to death a million times elsewhere”. Two khinkali (soup-filled dumplings), pork and shiitake girolles, “were barely distinguishable”. Most baffling of all was a single, deliberately overcooked octopus tentacle on a risotto “the colour of someone who recently found out rollercoasters don’t agree with them”.
As for the famously “interesting” Georgian wines, from a tradition stretching back 8,000 years, “unfortunately whoever made the pair we tried must have skipped millennia of oenology class as both were hideous, tannic messes.”
David Ellis - 2026-02-08The Times
Camilla Long sampled what she described as “Georgian hipster” cuisine – that is, Georgia’s traditional heavy mountain food — cheese and mushroom dishes, stews — and “sexed up for a younger audience”, at a restaurant whose name apparently means ‘big energy’. “Why do hipster restaurants do this,” she wondered, “choose names that sound like broken family cars? Calong, Mambow, DakaDaka.”
Small plates included penovani, a delicious square pasty with salty cheese and green chilli that was “a Ginsters of dreams”; “excellent” lamb kebabs; and badrijani — an imperious aubergine dish with tahini, corno pepper, dill and coriander, “swamped in an entire graveyard of vampiric garlic; the flavours come at you like 50,000 Russian cossacks”. But the dumplings were “large, chewy and unglamorous, with an unexciting filling. It’s like eating shoes, or umbilical cords.”
Perhaps, Camilla suggested, there were too many small plates for the kitchen to deal with, to the detriment of main dishes. Her main, grilled plaice with sumac, molasses and wild thyme, took ages to arrive “and when it came was huge, meatless and dry, like a padel racket”.
Camilla Long - 2026-02-22
