Evening Standard
David Ellis was thrilled by a fish and seafood restaurant from Ross Shonhan at the address where the late Queen Elizabeth was born, whose “maximalist” interior décor is quite “mad” but whose food made it – much to his surprise – an “instant classic”.
The cooking was both superb and interesting (“when did gurnard, garfish and sea cucumber last appear on a menu in W1?”), with no dud dishes. Among the hits were individual fish presented in a “triptych” of raw, grilled and soup cooked to order, while the “petite” seafood platter was “an overflowing triumph of oysters and mussels and curls of sea bream, of crab tartlets as bright and cheering as a birthday morning, and deep-fried prawn heads”.
Mashed potato arrived “in a rockpool of shellfish bisque and lobster. Have I ever eaten anything better? I couldn’t swear to it,” David concluded. “Look, I’m not really recommending you go, I’m insisting. No offence.”
David Ellis - 2025-10-26The Guardian
Grace Dent anointed her “new favourite restaurant”: Australian chef and Bone Daddies founder Ross Shonhan’s seafood specialist at the birthplace of the late QEII (fka ‘Lilibet’) – whose “turbo-chintz, Las Vegas-style royalist fever dream” interior would be “extra-hilarious if the food was dire and the atmosphere stiff, but neither of those is true”.
Instead, Grace said, “Lilibet’s is pure joy. It’s high drama, camp as heck and utterly uncopiable”.
Dishes she raved about included a “really very, very good” freshly made ricotta agnolotti with sage and lemon sauce. “The meal I’ll keep returning for, though, will be the dover sole, expertly filleted tableside and served with Café de Paris butter, with a side of Lilibet’s mash, which of course comes topped with shellfish bisque and lobster meat.”
Grace Dent - 2025-11-09The Times
Jay Rayner was rather less impressed than Grace by a place whose “royal connections feel very loose indeed” and where the floral overload left him “feeling like [I’d] been interred in Laura Ashley’s coffin”. But he agreed that “the key is to give yourself up to the unconscious high camp of everything here”.
His first course of deep-fried oysters came in a “claggy, cakey overcoat rather than a light tempura batter”, although they turned out to be the only duds food-wise. Service, though, was a “chaotic panto”. Those oysters took an age to arrive, and were two short of the half-dozen ordered; the waiter seemed unsure what the ‘market price’ of the gurnard was; a whole John Dory arrived when only a fillet, costing £50 less, had been ordered.
“Lilibet’s is obviously silly. It’s also exceedingly spendy. And right now, the service is tripping itself up. But if it can just calm down a little and get is act together, it also has the potential to be an awful lot of fun.”
Jay Rayner - 2025-11-09The Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell thoroughly disapproved of the luxurious new seafood restaurant opened by Aussie chef Ross Shonhan on the site where the late QEII was born – although he could not help but admire much of the cooking.
Prawn carpaccio was a “brilliantly light and beautiful way to engage with a shrimp”; baby quid was “light, rich and tasty to eat, in part fried to a delicious brown crisp”; rice and prawns were “wickedly flavourful”, while the signature mash with lobster bisque and the desserts also earned a thumbs-up.
But William could not excuse what he regarded as the tasteless Dubai-style interior: “I’d venture that if the late Queen got wind of the garish furniture, fittings, lighting, mirrors, vases and lamps of her namesake restaurant, she wouldn’t just turn in her grave, she’d spirit a new wrecking ball on the place.”
William Sitwell - 2025-12-14
