The Times
“Can you tell an urban pub in the country from a country pub in the city?” was the question posed rhetorically by Giles Coren following visits to two smart new boozers for well-heeled customers in two fashionable corners of urban and non-urban England. “At the end of the day, it’s just a gorgeous old building with open fires, nooks and crannies, young staff, well-dressed punters with small, glossy dogs and cooking right out of the top drawer.”
First was the Blue Stoops near Notting Hill Gate from former hedge-funder Jamie Allsopp, who has revived his ancestral family brewery and put Lorcan Spiteri of Caravel in charge of the menu. “The vibe was retro, the food was good, the beer and wine were terrific, the bill was modest,” Giles reckoned. “It is a brilliant little pub trying out great new things and an excellent spot from which to relaunch an empire.”
The Mason’s Arms in the Cotswolds, sister pub to the Double Red Duke on the other side of the road, was a “bang-on-the-money modern country pub which is folksier than the Duke, more muscular in the menu, and thus even more my sort of thing” – “weary satirists might call the style “Notting-Hill-on-the-Wold”, but Giles is not convinced that’s the right way round.
To give added weight to his essential thesis, he gave the two pubs exactly the same rating (7.67 out of 10, to be precise) and insisted that both charge £30 for a pie and a pint.
Giles Coren - 2024-11-10Daily Mail
With 29 pubs closing down every week in Britain, Tom Parker Bowles was delighted to welcome a newly opened one – the flagship for Jamie Allsopp’s family brewery, a once-famous name that disappeared in 1959.
“Jamie is an old friend, and this is not only an exceptional pub, it’s a damn fine restaurant, too”, said Tom, his admission of a personal connection both hinting that this was not the most objective of reviews, and explaining its rather perfunctory nature.
The kitchen is run by Lorca Spiteri, formerly of Quo Vaids, Rochelle Canteen and Caravel, he noted, praising the robust main courses of slow-braised Hereford beef with buttery polenta – “spoon food at its finest” – and “a glorious chicken, leek and black trompette pie, the pastry crisp and burnished, the filling as heavenly as it is hearty”.
Tom Parker-Bowles - 2024-12-15The Observer
Jay Rayner was won over by Jamie Allsopp’s new pub from the moment he tasted its home-made pork scratchings, which “have crunch and a pleasing collagen stickiness and are more like a Mexican chicharrón than a friendly tooth-destroyer from the Black Country.”
The scratchings come courtesy of Quo Vadis-trained chef Lorcan Spiteri, whose menu speaks “both fluent pub and fluent cosmopolitan British bistro” – much to the approval of Jay, who toyed with the idea that pub traditionalists might object to cooking of this quality in a pub that was ostensibly designed to showcase the owner’s revival of ancestral beers Allsopp’s and Double Diamond.
“We are not in Burton-on-Trent any more, Dorothy. We’re very much in Kensington, where the mostly European wine list includes funky, skin-contact bottles and you nod at the pricing and say, ‘Not bad, given the neighbourhood’.”
Jay Rayner - 2025-01-19
