The Times
Giles Coren wondered if it was wise to name a restaurant after a nostalgia-inducing music technology from his childhood that was frankly “a rubbish format” and frequently got jammed.
There were promising touches – raw beef and comté croustades and fromage de tête – but panisse was not “hot, fresh, crisp out of the frying pan”, while smoked cod’s roe needed to be served with toasted carbohydrate and not vegetables. The restaurant also missed a nostalgia trick in serving modern natural wine, which Giles disdains, rather than the trad stuff he loves.
Where the meal got properly stuck, like a broken cassette, was with the much-photographed ‘coq au vin jaune pie’ – “an Insta-hit, a meme, a go-to dish, a signature, whatever, having the whole black claw of a chicken sticking out of the top… But it’s all just for show. The claw isn’t attached to anything,” Giles chided. Worse still, there was “no sense of rich dairy cut through by the tartness of wine”, the essence of this great dish. It was just a “perfunctory pub pie”.
Giles Coren - 2026-10-11
