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 - 2026-10-11The Observer
Tanya Gold brushed aside the “stupid name” of this new venture from the Levan team, and liked the understated décor and very short menu – “always an excellent sign” – of a restaurant that turned out to be “perfect” but for one whopping error.
Her meal started well with a “superb” endive salad, and reached its high point with a “wonderful” pie of chicken and mushroom braised in white wine wrapped in “the finest puff pastry – soft and hard together, exquisite” (she forgave the “pointless” chicken foot sticking out of the top). “We eat the pie with chips fried in rapeseed and olive oil: they are greenish gold, and very good.”
And the error? Serving a chocolate mousse improved with cream under “a pile of undeniably good olive oil” – “I want to take the chef-pioneer who first ruined a mousse with a small fruit oil, beat him to death, and stick him in one of his own pies… Why olive oil? Why not diesel oil? Or lard?”
Tanya Gold - 2026-10-25
