Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 31st May 2026
The Guardian
Grace Dent had to wait almost two years after its opening to bag a table at this “intensely relaxed yet still ferociously fancy” restaurant from former L’Enclume head chef Tom Barnes. Luckily it was “well worth the hype”.
Ornate pre-dinner snacks – a tartlet of chalk stream trout with golden beetroot and a Spenwood cheese biscuit with broad beans, pike roe and shiso – were, yes, “hugely scoffable”, and the dishes that followed were “properly magical”.
The cooking was rooted in “technique and cheffy prowess”: Sladesdown duck, for example, was blanched, marinated, dry-aged and then roasted and served pink with beetroot, cherry and citrus, accompanied by a warm mini-loaf filled with pulled duck leg meat for dipping into the jus. In short, “fine dining that even a naysayer would like”.
*****
The Times
Giles Coren ventured into one of the half dozen new handroll sushi, aka temaki, bars that have sprung up around London – a concept “rooted in Japanese tradition”, according to its website, but non-existent in Tokyo when Giles last visited, and invented in Los Angeles in 2014.
The venue itself was messy and grim – “like you’d wandered into a rundown hospital canteen” – with guests seated at a counter on “sharp little half-backs… I have never been more uncomfortable at lunch in my life, and I have had lunch on a camel.” Giles’s biggest beef, though, was that temaki are properly “a moment in a meal”, something to served after sashimi and nigiri, but not a meal in themselves. “It’s like going out for mashed potatoes and broccoli.”
If some of the rolls were decent (spicy scallop and baked crab), others were “truly miserable”: the toro taku roll, using the treasured belly meat of the tuna, was “slushy. Almost phlegmy. My mouth just didn’t want it”, while the miso aubergine roll “sogged through the seaweed and was sweeter than cheap chocolate”.
The verdict: “Handroll bars: crap idea. Send them back to LA and let’s get on with building proper restaurants for grown-ups.”
***
Eve’s Court, East Lothian
Chitra Ramaswamy was one of the first evening guests at “the most exciting new restaurant in East Lothian”, on the restored Papple Steading estate in the Lammermuir foothills. Named after organic farming pioneer Dame Eve Balfour, founder of the Soil Association, who grew up on the estate, its menu is overseen by the “fantastic” Scott Smith (Fhior, Norn) and the kitchen led by Chris O’Connor (ex-the Caledonian, Edinburgh).
The “confident, ingredient-led cookery” is exemplified by barbecued monkfish served with an exceptional pearl barley risotto – “profoundly creamy, chewy, hearty and Scottish…. traditional yet modern, and unique.”
One black mark from Chitra, though: “what’s with Koffmann fries when the best new potatoes can be dug from the earth at this time of year?”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner was baffled and disappointed by a vegetarian bistro whose “dishes read well” and whose kitchen is overseen by an accomplished chef in Daniel Watkins (ex-Acme Fire Cult).
Unfortunately, much of the cooking missed its mark, such as a special of oyster mushroom ‘wings’ with a ‘Buffalo sauce’. This “uses the language of a meat dish to make a promise, which it then breaks. The crispy, deep-fried mushrooms are fine. But Buffalo chicken wing sauce should make your lips pucker and your eyes widen. This one just waves politely at you as it passes by.”
There was worse. Flatbreads were “doughy and soggy”; Roman-style globe artichokes were “soft and oily”, and arrived with a salad that was “just a mess of vegetal matter”; a no-waste lemon posset came with a “foaming globule of rank ‘meringue’, made with potato starch tortured in ways it did nothing to deserve”.
*****
London Standard
Guest reviewer Heather Steele was wowed by a succession of small plates at this new bistro from the St Barts team: smoked cod’s roe dip, ‘Chunion Puffs’ – “polished, one-bite wonders of molten cheese and onion” – and hogget kofta with fermented chilli.
The high point of her lunch was “a genius pork and cuttlefish sausage, accompanied by ribbons of sauerkraut and a quenelle of dark mustard, made in-house with the skins of red grapes. They should sell the stuff by the jar.”
All was not perfect, though. Service was patchy, even in an all-but-empty restaurant, and the 80s soundtrack repeated itself. Still, Heather reckoned, “It’s early days, and just a few more guests and an extra chef behind the pass will make this place sing like its sausage.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell ran hot and cold on a new Sicilian in Brum’s Jewellery Quarter, where the décor – in particular “walls that attack you, like a titanic clash of ideas” – clearly set his critical faculties on edge.
Service was “charming”, though, while half a spatchcock chicken was “a tremendous success of charred skin, soft, juicy flesh and trails of the Italian leafy rapini”. Bresaola, tenderstem broccoli and butterhead lettuce also met with William’s approval.
But a ‘32 HR ox cheek crispy lasagne’ was both overcooked and over-crispy, while “a long, winding curl of Sicilian fennel sausage with butter beans was more depressing away-school-match tea of sausage and beans than glorious rustic supper”.
*****
The Observer
Joel Golby immersed himself happily at a restaurant that is “very French, in a way that we don’t have enough of in London or, arguably, in Britain” – by which he meant a cosy, dark-wood-and-soft-linen spot with a French wine list, fine British ingredients, good bread and “a rustic threat of lentils, hearts, brains”.
Joel and guest hoovered up “basically every starter” – puffed pig skin; monkfish liver parfait; ox-tongue and smoked eel terrine; nettle and garlic sausage – before girding themselves for “the offal part of the night”: calf’s brain and smoked cassoulet with “a gelatinous snout nestled on top in a way I can only describe as cheeky”.
He ended with a shout out to the man in the kitchen, Elliot Hashtroudi: “Get down there and go and admire a chef in hot form.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles enjoyed lunch at a branch of a “Neapolitan-ish” group in Kent – “the kind of local Italian restaurant that is all the better for not banging on about being ‘authentic’”.
The staff were “lovely”, and the menu had “something for every whim and pocket”. Fried calamari was “crisp and hot and grease free”; spaghetti alla vongole combined al dente pasta with a “generous scattering of fresh clams”; skate was drenched in a “buttery, lemony, caper-studded sauce”.
“Pizza Vesuvio may not wow the Neapolitan purists (what does?), but with a perky tomato sauce, molten puddles of mozzarella and a crisp, charred base, it’s deeply respectable.”
