Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 31st August 2026
Financial Times
Jay Rayner was impressed by the Thai cooking he encountered in the upstairs back room at an old boozer called The Albert Arms, where young ex-Fallow chef Ice Pongnat Ramanat offers an “utterly compelling” take on what he calls ‘evolved Bangkok street food’.
The short menu is “full of very good things at thoroughly amenable prices”, such as a roast chicken curry in an earthy brown broth that “tastes like it would make any bad day so much better, and a good one better still”, or 12-hour roasted beef short rib in a spicy ‘pad kapao’ glaze that “really is a mighty and assertive plateful”.
But Jay was even more impressed by the “wit and good taste” on display in a simple salad of fried eggs with tomatoes, chilli, Thai herbs and a sweet, sour and piquant dressing. “It takes real flair to come up with something so diverting.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent joined the throng of critics heaping accolades on this Turkish ‘mayhane’ from former Bibi head chef Keiran Mustafa and “smart-cookie” restaurateur Dom Hamdy, which she hailed as “the first genuinely cool, weird thing to have happened in Borough for ages”.
The atmosphere is “structured and very chic bedlam that’s lovable and edgy in equal measure”, and the fish (“expertly grilled” monkfish), meat (“incredibly juicy” lamb neck kuzu shish) and veg (“proper staying-at-your-gran’s-house” shallow-fried chips and “beautifully seasoned” braised green beans) all hit the spot.
But the dish everybody raves about is the “very humble-sounding” atom (yoghurt, chilli and butter) with bread. Grace demolished “two whole baskets to myself, which finally killed off my ambition to be Victoria’s Secret’s most elderly thong model. Damn it, give me warm carbs.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
The Boathouse, Isle of Gigha, Argyll and Bute
Chitra Ramaswamy was primed to enjoy a meal in the oldest building on a Hebridean island owned by its inhabitants since 2002 and which produces some of the best oysters in Scotland (“and thus the world”) – “briny, creamy, with a long mineral finish. So fresh they taste of the salted air we breathe as we throw them back.”
But the restaurant has been on sale for £100,000 since last September (“a real catch for the right buyer”, in Chitra’s view), and perhaps this uncertainty is undermining its performance. The seafood is as fresh as it gets, but the cooking is competent rather than excellent, and the portions are “far too small for the elevated prices”. A main dish of grilled sardines was served with one new potato, lemon meringue tart had wan pastry and gloopy curd, while whole lobster cost an “eyewatering” £75.
Chitra did manage a perfect meal on Gigha – from a takeaway hatch called the Nook behind the one shop in Ardminish, where her family feasted on an “exuberant, generous, bold and fun menu” of battered king prawn baps, lobster tacos, beer-battered haddock, crayfish cocktail, sizzling octopus and surf clams mariniere.
***
Camilla Long found much to ridicule at what she called a “trendy elevated barbecue spot” overlooking “Hackney’s muckscape” – a “blistering caveman manspace” with a “huge, steel 500-gallon barbecue [that] sits like a priapic Stephenson’s Rocket at the entrance”, and shoddy service that failed to match the restaurant-level prices.
As for the Texas/Asian food, “I’m not going to pretend the tofu was OK,” she grumbled. “Five slices of cold, grey soy with chillies, coriander sprinkled over the top, swimming in some greasy tasteless linctus – it was like eating pressed dandruff.”
But some of the dishes, Camilla had to admit, were “outstanding”, including melting cubes of Taiwanese pork belly that were “wobblingly soft, like seared foie gras, pork flavour hovering like a mirage”; an “incredible brick of succulent short-rib beef that’s drenched and black with peppery Sichuan sauce”; and a terrific side of rice topped with beef dripping.
*****
The Observer
Guest critic Chitra Ramaswamy wondered whether this “achingly cool Italian-inspired” restaurant from Anna and Dean Parker had survived its transfer from Glasgow’s most haunted hotel, the baronial Cathedral House, to the art deco Arthouse in the city centre. “It’s all gone a bit posh,” she judged – but a “fabulous” Sunday lunch confirmed that all was well.
“Many preoccupations of Dean, the head chef, are here: ferments, smoking, preservation, a zero-waste ethos and a love of fried stuff,” Chitra reported. His cooking is “idiosyncratic and sophisticated”, but with “an Italian reverence for simplicity”, and his house-made pasta is “God-tier-good”.
A dish of linguine pushes the “inspired” in Italian-inspired to the limit, with meaty cod cheeks flavoured with a berber chilli blend and what tastes like preserved lemon: “a pasta with one foot in the boot of Italy and the other striding out across the Med to Africa and the Levant”. A main of monkfish comes with Celentano’s “iconic strati: gold ingots, thinly stacked in striated layers, and licked with beef fat and as naughty as a Glasgow potato gets.”
*****
London Standard
Josh Barrie hailed the pizza tasting menu at the central London flagship of a Chiswick-originated group as “something everybody should do at least once. Especially those who think pizza is ‘just pizza’. Idioti!”
Its founder, Neapolitan-born Michele Pascarella, is engaged in the task of proving pizza is not junk food, thereby “undoing decades of Domino’s in Britain”. While traditional Neapolitan dough calls for 00 flour and only a two-minute whoosh in the oven at 400C, here methods are tweaked at each course: one pizza has a crispy base of barley and rye that is steamed, then baked, then fried before arriving topped with mozzarella di bufala and dotted with wild garlic pesto, dried oregano and tomato jam – “messy, gladiatorial food,” declared Josh.
“The concept of a pizza tasting menu is mad. More so given Pascarella’s dessert trio includes a mini-Magnum. But this is what London does best: artful lunacy. I cannot chef’s kiss enough.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles reckoned the playful and broadly European menu at Jackson Boxer’s new restaurant “reads like a well-crafted thriller. It grabs you by the gut and makes the heart pump harder.”
The highlights of his meal included a half chicken that was “all charred skin and buxom flesh, the juices shot through with an elegant acidic swathe”, and a plate of crab-fat rice with brown crab meat that was “a joyous, sun-baked Balearic blast of pure crustacean bosk”.
“Boxer was always a talented chef,” Tom concluded. “He’s now proved himself, once and for all, as a very serious restaurateur.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell loathed Tom Sellers’s well-known flagship Story in London, but took a very different view of the chef’s “stylish and beautiful” new spot in a Cornish seaside hotel – “think of it as an epicurean spaceship”.
The starters and pud – hot and cold scallops, tuna loin and a miraculously light date tart – were excellent enough, but William was bowled over by the “rustic Spanish charm” of a shared main dish unromantically named ‘Oven-Baked Crisp Seafood Rice’ (“but then not even a great poet could do justice to its magnificence”).
This consisted of a large bowl of rice cooked till crisp and bobbing with scallops, prawns, mussels and chunks of fish, along with dollops of rouille, fried quail’s eggs and wisps of pancetta. “It was a dish of unending joy as each return, each morsel, each scrape of rice from the edge provided visceral, blissful pleasure…. I felt that no food in my life before or after could measure up to this happy glory of communal comfort.”
