Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to the 2nd March 2025
London Standard
Paradise, Soho
David Ellis went to a six-year-old Sri Lankan whose owner, Dom Fernandes, has “tarted-up” the interior and replaced the original menu with six-course tasting options (carnivore, pescatarian or vegetarian) at £65 – in truth, the standard three courses “divvied up differently”.
Never mind that, the food is of “formidable quality” – much of it “so furiously spiced that it could cure colds”, and some extremely complex: in a bowl of “stripper-pink” rasam, “the usual base of tomato was foregone in favour of lacto-fermented raspberries, a technique more usually associated with Copenhagen three-star Noma.”
David played his trump card in his final paragraph, declaring: “I didn’t eat this well in Sri Lanka itself when I visited a fortnight ago.”
*****
The Guardian
Yari Club, Covent Garden
Grace Dent checked in to what was billed as a ‘robot yakitori restaurant’, fully expecting to eat food prepared by our “new mechanical overlords”. So she was “hugely disappointed” (and, we hope, rather relieved) to find no “jaw-dropping, futuristic” droids chopping, stirring and plating, but instead a “deeply unattractive kitchen gadget” in the form of a semi-automatic deep-fryer.
The exaggerated sales pitch and the “big stainless-steel box” in the front window seem to have scared custom away, too. The restaurant was deserted when Grace visited for lunch, while stalls at nearby Berwick Street market were humming with punters ordering food produced by human hand.
Which was a pity because, she said, Yari Club pumps out excellent-value and tasty skewers of every imaginable cut of chicken dipped into a special, sweet, soy-based sauce – all prepped by human chefs and served by “wonderful” front-of-house staff.
*****
The Observer
Nord, Liverpool
While all of Liverpool was watching the last derby at Goodison Park, Jay Rayner was two miles away at an empty (until the match finished) restaurant in the “groovy” ground floor of a landmark 1960s office block, where locally born chef Daniel Heffy has returned after years in Sweden to cook meals inspired by the North.
He’s not doctrinaire about it, Jay noted with approval. “You could get kicked out of the New Nordic clubhouse for daring to allow racy, sunkissed things like olives, lemons and that wantonly promiscuous bulb garlic into your kitchen.” Australian macadamia nuts also crop up, as a “game-changer” in a brilliant beef tartare.
Not everything worked; Scandi-style greens were over-vinegared, a Japanese-style chawanmushi savoury custard over-salted. “But I’d much prefer Heffy’s slight misses than the unambitious hits of safer cooks. Because when he gets it right, my heart simply beats faster.” Monkfish on a fish roe and chive cream sauce that would “make a lachrymose Finn weep gently with joy”. Even better was a plate of chicken, both roasted and deep fried, with quenelles of mushroom duxelles on a fermented mushroom sauce.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Voyage with Adam Simmonds, King’s Cross
Giles Coren took a rather different view of Nordic-inspired cheffery, using a visit to a new restaurant next to a vast building site as a vehicle to vent his spleen on “all the miseries of the Scandi kitchen”.
How Giles enjoyed himself conjuring up ways to insult the genre, starting off with its high priest, René Redzepi, whom he dismissed as a “mouse-faced misery guts”. “Yumminess is not cherished in the ‘Nordic kitchen’,” he declared – it “simply doesn’t translate out of Scandinavia, or the late Noughties”.
Course after course came in for the treatment: an oyster cut (cut!) into three; a dry sweetbread; a langoustine served with a “thin and irrelevant jus and some curls of turnip. Or celeriac. Or possibly orthotic insole. It was hard to tell.”
Finally, instead of coffee, he was served a hot water infusion of cocoa beans from Grenada. “It was the saddest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” said Giles. “And I have given CPR to a cat.”
***
Sub Rose Pizza, Glasgow
Chitra Ramaswamy tracked down an “ultra-hidden gem” at the end of possibly “Glasgow’s grimmest strip-lit corridor” on an industrial estate in Castlemilk, to sample what she was assured was Glasgow’s hippest pizzeria – the domain of Dom Morton, an ex-engineer who taught himself to make pizzas as an escape from boredom after giving up booze.
His come in two very distinct types: Neo-Neapolitan, a hybrid of the New York and Naples styles, crunchy from being baked at high temperature in Sub Rosa’s modern, industrial-chic electric ovens, rather that artisanal wood ovens; and Detroit, invented by immigrant Italian car factory workers and baked in steel automotive drip pans, resulting a springy open texture like focaccia.
Using “second-to-none” produce, the joint lived up to its billing, pumping out “phenomenal pizza, rich and robust, with each ingredient speaking loudly and brashly for itself, like a bunch of New York taxi drivers on a rare night out”.
***
The Prince Arthur, Belgravia
Charlotte Ivers enjoyed a long lunch at a new venue describing itself as a ‘neighbourhood pub’, although she quickly established that “this is a lie”.
“The first thing you see on entry is a counter of fresh fish on ice. Pubs, let me be clear, do not display fish on ice. They do not have white table cloths and smartly dressed waiters. They do not — and I cannot stress this enough — offer six caviar options. In my experience, most pubs barely do two.”
Once happy that this was in fact a restaurant, Charlotte conceded that “the food is good” – if very pricey, given that anywhere this close to Sloane Square charges what she called the “West London tax”. Which meant she and two dining companions shared (among other dishes) a lone £10 devilled egg and a single £25 carabinero prawn – “only a bite each when shelled”. Her top bite was the “gorgeous” turbot dripping potatoes: “a weird idea but it works, a comforting childhood hash brown made luxurious.”
*****
Daily Mail
Juliet, Stroud
Tom Parker Bowles came over all Romeo at a modern bistro named by its founder, sculptor Dan Chadwick, after his wife Juliet, falling head over heels in love with “a menu that skips across Europe with joyous aplomb”.
“There’s a simplicity to the cooking, but an absolute skill and confidence” in chef Oliver Gyde’s cooking, with dishes like oeuf mayonnaise “as voluptuous as a Titian nude”, pasta “as good as anything you’d find anywhere in the country”, and a tarte tatin “as caramelised and classic as they come”. To seal the passion, “service is divine”.
“I could stay here all night,” Tom concluded, setting up a final love-lorn quip: “And parting is indeed such sweet sorrow.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
Dove, Notting Hill
William Sitwell delivered a mixed verdict on Jackson Boxer’s follow-up to Orasay on the same site, finding cooking that was “a sort of modern British assembly of current fashions”, but where the “scales tip in favour of the cooking flaws, from flavour to conception”.
First, the hits: grilled prawns were “magnificently on song; soft, suckable and sweet”; bavette steak “chewy in the best way, with oodles of flavour and little morels to jolly one along”; while the soft serve was creamy and accompanied by homemade oat biscuits.
On the debit side, ricotta dumplings were “heavy little pasta weapons, just the ticket for a food fight”, in a lobster sauce “more Bovril than sweet, delicate seafood”; duck fat fries tasted “factory-made industrial”; Castelfranco was an “oversized folly”; and a caramel cream “so firm you could have sat on it”.
*****
Financial Times
The Yellow Bittern, King’s Cross
In one of his final pieces as restaurant critic at the FT, before shifting over to become the paper’s food writer, Tim Hayward posted a non-review of the Yellow Bittern, the lunch-only, no internet and no card payments venue on the Caledonian Road that caused much debate when it opened late last year.
For the record, Tim his eaten there, plans to return regularly, and rates its outspoken co-founder Hugh Corcoran as “an outstanding chef”. But “no, I won’t be reviewing The Yellow Bittern”, he said. Instead, he treated us to a cod-structuralist analysis of its attractions.
The restaurant’s retro appeal – “it looks like a carefully curated set for a working-class eating establishment in about 1930” – had been sneered at as “cosplay”, Tim reported. But he flipped this to argue that instead of “mimsy nostalgia”, the YB represented a very contemporary – possibly ahead-of-its-time – commitment to “immersion”.
After all, he said, all restaurants are businesses that depend on creating the illusion of hospitality – and at the YB he can believe, for the duration of lunch, that this is a restaurant “where true hospitality, rather than profit, is the motive”.
