Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 1st March 2026
The Guardian
Grace Dent, a proud member of the early-rising “5am Club”, followed a heavily hyped trend to sample an upmarket power breakfast at the Four Seasons hotel on Park Lane, suggesting: “Perhaps now that gen Z is eschewing booze and all-night raves, we’re moving into a hospitality era when the big, posh breakfast may well be the main event.”
The showstopper dish was French toast, “a sublime flavour bomb of vanilla milky-egginess with a perilously thin, crunchy outer surface” – although Grace reckoned such a carb-heavy start to the day was more likely to result in a convalescent snooze than all-day productivity.
Among other dishes, a chicken samosa topped with a fried egg and vermicelli offered “pleasant shades of Malaysian mee goreng” but was “a tad heavy for so early in the morning. The coconut-based chia pudding, on the other hand, is a total delight, even if it’s essentially just fruity frogspawn.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren had a jolly lunch with Jan Leeming (remember her from TV? She was one of Giles’s schoolboy crushes) overlooking rain-lashed Folkestone harbour at a restaurant that opened 15 years ago, although he struggled to be enthusiastic about the cooking.
“My fish soup was fine (although was that thickly grated factory cheese with the toast really gruyère? My Spidey sense said ‘supermarket mousetrap’)”, while lemon sole on the bone was “fried a couple of minutes too long”, although Giles insisted it was “good”.
As for the skin-on fries, they were “hot and crispy but didn’t have their skin on and weren’t really fries. Nor were they cut in house; this is a medium-sized restaurant group now and they don’t tend to do things like that.” Oh dear.
***
1610 at The Globe Inn, Dumfries
Chitra Ramaswamy savoured an elegant dinner at a “national treasure” of a hostelry that was already 180 years old when the poet Robbie Burns was a regular in the 1790s.
Immaculately preserved by David Thomson and Teresa Church of the nearby Annandale Distillery, its kitchen is run by chefs Jonathan Brett and Fraser Cameron (both ex-Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles), who send out technically precise and exquisitely plated dishes that “burst with colour, like small Scottish assemblies of land and sea.”
Chitra’s meal began brilliantly with “cloud-light gougères” and “warm slices of sublime malted bannock studded with flax seeds and an ecstatically pillowy milk bun”. Then followed scallops, venison with soused beetroot, roasted halibut with a lush grenobloise sauce, and an “outstanding caramelised apple slice, mille-feuille-esque, graceful and not too sweet”. She also advised guests to visit the snug, “surely the most stunning in Scotland. So wee, cosy, and glinting with 300 bottles of whisky.”
***
Camilla Long had fun skewering the pretensions and patrons of this New York-Italian restaurant import, just as her predecessor Charlotte Ivers did when it opened less than six months ago. The only surprise was that her Sunday Times editors thought the venue warranted such a speedy revisit.
Whatever the reason, Camilla set to with relish. The food was “bastardised mafia Italian”, she said, and came in “huge, Desperate Dan” portions “to be picked at by thin, confused, plastic women”. The keynote was “compulsive excess”: “TGI Fridays” with “34 types of grappa but … hardly a decent thing to eat”, for an audience that included Kim Kardashian’s hairdresser and plenty of “small cigar men and their enormous, decorated wives”, who like the food are “huge and orange”.
“If they want to throw away hundreds of pounds on cubes of malodorous sog, I won’t stop them,” she concluded. “But I will say you can’t do food this bad at these prices.”
*****
London Standard
David Ellis gave qualified praise to a Greek restaurant that was rammed with student-age guests on a rainy Monday lunchtime, apparently because Dua Lipa had recommended it.
In its favour, “the place is shruggingly stylish, in that no make-up make-up sort of way”, and there are some tasty things in the menu – in particular a hunk of Anthotyros cheese with thyme-spiked olive oil and a neat cube of fresh honeycomb: “My God, was it good — take the knife and coat this soft cheese in plenty of the oil and a little honeycomb. The sweetness echoed across our tongues.”
The dips, chicken thighs and a citrussy sea-bass soup called kakavia were also good, but “oyster mushrooms had been reduced to a stringy, chewy mess in an unremarkable onion broth”, service was unappealingly brusque and the room a bit tight: “I had to fight to keep my elbows from resting on the table next door”.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles was bowled over by “the most thrilling Korean food I’ve eaten for years” at an “unselfconsciously minimalist” family-run restaurant with a steel open kitchen.
“There’s a freshness to every dish here, a lightness of touch, and a true understanding of the art of acidity” in dishes ranging from white cabbage or baby cucumber kimchi to pork belly in a creamy sauce with mustard and vinegar.
Best of all was an “incandescently exquisite” ox broth – “not much to look at, a bland, pasty white, with sliced green tops of spring onion scattered across the top. But just one sip and the cares and worries of the outside world dissolve: there’s silken elegance, discreetly gentle bovine depth, and a perky blast of pepper….How can something so seemingly simple be so damned good? I’d cross town for this alone.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell urged readers to “do whatever it takes” to eat at a tiny six-seater Japanese restaurant where chef Kaoru Nakamura serves a 20-course omakase menu (he also runs Hana Matsuri in the city).
“The path of plates was beautifully constructed, a hand-held journey from seaweed to cake, each dish cut, pressed or torched and laid before you by the chef, who wielded his knife like a possessed alchemist before, occasionally, disappearing behind an orange curtain.”
