Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 2nd November 2025
The Guardian
Grace Dent enjoyed some “just great, great cooking” at a new venture from Dave Hart and Polly Pleasence, formerly of the Folkestone Wine Company, in a timber-framed gatehouse to Tudor-era almshouses – which, unusually, serves its fancier meals at lunchtime in an upstairs dining room, with a curtailed evening menu in the downstairs wine-bar.
Hart’s cooking is “very French, très simple – and outstanding. The duck arrived all pink and luscious, with its fat perfectly and crisply rendered, while the chicory was sweet yet still deliciously fibrous… When the cooking is this good, you don’t have to play every drum in the kit and bring in extra cymbals.”
That said, Grace insisted that “real star of the show is actually Pleasence. More restaurants, in my opinion, should have at their helm a stalwart, generation X woman who can update a bookings system and uncork a bottle of burgundy at the same time, while also hammering together a trestle table and charming an entire table of eight.”
*****
The Observer
Joel Golby was happy to report the success of the recent transfer of a beloved but “impossible to book” suburban Thai institution from Leytonstone – “the original restaurant for a generation of London’s foodies” – to a new development in cleaned-up Shoreditch.
Yes, “some of the magic has gone”: the new version is a more conventional restaurant that now “lives comfortably on the hallowed list of London’s modern fun/spicy/Thai restaurants (Kiln, Smoking Goat, Speedboat Bar).”
But its cooking still hits its targets – in particular, Joel’s cerebellum: the “profound” chilli spice of dishes such as lamb riblet and ox cheek gaeng om puts “a smile on my face” with “heavy heat that slightly makes you giddy and euphoric (‘I sort of feel high,’ I tell the waitress)”. The smoked tomato salad “turns my brain upside down”, while the highlight of his meal, aubergine pad phet, leaves him feeling “like my brain’s just had its own sauna.”
*****
London Standard
David Ellis gave a luke-warm reception to a new Vietnamese restaurant inspired by the late Nguyen Thi Thành, a Ho Chi Minh City stallholder known as Cô (Aunt) Thành who was made world famous by the (also late) chef/writer Anthony Bourdain.
“Moments of brilliance” were balanced by “moments of boredom, although David sensed the cooking – “true to Vietnam’s milder taste” – would “tighten up very soon”.
Successes included fresh-tasting goi cuon (summer rolls) “bulging with shrimp and rice and salad leaves… restorative, pure-tasting things, with a creamy peanut hoisin sauce somehow sweet and spicy and salty at once.” On the debit side, bún (noodle broths) “felt timid, underpowered, low on personality; where were the great big thwacks of aromatics, the vivid lime leaf and lemongrass? Someone in the kitchen should let go, drop the subtlety, uncuff the restraints.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner knew he was on to a good thing at this shopfront bistro from former Kerridge’s head chef Nick Beardshaw as soon as he tasted the first dish – a “cheese crumpet of the gods”. There followed by another “beautifully crafted” snack, hash browns topped with tarragon-flecked tuna tartare; a venison dish that was “English autumn on a plate”; and a dessert of soft, intense chocolate ice cream in a pool of grassy olive oil topped with lightly salted hazelnuts – “three flavours becoming the closest of friends because they have discovered they have an unexpected amount in common”.
Located in the Surrey suburbs, Starling was packed on a weekday lunchtime, “doing the sort of business many central London restaurants could only dream of for a Friday night… Quite right too”, Jay added, pointing out that its £30 lunch costs less than most main courses on its menu, without making you feel like you’re “travelling in economy”.
“As 2025 is hurtling towards its conclusion, it doesn’t feel to early to describe Starling as one of my picks of the year.”
*****
Daily Mail
A couple of weeks after Grace Dent savaged this new London outpost from a group of Swedish art/food pranksters for “trendified” food that “tasted of nothing much”, a pair of rival reviewers have now offered a more positive view – led by the roué-esque Tom Parker Bowles, who declared: “Part restaurant, part rave (minus the dancing), Punk Royale is a headily intoxicating mix of glee and gastronomy, hedonism and haute cuisine, camp, vaudeville and caviar.”
The immersive concept, he said, “may not be to all tastes (first dates and maiden aunts beware)” (ouch! to that, Grace) – but “I haven’t had so much fun for years”: “their tongue is wedged so firmly in cheek, the service so exuberant, the atmosphere so giddily voluptuous that one cannot help but fall in love. More surprising still, the food is superb.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Charlotte Ivers had much the same reaction as Tom PB – although she felt she had to apologise for enjoying such a “psychedelic fever dream” of a nosh-up costing £220 a head.
Munching her way through 20 courses of food to the accompaniment of a smoke machine and a soundtrack that progressed from Pachelbel’s Canon to the Clash’s London Calling, she found the experience “all faintly ridiculous [and] slightly euphoric”. But its saving grace was that – with the exception of one dish tasting “unmistakably [of] vomit. Was this deliberate?” – everything she ate and drank was delicious.
“Sorry. I’ll go somewhere cheap and worthy next week, but I can’t hate this place. You can’t make me hate it. It’s too good.”
***
Giles Coren made the 14,000-mile round trip to the Peruvian capital so we don’t have to worry about missing out on a meal at this year’s ‘World’s Best Restaurant’ (according to the annual list which foodies alternately drool over and scoff at). Chef Mitsuharu ‘Micha’ Tsumura may serve Amazonian ingredients transformed by his Japanese culinary expertise, but Giles “hated” it. Perfect – no need of FOMO for the rest of us!
*****
Daily Telegraph
Meadow, Bishop’s Lydeard, Somerset
William Sitwell suffered an overdose of sourdough bread over lunch at a newly opened café near Taunton in the Quantocks. A “very charming, sweet and gentle affair it is too”, set in a barn which has previously housed two restaurants that didn’t last.
The offending bread was “fabulous” in itself, but it cropped up again and again alongside very creditable plates of butterbean dip, pulled pork, aubergine parmigiana – and was probably mixed into the topping of the apple crumble.
“I congratulate them for grabbing and grappling with this place and opening at a time of adversity for the hospitality sector,” William concluded. “I’d just throw in the suggestion that they consider, only occasionally for us ordinary folk, cooking a potato.”
