Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 3rd May 2026
Financial Times
Declaring that “going to a restaurant with one particular dish in mind is a noble approach to eating out”, Jay Rayner set his heart on a rare-in-London plate of Singapore chilli crab at a venue that feels like “a beach shack reimagined for the city”.
First, though, he sampled a selection of “interesting” curtain-raisers that all hit the spot: deep-fried soft-shell crab; garlicky cucumber salad; spring rolls; green beans and ground beef with the “fermented honk” of shrimp paste; and a helping of “delicate and intensely moreish” Singapore noodles.
The famous – and extremely messy – chilli crab lived up to Jay’s high hopes: “a huge platter of semi-broken crab in a thick, red traffic light of a sauce with, on the side, a basket of steamed rice-flour buns, white as snow, soft as clouds, perfectly designed for mopping”. He quickly lost himself in working his way through what he came for – “the perfect contrast between the sweet white meat and the heat of the thickened sauce.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent had a great time in the “cool, cute and jovial” dining room of Margate House, Will Jenkins’s boutique hotel with “plenty of character despite all the money that’s been spent on it”, whose kitchen is run by ex-The Dairy and Samphire chef Mark O’Brien, who made the final three in this year’s MasterChef: The Professionals.
His menu is “short, intentional and hearty, rather than airy-fairy, and it chortles in the face of small plates”. Among the highlights were Guinness soda bread with whipped butter; beef rump tartare with caper dressing and dripping toast; and a “delightful” chalk stream trout with cavolo nero in a puddle of seaweed butter sauce.
A “brief but pleasing” list of desserts included sticky toffee pudding with salted toffee sauce and stem ginger ice-cream, earl grey panna cotta with rosemary shortbread, and a rhubarb crumble that “really is a whole lot of wonderful”.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
The Hollow Bottom, Guiting Power, Gloucestershire
Giles Coren enjoyed Sunday lunch at a racing-industry hangout pub near Cheltenham that has been taken over by former Wild Rabbit chefs Nathan Eades and Liam Goff of the Halfway at Kineton and the Horse and Groom at Bourton-on-the-Hill.
Giles hinted broadly that it was his move as a weekender into the Cotswolds a dozen years ago that created “the best gastropub scene in England. What a coincidence! And what was weirder still, they all offered the rigorously trained but superfriendly service I demand and the mash-up of fancy bar snacks, cask ales, good claret, fresh game in season, line-caught fish, a savoury pie or pudding, one or two borderline ‘haute’ dishes and a quality burger that constitute my preferred menu.”
The Hollow Bottom was firmly in this camp, with “their famous Scotch eggs, gammon chops, date and black treacle pudding” served in a “nice quiet dining room”. The Sunday roasts (beef and chicken, with Yorkshires, double spuds, seasonal veg and cauli cheese) and starters of prawn cocktail, salt-and-pepper squid and a soft-boiled Cacklebean egg on Wye Valley asparagus were “all in order… and all would have been unthinkable in these parts just a decade ago”.
***
Camilla Long stuck her critical claws deep into the London branch of a Manchester-based Greek restaurant that’s “done up like Circe’s knicker drawer”, describing it as a “Polyphemian sex cave opposite the Ritz”. Cue much innuendo: a cocktail was a “long, deep throatful of Apollo’s Essence”; a salad with over-ripe tomatoes was “squishy and slimy, like going down on Medusa”; tuna tartare arrived with a “bit of caviar bukkake on top”.
The gushing menu was comically misspelt – a cocktail called “River Sticks” was compared to “Homer’s legendary poem, Odysseus” – and included iberico ribs (Spanish), steak tartare (French), wagyu anticucho (Peruvian) and Asian-inspired gyoza. “Why make such a big deal of your Greek restaurant if you think your customers won’t like it?”
“If a restaurant’s purpose is to make people feel at home, then there are people who will find its sybaritic raunch reassuring,” she concluded. “But at these prices, with this swagger, the food needs to be excellent. It isn’t.”
*****
London Standard
David Ellis was in the mood to forgive a “very up-and-down” meal at a new restaurant with “enormous promise” in the former premises of Papi; perhaps, he suggested, it was just “having a wobble, an off night”.
Inspired by Abruzzo in central Italy, the menu skips ragu, risotto and the “New Yawk red sauce” approach that is currently in vogue, in favour of “things like hefty asparagus stalks lazing beside a pool of thick wild garlic sauce with beautifully fresh peas, or narrow skewers of salt marsh lamb”, or potato rosti with blue cheese and marjoram that are “almost comically tasty”.
But the ciabatta was only “so-so”; capelletti were “unfathomably undercooked”; morels stuffed with wild boar were dry; and the food was generally over-salted. Adding insult to injury, the bill “both flabbergasted and horrified” at almost £300 for two.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles knew he was in for a blast at the new city centre venue from “hirsute Brummie hero Glynn Purnell” as soon as he took his first bite – of “a vast ‘XXL’ gougère the size of my fist, all crisply delicate choux pastry, stuffed with Montgomery cheddar cream, and topped with an excess of grated Gruyère.”
This was Purnell “at his playful best, in a room seemingly macerated in delight”, serving food that was at once “fun”, “cheffy” and “extremely satisfying”. A crisp waffle was piped with an old-school punchy chicken liver parfait and blobs of Sauternes gel; a potato ‘scallop’ based on the chip-shop classic was “like a Pringle with a PhD; monkfish cheeks in the “most burnished and brittle of tempura batters” arrived on a splodge of ragù bolognese.
An “exceptional” Tamworth pork chop looked unpromising, covered in what “seems like a mess of, well, orange and white sputum”, but this turned out to be a clever take on romesco sauce made with smoked almonds, charred red and bacon – and it tasted “divine”. As did a rhubarb trifle “that could make even the most pudding averse let slip an involuntary gasp. Jelly! Sponge! Custard! Meringue!”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell was relieved that despite being hyped as the ‘opening of the year’, the new permanent home of chef Dara Klein’s former residency project is no more than a “resoundingly normal” local Italian offering an “unremarkable” collection of dishes, many of which nod to the region of Emilia-Romagna.
“Tiella may be big news for some. For me it’s just a simple, busy, neighbourhood restaurant. Which, frankly, is really all a great restaurant should hope to be.
“Tiella leaps out from the pack, reminding me of the sort of Italian restaurants my father would take me to in London in the Eighties. They were unobtrusive, they were busy and we had fun. And I don’t remember what we ate.”
*****
The Observer
Kieran Morris set off by bus up Shooters Hill into the Kentish hinterlands on a pilgrimage to ‘the UK’s first Kazakh restaurant’, where he found “a cuisine shaped by 7,000km of geography: a few core Kazakh and Persian dishes, but then a Soviet layer, a Tatar layer, an Uzbek, Tajik and Uyghur layer, touches of Turkish and Chinese… a cuisine that absorbed everything the Silk Road carried, which for 2,000 years was the whole world.”
Plov – a distant cousin to pilaf and paella, and famous throughout central Asia – was spiced with cardamom and cinnamon; it had a “satisfying sweetness”, although Kieran reckoned “it could have been greasier”. Beshbarmak (meaning ‘five fingers’), the national dish, was a “pleasingly basic” lamb and onion stew served over thick hand-sliced noodles and topped with a “nomadic delicacy” called qazi, a gamey horsemeat sausage.
“If you want to eat something you’ve never eaten before, in a part of the city you may never have been to, it’s places like Turkistan that make the capital feel bigger than you thought it was.”
