Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 4th October 2026
The Guardian
Grace Dent managed to find nice things to say about the New York import permanently installed in the main restaurant space at this grand hotel, going against the flow of reviewers who have given its arrival a critical mauling.
“It won’t win prizes for its food, but it is friendly and handy as hell,” she said, praising the “warm, slick, effusive and casual” service that makes the venue ideal for breakfasts, meet-ups, client lunches or intimate tête-à-têtes: “you could invite anyone here, and at any time.” And the prices are “weirdly reasonable” for Mayfair, even at £27 for a bowl of pasta: “you should see how much they charge for pasta at Bacchanalia just down the road”.
Most noteworthy is the ‘honey bee’ from the dessert cocktail list (tequila, coffee liqueur, amontillado, raspberry, salted honey cream) … “And wait, what? It comes with my own face printed on top of it!?! Dante has a piece of kit that stamps photographs on to the foam in edible ink, and I defy anyone not to be exhilarated by that.”
*****
The Observer
Tanya Gold offered a very different view, saying she “struggled to see the point of Dante, at least in Claridge’s”: the new arrival failed to meet the challenge of this “dramatic Art Deco palace” – much as its predecessors, Simon Rogan’s rustic Fera, Daniel Humm’s Davies and Brook, and an in-house brasserie had also fallen short.
The culinary theme is “Italian-American food, which treats America as another province of Italy, and the smashburger as cherished regional dish”, and whose pasta (she agreed with Grace Dent) was “slightly overcooked”. Chicken alla diavola was “not particularly devilish”, and if the tiramisu was well done, the sticky toffee ‘donut’ was too much: “It’s a sugar coffin and I’m lying in it.”
The hotel, Tanya urged, must solve the riddle of what rich people want to eat, and in Mayfair. “Claridge’s needs the defining plutocrat restaurant, because nothing else will meet the interior, and the interior will not change. You should walk in and faint.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner seemed distinctly uncomfortable to be in the Cotswolds and at a wellness centre and ‘lifestyle hub’ called Elkstone Studios, until he found himself in a restaurant with a “great ingredient-based name” name that was “pig-positive and shouting France”.
He was not disappointed. The food was “an awful lot better than a restaurant here needs to be”, ranging across southern Europe from Italy, through Provence to the Basque Country. “In the hands of lesser cooks, this could all be cacophonous. It isn’t.” Iberico ham was followed by “brilliantly made” salt cod croquettes; then huge, oil-slicked wedges of focaccia; a crab and avocado salad; cod with chorizo bean stew; and pork belly with charred sweetheart cabbage. Desserts – Basque cheesecake and Amalfi lemon cake – were equally good.
“If you want to look after your wellbeing, dodge whatever nightmare is unfolding over at the tipi wellness workshop; and eat here instead. It’s bound to make you feel better about the world.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren made a seven-hour, 504-mile round journey to a remote North Yorkshire village, he informed us, to visit a “charming, hobbity medieval inn with wonky bricks and wormy beams”.
Run by chef Tom Heywood and his “lovely” wife Laurissa Cook, it’s a place that proclaims its sustainable and local values and offers a 7-course tasting menu for £50 – “yes, £50. Which is embarrassing good value for cooking this careful, this precise, this deeply thought about”.
The food was delicious throughout, and Giles’s only gripe was that his locally forged knife was too blunt to cut fine slivers of the “very deeply flavoured but tough” Castle Howard mutton. The inn is, he said approvingly, typical of a “certain sort of old/new English hospitality that owes as much to Little Grey Rabbit and Mrs Tiggywinkle as to Escoffier and Blumenthal”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy paid her respects to a “Dundee institution” – a “hip yet thoroughly unpretentious Indian-Scottish (with a splash of Mexican) hotspot” in “resolutely ungentrified” Stobswell from self-taught chef Jim Ferrie, a former social worker “with a gift for the local banter that almost equals his sizeable culinary talents”.
Jim’s snappy portmanteaus – “naanwich”, “paco” (a taco made with paratha), “chaco” (made with chapati) – are fun, Chitra said, but also “make brilliant culinary sense and show his deep understanding of the affinities between cuisines”. Jim even pops a teabag into his chana masala, “which I’ve never seen anyone but an Indian home cook do (the tannins darken the gravy, plus you get deeper, more complex flavour)”.
Laden with takeaway packages (the venue’s main trade), she gave a big thumbs-up to Jim’s “bold-flavoured, big-hearted food to fill the belly and put a smile on your face”.
***
Camilla Long headed to “blandissimo” Wandsworth Common, where “Posh London Food” began at Marco Pierre White’s restaurant Harveys (now Chez Bruce), but whose days as “a serious food place are long over”. Here, chef Adam Byatt (of modern British restaurant Trinity in Clapham) has “suddenly decided he wanted to do Italian food” (Camilla suggests this urge is a “midlife howl”).
The restaurant attracts a lunchtime crowd of “boomer foodies in big necklaces” and an evening crowd of “check-shirted Hooray Henrys with signet rings”. “If I had to put a label on it, I’d say it is Carluccio’s for people who could actually buy Caluccio’s”.
But for all the “polite, ho-hum” Italian cooking (nice pasta; an elegant whole bream in salt; a musky rabbit escalope), what Camilla really admires – and what she’s quite sure Byatt is most interested in – are the “rip-roaring, rude dishes” on the menu: earthy rabbit livers in chianti, deep-fried gnocchi with salame rosa and, “bolting out of the blue”, veal tongue with mostarda – the “ugliest dish I’ve ever seen, the colour of old schoolboy socks in the flesh”, but whose “melting loveliness, the incredible, jelly-like softness and the blooming subtle taste” she will remember forever.
*****
London Standard
Guest reviewer Adriann Ramirez, who hails from El Centro in southern California, had high hopes of this new diner from Julian Denis, where the leather booth seating, Formica tables, soundtrack of bangers and “intoxicating smell of fryers and carne asada on the grill” had him dreaming happily of SoCal sunshine.
But in dish after dish over two meals – breakfast and dinner – the food came up short. Beef chilli was bland, chips were undercooked (“a crime in any country”), and bavette steak was “tough and chewy and not seasoned well enough”, while “the usual ease that comes with diner culture is lacking” (chilli cheese fries and cheeseburgers are not served at lunchtime over the weekend).
Marks for a commendable attempt, then, but the outfit “doesn’t live up to the ‘immigrant-run’ (what they really mean to say is Mexican) establishments it is modelling itself on. Johnny Boy’s has a way to go before it sparkles with the sun-drenched ease of its inspirations.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles found “pure exalted Cantonese comfort” at the second branch of a cult canteen near King’s Cross, whose perma-queues had always defeated his previous attempts at eating there.
The dim sum were “peerless… precisely made and precisely steamed, with no unnecessary frills or flourishes”. Xiao long bao were made with “dough just thick enough to contain the liquid without splitting, but not so sullenly dense that chewing becomes a chore”.
The seafood was particularly good: king prawns, buried under a blizzard of deep-fried chilli and garlic to be eaten whole, “a thrilling cacophony of taste and texture”; razor clams “softly chewy” in a mess of fresh chillies and vermicelli noodles.
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell was thrilled by a Mediterranean menu of pintxos, tapas, paella, pasta and treats from the Josper grill, delivered by “wonderful, friendly, confident and competent service”.
Among the highlights was a dish of manchego croquetas with truffle and cep: “With their smoky savouriness, hint of mushroom and golden aura, they have the same appeal as the Second Coming. One can’t quite believe they’re real.”
Best of all was the pil pil, “named not after a cross person demanding tablets, but after the bubbling noise this Basque dish supposedly makes, as olive oil, spiked with chilli, mixes with garlic, scallops, prawn and octopus.”
