Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 4th May 2025
London Standard
David Ellis reckons “success is around the corner” for a “rotisserie restaurant that almost everyone can afford” operating out of a small and plain room in Brixton Market.
Chicken, pork belly and potatoes are cooked in a rotisserie oven called Esmerelda, and served alongside excellent coleslaw and gem salads. Drinks include £7 trumblers of negroni poured from a pre-mixed magnum at the bar and wine at £4.50 a glass.
It’s straightforward, as David tells it, but impeccably thought-out and done. “Chicken is marinated for 24 hours on the Norfolk farm that supplies the place in a propriety blend of Greek yoghurt and lime juice, and handfuls of salt and pepper. To cook it takes an hour, until the skin is the colour of fallen leaves… Pork belly is perhaps more obviously arresting: lemon, lime, fennel seeds and garlic have been kneaded into the meat”, while “the potatoes — tasted every 10 minutes, allegedly for quality control — arrived with crackled skins, cooked in the fat of the chicken and pork and with all the spices from both.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent welcomed this purposely shabby-chic upstairs dining room a with “heady, tipsy, twinkly atmosphere” as a “thrilling, retro glimpse of mindlessness” in our era of health-conscious mindfulness.
Like similar establishments including the Devonshire off Piccadilly Circus and the Plimsoll in Finsbury Park, One Club Row offers “battered stuff, things in buns, strong drinks – and the sense that, at any point, you might cop off with one of Shed Seven or Wendy from Transvision Vamp”.
Chef Patrick Powell’s cooking is heartier, less “fine dining” here than at his former restaurant, Allegra in Stratford, but Grace was more than happy with that. “There are croquettes filled with lobster and ham, roast scallops in confit garlic butter and thick French onion soup topped with comté and gruyere.”
*****
The Observer
Guest reviewer Simon Callow, a dining enthusiast whose accountant once told him he had eaten an entire year’s earnings, finally found his way to a restaurant he made a mental note to visit when it opened back in 2006. It was well worth the wait.
The four-course set menu from chef Adam Byatt was “perfection, every morsel delectable, surprising, stimulating and filling, but light.” The smartly suited sommelier and the waiter were “precise and candid… None of that spooky, holy tone too often encountered in more formal establishments, as if they were unveiling the blessed sacrament and expecting you to kneel down in front of it.”
The highlight of the meal was roast chicken with pomme mousseline, “apparently straightforward but of such perfection that it seemed to stop time…. It wasn’t just us: look around the room, and everybody eating that dish does so with their eyes closed and no detectable movement of their jaws, gently moaning.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Tenmaru, Fitzrovia
Garum, Bayswater
45 Jermyn St, St James’s
Giles Coren generously offered a portmanteau of London restaurants for lunching – one at speed, one more leisurely, and one for feeling “posh”.
Tenmaru is a “nice authentic little ramen joint” (branches in Finsbury Park and near Oxford Circus) whose noodles are served in a ‘tori paitan” milky-white chicken broth instead of the more standard ‘tonkotsu’ pork version. Giles also recommended its izakaya classics including gyoza dumplings.
Garum is a “higgledy-piggledy broadly Roman restaurant crammed into the mini-Chinatown of Queensway”, with a menu of antipasti, pasta, risotto and vegetables – but no main dishes. The cooking is “avowedly domestic and mostly pretty good” – although Giles advises dodging the “dismal” risotto agli scampi. The standout dish is a rigatoni alla carbonara, “the creation that is the pride of Rome”, served with antique parmesan and two types of pepper: white from Cameroon for aroma and creaminess, black from Indonesia “for a real kick”.
45 Jermyn St, part of Fortnum & Mason (where it replaced the old Fountain restaurant 10 years ago), is “somewhere for grown-ups, somewhere a bit posh, somewhere Bertie Wooster could take his Aunt Dahlia”. It’s all “shimmering parquet, red leather upholstery, assorted caviars and incredibly confident young waiters in black and white uniforms“ – and the dishes are “brilliantly done”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy revisited a restaurant in the Merchant City she frequented 20 years ago, when it was the only place where as somebody of South Indian heritage she could find a good dosa (apart from her mum and dad’s kitchen, 500 miles away in London).
Dakhin is a “posh Indian, elevated and elegant” and set in an A-listed historic building, but during the week offers an “unbeatable lunch menu: for £15 you can have a thali, or a dosa and payasam (a traditional cardamom rice pudding), or three courses from the rest of the menu. Incredible.”
The dishes have barely changed over its two decades, and “they taste just as fresh and — I can think of no other word for it — authentic as they did in 2004,” Chitra concluded. “Dakhin has achieved what every restaurant is seeking in the end. To withstand the test of time.”
***
Paternoster Farm, Pembrokeshire
Charlotte Ivers tracked down “echt” – which she defined as “the most authentic manifestation of the culture your are visiting” – on a working family farm in the furthest-flung pastures of Pembrokeshire where Michelle Evers, a former divorce lawyer, cooks locally sourced ingredients in a converted barn.
“I can’t vouch for whether she’d help you keep the car and the kids, but she makes a first-class Jerusalem artichoke soup and a focaccia that’s simultaneously crunchy and melty, served with a superb glob of crab meat butter.”
“There’s a fine balancing act here between countryside authenticity and fashionable cooking. It works extremely well. So too does the crumbling beef brisket on a delicate lentil vinaigrette. Again, hearty and rural yet elegant and cosmopolitan: the product of a big city lawyer transplanted to the rolling fields.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker-Bowles added his voice to the critical acclaim for this restaurant with a “family feel” from John and Desiree Chantarasak that “mixes the haute with the hearty, the traditional with the cutting edge” – noting that it is “a brave chef who opens a Thai restaurant that doesn’t serve rice”.
Not will you find fiery, pungent or fragrant larbs and curries here. Instead, “Exmoor caviar and Brixham crab, pretty as a hidden Devon cove, are served alongside a crisp black cracker, shaped like a flower and flavoured with coconut ash. The artistry is incredible, but there’s a cool purity to the flavours, the very essence of the English sea,” Tom said.
“AngloThai may be more Anglo (and French) than Thai, but this is sophisticated, ambitious, highly intelligent cooking that’s both quietly thrilling and utterly unique.”
*****
Financial Times
La Môme, The Berkeley hotel, Knightsbridge
Jay Rayner may have had suspicions ahead of his visit to the London offshoot of a Cannes restaurant named after a billionaire French socialite who numbered among her circle Rafael Trujillo, “the blood-soaked dictator of the Dominican Republic”. If so, they were confirmed as he settled into a room whose design was “apocalypse tech-bro bunker”.
The menu claimed to celebrate ‘the golden age of the French Riviera’, but was “about as French as Dubai” – featuring Australian Wagyu, yellowtail carpaccio with ponzu, and truffled sea bass crudo with passionfruit sauce. As for the cooking, vitello tonnato was a “feeble mess”; pairing gravalax with Aperol and raspberries was a “lousy idea”; and bouillabaisse-style cod was “grossly over-salted”. The dessert soufflé looked “magnificent; so mightily tumescent it could be sponsored by Pfizer” – but the effect was achieved by going heavy on the whipped egg white, masking the flavour of the Grand Marnier base.
On the plus side, pretty well all Jay could offer was that the bar “mixes very good cocktails” and the staff “do a lovely job”.
