Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 6th July 2026
Financial Times
Fresh from a critical mauling by Camilla Long in the Sunday Times last week, Appalachia bounced back with two rapturous reviews this week, Jay Rayner kicking off by hailing it as a restaurant that makes “a delicious kind of sense” of the disparate culinary traditions of the United States, “which it plunders with a careless, goofy joy”.
Jay was full of praise for chef Ali Borer’s spiced smoked sausage with a pokey blue cheese slaw, his two-inch-thick smoked pork chop with bitter collard greens, and his star dish – a seafood omelette “like a special from some San Francisco diner, bowing deeply towards Japan. That one dish is a reason for coming to Appalachia.”
The place put new life into the “London American restaurant” tradition that Jay traces from the Great American Disaster burger bar in Fulham (1970), via Joe Allen in Covent Garden (1977), to the more recent Christopher’s, Big Easy and Sunday in Brooklyn. “Now there’s Appalachia. Happy birthday, America. Your politics might be messy, but your food really can be great. Again.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent was even more enthusiastic than Jay Rayner, hailing Appalachia as “one of the absolutely hottest, most interesting spots in town” – a place where the butter-brined half chicken with miso grits and black pepper gravy “reminded me of nothing so much as Sunday dinner on performance steroids”.
The converted pub premises were not particularly comfortable and had the feeling of making do – which seemed appropriate for a kitchen that “strives to waste nothing, possibly in the great Appalachian tradition of being cut off from anything so much as resembling a Tesco Metro”.
Chef Ali Borer, Grace said, “is cooking the best Appalachian food in the UK, not least because he’s cooking almost the only fried green tomato salad on this side of the Atlantic. I can’t pretend his place isn’t weird, but the weirdness is delicious.”
*****
The Times
Giles Coren found “all I could have dreamt of” at a “cluttered, eclectic, eccentric” restaurant near the seafront – most importantly, some “proper cooking” from Le Gavroche-graduated chef Michael Newton-Young, who had “the twinkle-eyed, world-weary confidence of a properly trained chef who could cook you anything you wanted.”
The menu started with chicken liver parfait, steak tartare and warm asparagus with poached egg and parma ham all £9.50, but Giles paid the £8 supplement for five delicious, ham-wrapped scallops with asparagus and beurre blanc. “Then I had the pan-roasted chicken supreme with morels and vin jaune – one of my favourite dishes in the world – done beautifully with fine beans and mashed potato.”
An excellent tarte tatin and a kindly priced wine list sealed the deal.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy swooned at a “vision of contemporary café chic” in a former butcher’s shop with original art nouveau tiles, in Scotland’s most perfectly preserved 17th-and 18th-century burgh, these days a mecca for Outlander fans.
The menu is from Edinburgh-based food writer Jess Elliott Dennison, the parties are from a bakery in nearby Dunfermline, and the ingredients are uniformly excellent, resulting in “exactly the kind of humble do-try-this-at-home cookery that you want”.
The high point of Chitra’s meal was a green minestrone that was “a verdant hymn to the season”, combining spring greens, peas, broad beans, fennel and preserved lemon in an intense almost consommé, into which was dissolved a spoonful of crunchy, garlicky almond and watercress pesto. “The outcome is the perfect bowl of soup. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.”
*****
The Observer
Chitra Ramaswamy doubled up for her second review of the week, spending “three joyously sybaritic hours” at the new bistro from acclaimed Irish chef Peter McKenna and Kevin Dow, “the most loved maître d’ in Glasgow”, in the same Finnieston premises they ran as the Gannet for 12 years before a flood closed it last year.
The new incarnation, Chitra suggested, may be even better than its predecessor, having replaced tasting menus with the relaxed elegance of a classic Parisian bistro. “Think beef tartare decorated with droplets of wasabi purée, served with roasted bone marrow popped back in the bone, to be spooned on to the coarse chop of raw fillet until it gleams like an oil painting by an Old Master… It eats like butter, and is the bright magenta of my daughter’s felt tips.”
An Irish ribeye steak was outstanding, and arrived with a “divine, and bovine, bordelaise sauce made with the trimmings, glossy with, yes, more bone marrow, and a sublime Café de Paris butter”, while John Dory cooked with house-grown mushrooms and chicken butter sauce was “pure cream-drunk indulgence”.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles dropped into “the local restaurant of your dreams” – too far, alas, from his west London home, a place where “every dish is so different, but all are united by the quality of the ingredients and the art of their cooking”.
An elegant poached trout with cumin roasted cauliflower, tahini-spiked yogurt, capers and a sprinkling of almonds was followed by tender monkfish cheeks in a rich, tomato-heavy chickpea and chorizo stew, then by an “inspired combination” of black beans with fish sauce, chilli, crisp onion and slow-cooked leek.
“A menu that mixes French, Italian, Spanish, Middle Eastern and Thai would usually have me running for the door. Not so much fusion as confusion. But it’s testament to the skill of chef and co-owner Richard Knighting (alongside head chef Samuel Lewis) that dishes not only work, but sometimes dazzle.” The wine list is a “gem”, too.
*****
London Standard
Katie Glass paid tribute to a King’s Road Italian that has served “real Tuscan food” since 1976 – a time before London went global and Chelsea was still “a village of toffs”. Nothing much has changed: there’s a Tony Soprano vibe, with charming waiters who fuss over guests who make a point of celebration family birthdays here.
“The food is the same mothering experience. Untouched by the ravages of time or food trends… It’s comfort food that doesn’t just take you back to the 1970s, but to the womb.”
Katie felt “almost guilty” reviewing the food – but “this isn’t destination dining. Everyone here lives nearby and has been feasting on the same hearty, yummy, forgettable food here for decades.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell found glorious pasta amid intrusive and annoying artwork at a 17th-century Cotswolds pub-with-rooms that was relaunched earlier this year by the team behind the Kingham Plough. The object of his ire was a series of large black-and-white photographs of Steve Martin, Willie Nelson, Cher and Tina Turner that clashed with the “coy charm” of the pub’s chic bare walls, stone floors and candlelight.
The menu of British dishes with European influences, though, was much to his liking – especially the bigoli pasta, a little thicker than spaghetti, porous of texture and nutty of flavour, hand-made in-house by a Venetian chef. “It was so good I almost forgave the wall art, which was actually getting more and more on my nerves as dinner progressed.”
If the rest of the meal did not quite match the pasta, William felt the pub was still a “great addition” to this part of southern Warwickshire.
