Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 6th September 2026
The Guardian
Grace Dent sang the praises of “a small regional indie doing its very best in rather weird times”: chef Paul Wendholt’s ambitious set menu outfit (eight courses plus extras for £90) closed down for four months last year due to financial pressures – which shows we must “use these places or lose them”.
Even the “I just want me dinner” brigade that are put off by the idea of a tasting menu as “too faffy, too fiddly” might find their heart softening at Wendholt’s “good, thoughtful, clever cooking that errs on the side of tasty rather than flippant”, from the warm-up snack of whipped Montgomery cheddar in a fluted tartlet.
Then came wild Suffolk bass, treacle-cured pork and Herdwick lamb – the strongest of the savoury courses. Among the sweet dishes was an inventive creation involving Colchester cherries, both cooked and preserved, something biscuity, something creamy and something with a whiff of amaretto. “It doesn’t look like much on the plate – a collapsed Jenga of dessert ideas – but it is utterly fabulous.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner was both amused and well fed at a restaurant that has recently moved into new city centre premises, from a couple – chef Dean Parker and his wife and business partner Anna – who were serenaded on their honeymoon in Italy by the ballads of veteran singer Adriano Celentano.
The food comes “at a jaunty angle”, and manages the “rare balancing act of being knowingly eccentric but not annoyingly so”. It’s Italian-inspired but with a very Glaswegian love of the deep fryer, so the meal opens with a ‘lasagne fritte’ – deep-fried breaded squares of lasangna whose shell cracks to release a soft ooze of béchamel flavoured with porcini and Cora Linn cheese from Lanarkshire. “It’s a god-tier snack. A show-stopper, before the show has really begun…. Smart, funny and most of all delicious.”
This is followed by a savoury donut filled with creamy cod’s roe and topped with kimchi that’s “about as Italian as the boys from BTS”, while the chicken liver mousse is “really quite French”. Pasta is both very Tuscan (pappardelle with slow-cooked beef ragu) and Chinese-influenced (linguine with a crab and nduja ‘XO’ sauce).
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren opened his annual summer round-up with the assertion that “in London, if a place looks good on paper, it usually is. Out of London, it usually isn’t. So of the many I go to, barely a third live to be written up.”
Sparing us the duds, Giles gave us the good news: in St David’s, No 16 is “charming, haphazard and boozy in the style of the best provincial bistros”, while a few doors away Grain is “still the UK’s best indoor/outdoor beer and pizza rave… so staggeringly modern it makes the London pizza scene look positively medieval”. Gloucestershire stablemates Juliet in Stroud and the Woolpack in Slad are “both on peak form”, the latter’s burger now “off the charts to become the best in the UK, no question” (although “only a fool would overlook the tripe and sobrasada on toast”), while at Clevedon in Somerset, Mon Plaisir is now under a new regime and offers good local shellfish.
But his “most exciting meal of the summer” was at Circus Sauce, a no-choice restaurant in a tent that travels around the West Country alongside Giffords Circus, which served a meal of pork and nduja-stuffed squid, roast chicken and “epochal” profiteroles in chocolate sauce. This was, Giles said, “top-flight, imaginative home cooking where it might have been something akin to wedding catering”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy was delighted by her meal at Scotland’s oldest Indian restaurant, founded in 1947, still family-run, and since last year ensconced at its eighth address in Forrest Road, with an interior that’s a study in “postcolonial modern Indian maximalism”.
The menu mixes crowd-pleasing classics, signature dishes and “lesser spotted regional dishes”, such as recheado prawns. The cooking is “sophisticated, fun and bold”, with an admirable dedication to freshness shown in its seafood, and in the paneer made every morning. “Exemplary” curries include a monkfish moilee and a “rustic, home-style chicken karahi [that’s] a little heavy on the ghee, but packed with fresh ginger”.
“Institutions can get tired as the age, even lazy,” Chitra reckoned. “Khushi’s has done the opposite. It’s evolved, modernised, upped its game while staying true to its heritage.”
***
Camilla Long longed for a taste of Northumberland (“my favourite place in the world”) in east London, but instead of Bamburgh she found “Hackney cool” – “Mayfair with manbuns” – at Gabriel Waterhouse’s former supper club that now has a permanent home and offers a 12-course tasting menu to 24 guests at a single sitting.
Some of the courses “get it right”, she said, naming two: coral custard and quince, and scallop and koji. The rest of the meal, though, was “bonkers” – “high-end fancy food for rich, silk-clad Hackney whatevertarians who are stuck, slightly, in 2015”.
Every ingredient arrived with a long CV explained by the waiter, and Camilla lost count of the number of “quite good dishes” whose native ingredients (rye, fish and oysters) were overpowered by strong and intense flavours. A case in point was the ‘singing hinny’, a Northumbrian scone with mixed spice and currants, that was smothered in cream infused with “buckets” of Laphroaig whisky. “It tasted like Rob Roy’s shaving foam.”
*****
London Standard
Josh Barrie was enraptured by a bustling Gujarati social club/pub near the northwestern end of the Jubilee Line that was “full to the rafters with football, cheap pints and curry”.
The expansive menu, which has dishes from Mumbai in neighbouring Maharashtra as well as Gujarat, runs from batata wada (fried balls of mashed potato, garlic and chilli) to a nourishing veg masala and chicken tikka that arrives “sizzling theatrically on a cast iron skillet”.
The spring lamb is recommended. “Why is immediately obvious: it’s a deep, rich dish, with cushion-like meat slipping from bones and marrow mixing into the sauce. There’s a punch of chilli too, though it’s tempered by tomatoes, cinnamon and cardamom. We scoop it up with great folds of buttered naan.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
74 Charlotte Street by Ben Murphy, Fitzrovia
William Sitwell could not help but admire the “delicate, clever cooking” he found in this basement dining room at “the wrong end of Charlotte Street” (on the former site of Monica Galetti’s Mere), despite chef Ben Murphy’s use of tweezers, blowtorches and pipettes of jus.
“What arrives is food so clean, prepared to a degree of almost painful perfection, that one has to, on this occasion, be forgiving,” William conceded. A starter of chicken liver parfait whipped as light as a cloud yet brimming with a rich umami flavour, and served inside an eggshell with a brioche ‘soldier’, was “an adults-only pleasure dome of crunch and taste”.
A beautifully cooked cod loin was accompanied by squid Bolognese that was “a revelation of added depth to this ancient ragu which we should see a lot more of”. Finally, a soufflé of chocolate, praline and pistachio had “risen, you might say, like the Lord Jesus himself”.
