Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week to 5th October 2025
The Guardian
Grace Dent was an early visitor to the “bright, twinkly turbo-Kudu” that has been newly transplanted to the West End from Peckham, and declared it “London’s prettiest restaurant of 2025 so far… the lighting campfire twinkly and the vibe sexy safari chic”.
The South African-inflected flavours and “earthy, live-fire approach” were evident from her first mouthful of Kudu’s bread with curried butter – “bread and butter is undoubtedly one of the loveliest mouthfuls on God’s great earth, and here I’ve found a new way to enjoy it” – which was followed by some excellent plates from the braai, including a “very good” piece of confit trout with crisp skin and a “whopper” of a pork chop with ‘monkey gland’ sauce (no actual monkeys involved).
For dessert, the ‘Kudu Kitkat’ – “a bowl of rich chocolate mousse with sweet kumquats and foamy marshmallows, toasted tableside with a chic set of hot irons, as if we were camping in the wilds of the Kruger national park”.
*****
The Observer
Guest reviewer Jago Rackham wondered if the mysterious venue that opened opposite his flat in Bethnal Green Road was a private club for South Korean émigrés, until a menu was posted outside in Korean and English. Visiting it with a Korean friend, he found somewhere very unlike the Korean barbecue joints that sprang up around London a decade ago; somewhere closer to a “pocha”, informal bars where Koreans like to drink while eating “anju” or street food – “a place to experience a culture on its own terms”.
The food is “clever and moreish”, some of it familiar enough, such as fried chicken with the distinctively crunchy Korean batter: “At Dopi it’s cut with cubes of pickled radish, which are white, clean as marble, integral to the next greedy bite”. Other dishes, though, reveal “entirely novel combinations, flavours, feelings. It’s the closest I get to knowing the excitement my mother must have felt trying an avocado for the first time at 20, sushi at 30.”
Haemul-pajeon (seafood pancakes) get the thumbs-up, as does the sizzling bulgogi beef in a sweet-salty sauce, eaten with lettuce leaves and gochujang making wraps called ssam, “which combine lightness and richness, give and crunch”. Less successful is the gamja-tang, a hearty stew of pork, kimchi and potatoes – “the food of some universal grandmother” – which is marred by pork that is “a little mealy, of poor quality”.
*****
London Standard
David Ellis made a trip to a Victorian Gothic former hunting lodge built by Lord Byron’s son-in-law on Scotland’s northwest coast that is now apparently Britain’s northernmost five-star hotel. It boasts a whisky bar that might be David’s favourite bar in the world and a wood-lined restaurant, 1887, that is full of “mystery, magic” and very good cooking.
Chef Danny Young recognises that “gastronomy of an intellectual kind would be inappropriate” here, so he serves “food that does not shout but impresses, food that is delicious”. Dishes include a mushroom tea that is “savoury, rich, umami”; local venison tartare; barbecued langoustine; cod slow-cooked to bring out its buttery sweetness, and beef fillet “as perfect and tender as an old Scots ballad”. And while the menu is traditional, the wine list is attractively “modern, playful and egalitarian”.
The experience left David musing, “You look out of the window and hope for snow, as though you might get stuck here, in the safest place on earth.”
***
Back in London (busy week) but still on a vaguely Scottish theme, David Ellis dropped in at what was once a scuzzy indie rock venue, now revived as a pub serving Portuguese food – “or what I’d call seaside European” – from chef Jamie Allan, formerly of the Plimsoll and Tollington’s.
David and three companions ordered “one of everything on the menu”, working their way merrily through olives “so big they look like they’re blowing their cheeks out”; fried eggs topped with “hunks of trout soft enough they were mistaken for fruit”; a pork escalope “as brawny as a forearm”; octopus with horseradish and tomato; a bifana “full with rightly fatty pork”; lamb samosas with a plum chutney; and black pudding, “always a hit”. There was just one miss, rabbit in piri piri sauce – although this was “by no means bad, just a little boring”.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Chitra Ramaswamy trekked by bus, train, ferry and taxi to the shores of Loch Fyne, where his year “visionary” chef Pam Brunton is celebrating a decade at “the most radical and exciting restaurant in Scotland”.
Here, Chitra found “cooking that makes you think – but don’t panic, it’s delicious too”. She enjoyed leaves, pods, shoots and berries she had never encountered before on a plate (cucamelon, grilled leaf of goosefoot, candied pine cones), as well as more familiar oysters, langoustines, mackerel and mutton.
Most impressive of all was a simple-sounding but “ravishing” bread-and-butter broth: “Yes, a soup made from waste produce and thrifty Scots nous is one of the most exciting things I’ve eaten in five years on the job… Eating Brunton’s food is like eating the best idea of Scotland. Her dishes carry an atmosphere that stays with you.”
***
Charlotte Ivers had her faith in small-plates restaurants restored by “a meal I’ll always remember” at the latest opening from Jonathan MacDonald and Daniel Spurr, the team behind Glasgow’s Ox and Finch and Ka Pao.
Chef Robin Aitken, a local boy, deploys a “subtlety of touch” to bring together mismatched elements from disparate cuisines, such as cured trout in tiger milk with salted melon; Spanish sobrasada with Shetland mussels in Breton cider; kosho (a citrussy Japanese chilli paste) with skate wing; and miso with mustardy beef.
“It’s clever, properly thought out. Even better, there’s no shouting about the menu’s mission statement. Nobody tries to explain ‘the Concept’ to us. This is just assured food from a chef who seems able to march into any country in the world and declare, ‘I’ll have a bit of that’.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles hailed the new brasserie at Fulham’s Craven Cottage stadium from chef Adam Byatt (of Trinity and Bistro Union in Clapham) as “utterly historic”, while its signature coronation chicken pâté en croute – a tribute Constance Spry, after whom the restaurant was named – would, he said, “make even the most rabidly Anglophobic of Gallic chefs burst into a rendition of I Vow To Thee My Country”.
Anchovy fingers in flaky pastry, sweetcorn and green chilli tarts, a superlative crab omelette, and skewers of lamb and mint all displayed Byatt’s “effortless mixing of the classic and modern… Genius!”.
Tom then dropped his dining companion into the review, without introducing him: “’As good as it gets”, says Giles, between mouthfuls of mint-crusted rack of lamb.”
Strangely, he never divulged who this Giles was, although those who had read Giles Coren’s review of the very same Brasserie Constance in The Times a couple of week back might hazard a guess.
*****
Daily Telegraph
The General Tarleton, Ferrensby, North Yorkshire
William Sitwell saluted a team headed by chef Tommy Banks of the Black Swan at Oldstead who have chosen to “blindly chuck squillions at this eight-bedroomed old boozer” – an inn dating from 1786, which had been in danger of dereliction before they stepped in.
Perhaps not so blindly after all, since “Banks knows what he’s doing” and there’s now “a distinct feel of professionalism” about the place. The menu is “a vision of refined British pub grub (with) a wine list offering value to both the passing punter who wants a bottle for £30 and the prosperous North Yorkshire folk keen to drop £345 on an epic French claret”.
Dishes range from steak tartare and Scotch eggs to fish and chips, pie and mash, chops and fillets from the grill and “potatoes most ways” – all of which are done well. If Yorkshire coppa and pickles looked like a rather dreary plate of ham and chopped carrots, it turned out to be “a hymn to the pig and carrot, the sweetness of the ham perked by what was more of a prick than a stab of brined root veg”.
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner dined at a spacious new Italian restaurant in the former London Shipping Exchange where, he advised, you need to sit facing the street to take in the “creamy grandeur of the Grade II listed building”. Face the other way and your view is of the atrium of a sprawling new office development: “somebody’s idea of elegant and my idea of hell”.
There is a menu of “quality if unshowy Italian food of the sort you can talk over rather than talk about, priced at whatever the neighbourhood will bear… Think Club Class Italian.” Mostly of the dishes Jay ate were forgettable, with the exception of “a couple of high points”: angel hair pasta with ceps fried in butter was “an enticing shade of autumnal beige and has bite and slurp in equal measure”; thin-cut zucchini fritti were equally good.
One the debit side, “we have the calamari e gamberi, which means prawns, plural, but there is just the one. I cut it in half to share with my companion. When you find yourself counting items of seafood there is a problem, however greaselessly fried it happens to be”. This wasn’t a one-off omission: a skewer billed as ‘prawns, scallops & squid’ also had a single solitary scallop.
