Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 8th February 2026
The Times & Sunday Times
The Sunday Times unveiled Camilla Long, one of its heavyweight columnists, as its new restaurant critic this week – dispatching her for her first review, as custom apparently has it, to London’s oldest restaurant (est. 1798).
Rules is well-known to Camilla after possibly a hundred visits; it’s an institution she loves for a brand of confidence that is “so rare in restaurants as to be almost erotic”, and for a raffish atmosphere. There’s an upstairs cocktail bar, once “Edward VII’s sex lair”, and the feeling that the whole place is “a bit wayward and leery, about six months from needing a serious refit. But then, when you’re over two hundred years old, why make any effort? Bothering about loos is common, isn’t it?”
So what did she make of the victuals? “Acres of succulent brown food, game, shrimp, puddings. The main cooking method seems to be ‘imperial fug’. Potted shrimps are soft and silken in their pot — there’s a fat wodge of bread, more than enough to go around — and duck rillettes are gamey, spicy, fabulous, with a big earthy dollop of armagnac chutney. A roast crown of lean mallard is served pink, with salsify, mushrooms and quince. It’s fine. And then there is Rules’s — what’s the dumb phrase? — hero dish, steamed steak and kidney pudding.”
***
Giles Coren finally made the trek out east to a loud, uncomfortable pop-up-turned-permanent restaurant from Abby Lee, “an impressive young Gen Z/millennial bluehair with tats and a ballsy attitude who happens also to be Chinese Malaysian/Singaporean, the birth combo I revere above all others, food-wise”.
Her cooking more than met Giles’s highest expectations: “Everything was gloriously original, alive and confident, the chilli heat always mediated by sweetness and salinity, tempered in coconut, never wantonly aggressive.”
A tartare of wild sea bass was “raw fish sorcery of the highest order”; grilled banana blossom (jantung pisang), which Giles had never eaten before, “offered a whole new mouthfeel, spongy and bland but new and strangely compelling”; grilled hogget rump was “miraculous”. Best of all was a piece of short rib “the size of a guitar, braised in coconut milk broth to a perfection”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy savoured an evening of gluttony in a no-frills old-school craft ale bar serving “beautifully made dirty food” from Rob Casson, aka the King of Feasts, whose overpowering masterpiece is a “fiendishly filthy” take on a Findus crispy pancake. “Its crispy melty pastry glimmers with oil. Once sliced down the middle, it oozes cheese and fatty hunks of ham hough. It’s obscene, artery-clogging… and I never want another.”
His burger – “crazy mustardy, like a needle up the nose” – is definitely one of the best in Scotland, “probably the best you’ll get for a tenner”, while his ‘Bodega Chopped Cheese’, is “— wait for it — vegan! And magnificent: funky, messy, meaty and utterly compulsive… I still can’t get over it.”
“The King of Feasts is a genius,” Chitra declared. “Long may his reign continue.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent enjoyed a “roaringly trad” if thoroughly “classy” meal at a converted former All Bar One in central Birmingham – an area otherwise dominated by pricey chain restaurants. Named after the man-eating sea-monster usually spelt Scylla (opposite Charybdis), it is reassuring committed to “delivering an experience that’s seriously, elegantly Greek, but in a playful way”.
Greek-themed cocktails, smoked aubergine mezze, beef tartare, red snapper and karidopita walnut dessert were all good to excellent, but the big hit were the “mesmerising” beef fat potatoes – “quite possibly the best fondant potatoes I’ve ever eaten, and maybe even the best potato side dish served in the UK today,” pronounced Grace.
“To the naked eye, they resemble that all too familiar rectangular gastropub-style confit potato stack, as made famous by the Quality Chop House and copied everywhere, but these are so much more than that. The centre of these spuds is more like fluffy mash, while the exterior has a crisp whack of beef fat on all four surfaces.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner swooned over a meal which confirmed his view that Francesco Mazzei, whom he has followed from L’Anima and Sartoria to this new perch in the swanky Corinthia hotel, is “quite simply the best” of the many great Italian chefs currently working in London.
The “uneasy setting” – Jay reckoned Albert Speer would have admired the architecture of the dining room, whose linen screens were reminiscent of a First World War TB infirmary – and the “unconscionable pricing” could not disguise the quality of Mazzei’s cooking. “The earthy, jagged edges to his food are heavily inspired by his Calabrian upbringing, but never get rubbed smooth by the gilding of the grand dining room”.
This is a chef whose “game is complete”, from the springy focaccia at the beginning of the meal, via some “tottering lasangna pastachina” (from the chef’s mum’s recipe), tuna crudo, porchetta, a huge portion of zucchini fritti, through to the final dish of “cocoa-pelted tiramisu presented tableside in an earthenware bowl the size of an SUV tyre”.
“I know I will sit in more comfortable spaces in 2026,” Jay concluded. “I will certainly settle smaller bills. But I doubt I will eat better than I did at Mezzogiorno.”
*****
London Standard
David Ellis gave a stinker of a review to a Georgian (Black Sea, not US South) restaurant that has taken over the Heddon Street premises where Fallow and Manteca started out – revenge, perhaps, for being told “you stink” by the owner as he arrived.
David liked the “tiny skewers” of lamb with onions, parsley and sumac, but nothing else. A deep-fried king oyster mushroom “tasted of batter, but nothing more… It might well have been a deep-fried elastic band”. Cornish bream crudo was “boring, a dish done to death a million times elsewhere”. Two khinkali (soup-filled dumplings), pork and shiitake girolles, “were barely distinguishable”. Most baffling of all was a single, deliberately overcooked octopus tentacle on a risotto “the colour of someone who recently found out rollercoasters don’t agree with them”.
As for the famously “interesting” Georgian wines, from a tradition stretching back 8,000 years, “unfortunately whoever made the pair we tried must have skipped millennia of oenology class as both were hideous, tannic messes.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles was impressed by the modern British fare “with a pronounced Italian accent” he found at a tiny Harborne outfit from former Simpson’s chef Dan Sweet, whose “clever, polished and assured cooking” represents “exceptional value” at £45 for three courses at lunch (£55 at dinner).
Presentation is “pretty rather than pretentious” and “flavour always comes first”, in dishes such as a starter of raviolo stuffed with spicy sausage in a rich ragu with a light parmesan espuma, which managed to be “both gutsily hearty and quietly refined” and was “one of the best things I’ve eaten all year”.
Among the mains, a beautiful piece of bream with a sauce of nduja, intensely sweet tomatoes and parsley oil is “like a shaft of Mediterranean sunshine on this most bleak and damp of days, shavings of fennel adding gently bitter bite”. Puddings are excellent, too.
*****
Daily Telegraph
Michael Caines at the Stafford, St James’s
William Sitwell praised the Devon-based chef’s new spot in a smart London hotel, where the food is “richer than Croesus”, and approaching perfection. While the service is perhaps overblown, William said, the cooking offers “guts and glory” rather than the “gels, jellies, smears and foams” and other fripperies often associated with fine-dining.
