Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 8th March 2026
The Guardian
Trillium, Birmingham
Grace Dent warmed to a “weird, bold, silly restaurant”, where high-profile Brummie chef Glyn Purnell has “miraculously” managed to translate Michelin-style cooking for what she called a “semi-rowdier yet still upmarket stage”: “there’s a general feeling of people – gasp! – actually enjoying life.”
The venue is a noisy, “brand new, glass-fronted, multicoloured mock birdcage”, with service that is jolly, prompt, informal and “hugely welcoming”, while the food is “relentlessly spot on, as well as indulgent, imaginative and bizarrely generous in portion size”.
Highlights included ‘beef carpaccio with Oxo cube’; a “voluptuous beast” of an ‘XXL gougère’, filled with Montgomery cheddar and topped with inch-thick gruyère garnish and a dusting of paprika; and a chunk of perfectly cooked Cornish skate with butter beans and a rich espelette sauce “that I’ve since thought about many, many times”.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
The Potted Lobster, Bamburgh
Giles Coren enjoyed a satisfying and extremely good-value family lunch at a seafood haunt on the northeast coast with a plastic-covered menu backed up by fast-changing blackboard specials.
Everything the Corens ate was excellent, including half a dozen oysters from nearby Lindisfarne and pan-seared scallops with crispy belly pork and quince, while the prices were “extraordinarily generous these days”: mussels marinière with chips for £29 “could have fed two people happily”, while lager and lemon battered haddock and chips “was genuinely two foot-long fillets of (heavenly) battered fish for £21 that would have been two £21 portions anywhere in London”.
***
Angeethi by Sagar Massey, Glasgow
Chitra Ramaswamy could not hide her disappointment at the first Indian restaurant in Scotland to have won Michelin recognition, from a Delhi-born chef who has worked at some of Scotland’s top venues (Martin Wishart at Loch Lomond, Rusacks in St Andrews, Cail Bruich in Glasgow).
The menu was “closer to that of an old-school curry house” than she had expected, and the meal opened strongly with poppadoms, grilled lamb chops and chenin blanc from Maharashtra (the first Indian wine Chitra had ever tasted). But the dishes that followed were unimpressive: ‘Amritsari machli fry’ was fish in a thick and soggy batter; butter chicken lacked smokiness; biryani was “good but not breathtaking. We were hoping to lift the lid and be knocked sideways by a fragrant head of steam.”
Everything seemed “a little safe”, and Chitra wanted to see “more regional specificity and personality… more of Massey himself, on his plates.”
***
Bavette, Leeds
Camilla Long got down and dirty in a “warm, unmannered and unpretentious” bistro that “could only be more authentically French if it were run by hookers and/or resentful, silent elderly men”.
The cooking – from a locally born chef now returned from London – was “gorgeous, confident, surprising”, with a menu filled with “sturdy, noble dishes, whiffing mightily of the sea and the soil. All the best French food — and indeed, bistros — feel like this: a bit horny, a bit dirty, as if you’ve been truffling in the ground with your bare hands, like a hairy animal.”
The most interesting item began life as two separate dishes – a crab soufflé and a lobster bisque, now combined into a pungent, muddy, roux-based bisque, with a mop of fresh, silky fennel. Like the restaurant itself, it “came charmingly together. It felt relaxed, just right.”
*****
London Standard
Osteria Vibrato, Soho
David Ellis liked much about the new venture from Charlie Mellor, ex-Laughing Heart, from its good looks and “Casablanca” atmospherics to the choice of 10 olive oils and a £3 cover charge that buys bread, oil, a little cheese and still or sparkling water.
But the cooking, over two meals, was “a mixed bag”. Dishes of artichoke, red prawns, salt cod and a mixed grill “made clear the chefs have chops: a Vegas pink slice of lamb rack couldn’t have been improved”. But one of two risottos was “chalky and undercooked”, a ragu was “grim”, and ricotta tortelli with tomato and butter “had the sting of a lazy Sunday supper about it”.
With a two-course meal costing around £85 a head and wine starting at £50 a bottle, the food should be better – “that’s the rub,” David said. “I’m not sure this is Mellor’s fault; it may simply be the cost of operating in Soho. Restaurants require chefs, but they also take lawyers, accountants and landlords. Someone from that craven trio is ruining it for the rest of us.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
The Chelsea Grill, Chelsea
William Sitwell was similarly dismayed by the bill for a “heavenly dinner” at an attractive candlelit steakhouse on the King’s Road, which included not only the “best example I’ve had” of ex-dairy cow carpaccio, but also a shared bone-in ribeye steak “the perfection of which I challenge any chef in the world to meet”.
But nothing – the “fabulous food”, a good bottle of red, an attracting candlelit setting – justified a bill which was, William fulminated, “as painful when it arrived as finding a scorpion in your trunks during a summer siesta”.
With the rib priced at £135 per kilo and each slice of toast charged at £8, the food alone cost £298 for two, drinks and service pushing the total towards £500.
*****
The Observer
Dongnae, Bristol
Rebecca Nicholson enjoyed a deceptively casual but revelatory Korean meal at a restaurant whose name means ‘neighbourhood’, and which “presented itself like a plain white T-shirt on a supermodel. Everything about it shrugged: yeah, I know.”
Mushroom sotbap – short-grain rice in a sizzling pot, topped with chilli-spiked perilla oil and an egg yolk – had a soothing warmth; “the nuttiness, with the heat and richness of the sauces, turned those mushrooms and rice into something holy”.
“The tuna belly hand roll was delicate with wasabi, which I thought hated, though it turned out I just hate the nuclear green splodge from a small plastic sachet. It introduced a swaggering warmth that spread lazily, then blossomed suddenly, a journey of flavour that was repeated throughout the meal.”
