Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant reviewers were writing about in the week up to 8th June 2025
London Standard
David Ellis raved over a tiny no-booking bar with a dozen seats which serves “London’s best sushi”, the latest opening in the nascent Notting Hill empire from Chris D’Sylva, across the road from Dorian, his “mothership”.
Fish “better than I have ever had in London” brought a look of “ecstatic bliss” to the face of David’s missus – “one I’ve never seen before, which was a bit of an ego blow.”
“Even miso soup”, he said, “was above any other I’ve had. It could fuel an army, cure a hospital ward, ease grief.” And unlike a lot of sushi bars, the atmosphere was not one of quiet reverence: instead, the place “hums with music, bottles are constantly being opened… Everyone is having fun.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent was impressed by the “darkly chic” follow-up to Angelina in Dalston, which follows a similar Milan-meets-Tokyo culinary approach that “will offend purists everywhere, but being upset has never been so delicious”.
Focaccia is topped with nori, tempura’d courgette flowers are stuffed with miso ricotta, bream is cured in kombu and doused in burnt butter, while hamachi sashimi is smothered in truffled soy. The pasta dishes are finished with Japanese touches, while meat and fish are grilled over bincho-tan charcoal, the Angus steak drenched in miso mutter and served with Japanese greens and pickles.
“There’s a lot to adore about all of this cooking; it’s generous, oily, saucy and certainly not to be eaten every day,” Grace purred. “Every plate we tried swam in some variation on spiced, seasoned, miso-flecked oil that would have been a terrible waste to consign to the dishwasher.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Bill’s, everywhere
Giles Coren did not review any restaurants (he was playing padel in Spain), but he did devote a column to the economics of the restaurant industry, with a focus on Bill’s – “a mid-market chain so forgettable that I have been to at least three of them but couldn’t tell you when or where, or what I ate”.
Bill’s – part of Richard Caring’s Ivy Collection – increased its profits by 30% last year while revenues rose by only 1%, and had achieved this by cutting costs, which meant cheaper ingredients, worse chefs, grubbier loos and fewer waiters. So shareholders had benefited – “which in this case is mainly Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, former prime minister of Qatar” – but not diners. In the same period, Giles noted, “1,409 UK restaurants went bust”.
“So when you complain about the rising prices in the restaurants I review,” Giles admonished his readers, “do bear in mind that the alternative is to go where prices are maintained by stripping away everything else to ‘benefit’ owners and shareholders.”
***
Chitra Ramaswamy headed for the Pentland Hills on “the green margins of Edinburgh”, host to a regenerative no-dig farm which supplies some of the city’s best restaurants and has its own farm-to-table in a 600-year-old cow barn.
“The Free Company bears a utopian name that conjures up a gaggle of anticapitalist (and, yes, posh) dreamers committed to changing the world one cauliflower at a time.”
Chitra was happy to report that farming brothers Angus and Charlie Buchanan-Smith have created “one of the most exciting farm-to-table restaurants in Scotland”, with a “canny head chef” in Craig Turner, who understands that “with produce this fresh, the less done to it the better”.
***
Charlotte Ivers found her way into a “dungeon of red velvet and low neon lighting — halfway between a West End cinema and a Bangkok sex club”, in London’s Chinatown. “The ceilings, for some indiscernible reason, are mirrored. It’s mad. It’s a little bit magical. This is, of course, exactly what we want.”
this is the second branch of Noodle and Beer (the original is near Liverpool Street), and the main point of coming here, she said, is to eat ‘tian-shui mian’ water noodles – “plump snakes emerging from a pit of brown sludge” that “resist your teeth on the way down in an extraordinarily satisfying manner”.
Charlotte also recommended the crispy courgette fries in salty Persian spices (“oh, to snack on these on a sunny terrace with a glass of crisp chablis. The wine list isn’t up to much…”), plus the dry ‘wa-wa mian’ blanket noodles with frog’s legs or the wheat noodles with double-cooked chicken thighs.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles declared Stevie Parle’s “vast, buzzy, glamour-drenched room” an “instant London classic” – confirming a judgement he had made public a week earlier via Giles Coren (scooping himself in the process).
“God, I love this place,” he expatiated. “The food, the service, the room, the cocktails, the seductively dim lighting…. Hell, this is a place where even the pot plants look sexy.”
As for the menu, it is “essentially European with a few global flourishes…. The cooking is both simple and sophisticated; a chef and kitchen at the very top of their game.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
The Blue Stoops, Notting Hill Gate
William Sitwell revisited his 1990s stomping ground at the top of Kensington Church Street, where he stumbled across his old haunt Kensington Place mid-demolition but found solace in the revived Allsopps brewery’s newish pub and its “all-day Edwardian” victuals (oysters, anchovy toast, devilled eggs, rabbit croquettes, ham hock pie, braised shoulder of lamb, walnut tart).
“It is distinctly, chest-pumpingly, vow-to-thee-my-country English food. If vegan is hallowed turf to the Lib Dems, then this, in all its rabbity, mash-and-cabbage glory, is the menu of Reform.”
William had “the lunch of champions”: a sumptuous and comforting plate of braised lamb that was “like a magic potion for happiness”.
“Kensington Place is dead. Long live The Blue Stoops.”
*****
Financial Times
Royal Nawaab Pyramid, Stockport
Jay Rayner visited a vast “steel-blue glass cathedral” that “squats… like some cartoon version of an alien spaceship” beside the M60 in Greater Manchester. Following a reputed £15million refurb, the former HQ of the Co-operative Bank is now an Indian restaurant with three banqueting suites accommodating 1,250 people plus a 400-seater restaurant (“And it’s full”).
The self-service restaurant, which charges £29.99 a head, is so good it forces Jay to rethink his prejudice against buffets. “The aesthetic is classy cruise ship” and a buffet counter “so long you could run time trials down it” offers more than 100 different dishes to a mainly British Asian crowd: the warming lights are not kind to poppadoms, but the fried items – chicken wings and samosas – turn over so fast they don’t have a chance to go soggy, while the “startling array of curries actually benefit from sitting on a gentle simmer”.
The standard kormas and tikka masalas are here, but Jay was most impressed by less obvious dishes: lamb praya, slow-cooked trotters served in a soup-like broth, and haleem, “an extraordinary concoction of lamb in lentils… cooked down for so long that it has turned into a paste-like soup.”
