Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week to 7th September 2025
The Guardian
Grace Dent was puzzled and left a little flat by a visit to the new flagship dining option at the former Battersea Power Station, now a luxury shopping complex that is a “sumptuous paean to industrial chic” – but not the sort of place where people in this country head for special meals.
It is the first spin-off branch from Alan Yau’s Soho ‘Cantonese pub’ in Soho, and has “the dystopian address of Unit L1-003, Level 1, Phase 2”. But with £415 bottles of Vega Sicilia, Grace reckoned Duck and Rice Battersea “isn’t at all gastropub… much more quaffing an oligarch’s cellar with George Osborne while celebrating the glorious 12th”.
As for the food, main courses of the classic duck and rice house special and vegan glass noodles were “filling, but largely unmemorable” but “whopping great chilli king prawns, on the other hand, were possibly the highlight of the meal: fiery as heck, and in a fragrant pool of bright red, tamarind-heavy sauce”.
*****
The Observer
Guest reviewer, the venerable 94-year-old actress Sheila Hancock, drove herself (!) and her grandson to lunch at a three-month-old restaurant in Notting Hill, an area she is old enough to remember from the 1950s as home to Caribbean migrants from the Windrush generation. She was happily fed by here by a new group of immigrants, refugees from the war in Ukraine, where chef Eugene Korolev was forced to close his restaurant in Dnipro.
The décor and the “intriguing, imaginative and uniquely tasty” food at Sino (which means ‘hay’) transported her to a “comforting, rural world” summed up in a “brimming basket of bread … potato and honey bread, sourdough, Borodinsky rye and buckwheat”. This was followed by a dish of crayfish rolled in a green cabbage leaf sitting in a pool of pink tomato and dill velouté – “a work of art that I was reluctant to destroy. It is, I was told, a posh version of a workman’s lunch.”
Given that she was driving, Sheila only allowed herself a sip of Ukrainian wine: “Kolonist riesling 2024, a white wine from Odessa. It was utterly unique, totally unlike any wine I have ever tasted – I loved it.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren gave a rare 10/10 score (which he awards “max twice a decade”, he wrote on Twitter/X) to a bistro opened last October by Dan Chadwick (of the Woolpack in nearby Slad) – a “timeless, friendly, entirely unpretentious” operation that Giles felt “couldn’t be improved”.
“Everything here — the menu, the servers, the soft leather banquettes, the linen and paper-covered tables, the menu, the execution of the dishes, the pace of their arrival — is all that you dream of when you think of a bistro. And my score will reflect that shamelessly. Because Juliet is not just great for a boondocks bistro; it’s great for anywhere in the world.”
***
Chitra Ramaswamy fell in love with a “Scandiminimalist” restaurant in Stockbridge serving a “compact, inventive, rigorously sourced menu” from chef-patron Henry Dobson; her only complaint was that the homemade seating was uneven and uncomfortable.
Highlights of the meal included Atlantic bluefin tuna from Shetland – Chitra was told it was one of only three from the species caught in Scottish waters to make it on to the open market in the past three years – served sashimi-style and anointed with flecks of arsesmart – “Yes, arsesmart, a green so peppery it induces a mild sting. Feel free to titter softly. We did.”
Her main course was “one of the best venison dishes I have eaten”: “from the Stobo estate, the loin is boldy flavoured, delicately smoked, flawlessly cooked… the taste of the Borders – its green hills, wooded valleys and sparkling rivers – in every exquisite mouthful.”
“I love almost everything about Moss – there’s nowhere quite like it in Scotland,” she concluded. “What a beautiful, game-changing addition to Edinburgh’s ever more thrilling dining scene.”
***
Charlotte Ivers declared the well-known gastropub a “triumph” and praised its £35 three-course lunch menu.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles dismissed the view over the Grand Union Canal from the “sun-dappled” terrace of this new spot from the Crispin team – “sluggishly oily water… graffiti… brutal rolls of razor wire” – before delivering a largely positive review of its food.
A crudo of “splendidly fresh bream and slices of just-sweet mirabelle plum”, a “hunk of old dairy cow, cooked rare and sliced thin”, and an excellent Mangalitza sausage from Coombeshead Farm – ”all smoke, snap and succulence” – met his approval but the “‘table cheeseburger’, (meaning it’s cut in half for sharing),” was “easily the best thing… a burger of quiet majesty”.
On the negative side, over-chilled and under-seasoned crab toast, “brackish” cucumbers and “pretty chaotic” service let the experience down, so “Canal is not yet the equal to Stevie Parle’s late, great Dock Kitchen, a few minutes’ float downriver”.
*****
Daily Telegraph
The Kitchen at Feldon Valley, near Banbury
William Sitwell enjoyed a lunch in the modernist glass dining room of a golf club and retreat in the “golden-stoned Cotswolds”, where the “slick plates of British food with very professional service” were so good, he said, that “I might jettison the darts and take up golf”.
Starters of crab bisque and octopus with cucumber, avocado and pineapple were really excellent, but the pièce de résistance was “the finest steak, egg and chips I’ve had, delivering a bang for each and every buck”.
“As neat as the grass on the putting greens, as respectful as a busload of nuns greeting the Pope, [it] was a plate of staggeringly good eating. The steak was sirloin, perfectly grilled and rested, with a confit duck egg on top and a single large wedge of crisp chip – golden crust, flaky interior.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner was amusingly disappointed by a “mediocre international steakhouse” that has taken over the basement site at the Park Lane Hilton long occupied by the faux tiki bar Trader Vic’s. Mr Porter is billed by its own website as ‘a merciless lover…[who] fearlessly explores the borders between dinner and sinner’, a mission statement that set Jay up for much sniggering at a menu that can be read as “a single entendre” – notably sections called ‘Meat’ and ‘More Meat’.
As for the food, pretty well everything he tasted was awful, including ridiculously misnamed ‘King oyster carpaccio’ that was “a pile of slippery, salted, sliced mushrooms which, like this diner, are rather bitter”; yellowtail sashimi presented on slices of lotus root that “taste like they were fried back when Trader Vic’s was still knocking out the Mai Tais”; and a thin piece of steak that arrived cut into tiny slivers “because heaven forfend that the target clientele should have to do any work themselves”.
“Mr Porter wasn’t lying about this being a place of sin. It’s just that all the sins have been committed against innocent ingredients,” Jay sighed. “Dinner at Mr Porter isn’t sinful. It’s just a little sad.”
