Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 9th March 2025
London Standard
La Polombe, Kensington
David Ellis was won over by a two-year-old restaurant from James Chiavarini, owner of the long-running Il Portico nearby, which he has relaunched after bringing in a new head chef and co-owner in Jake Leach, formerly of The Ledbury and the Harwood Arms.
The improvement, David noted, is quite staggering. “This is a neighbourhood restaurant charging neighbourhood prices, but with a quality of cooking more usually found at Ducasse at The Dorchester, The Ritz, or, duh, The Ledbury.”
Game is a main feature, much of it shot by Chiaravini, whose dog Alba is responsible for the truffles that appear during the whose main theme is one of “unadulterated excellence.”
*****
The Guardian
Satori, Birmingham
Grace Dent visited a spendy Japanese restaurant in Moseley whose black walls, floors and tables gave it an air of “1980s MFI showroom doing international playboy lair”. The pompous promise of a dining experience that ‘transcends the ordinary and becomes a journey of discovery, flavour, and connection’, plus some determined upselling from an eye-rolling waiter, put her on her guard before she had tasted anything.
Sure enough, the cocktails Grace ordered failed to arrive, while the sushi platter that opened the meal was “pretty indistinguishable from the freshly rolled options at Waitrose”. Main dishes were better: a piece of “rather nice fish in a buttery miso sauce” and “three deliciously plump, pink pepper-seasoned lamb chops with a few smears of yoghurt and some spindly heritage carrots, which owed more to Bengal than to Tokyo”.
The ‘baked Mount Fuji’ dessert turned out to be a chunk of matcha ice-cream in sticky meringue with a shot of whisky poured over and set alight. “After the flames abated, the plate – black, of course – was a mound of singed, still moist meringue mix sitting on some melted ice-cream and a puddle of whisky. You really can’t put a price on that kind of excitement, although in this case it came to £12.”
*****
The Observer
Sharmilee, Leicester
In his final review for the Observer, Jay Rayner returned to the second restaurant he reviewed for the paper and only survivor from the first half dozen, 26 years on. The décor has changed and the impressive young woman manager was not even born when he first visited, but “what matters is the extremely good value vegetarian Indian food, which I loved then and adore now.”
Established by the Gosai family in 1973, Sharmilee (like Bobby’s across the road) is a “stalwart of Leicester’s Golden Mile”, with a shop on the ground floor and a dining room upstairs. Prices have risen from £2–£3 for starters and £5 for mains in 1999 to £5 and £8. “I don’t think the bill has quite kept pace with food price inflation,” Jay noted with approval.
He signed off with a big thank-you to the 1,300 or so restaurants he has reviewed – “even the shockingly bad ones. You can learn a lot from a lousy night out.”
“Underlying this column has been one grand principle: that there must be space in life for fun because otherwise, what’s the point? For me, fun is going to a restaurant. I really am easily pleased.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
The Tivoli, Cheltenham
Giles Coren visited the latest pub from his favourite Cotswolds food-publicans, Tom Noest & Peter Creed of the Bell Inn in Langford, the Lamb in Shipton-under-Wychwood, the Fox in Broadwell and the Sherborne Arms in Northleach.
All these, Giles reckoned, are “proper and honest, serious and real, expensive, yes, but not too poncey, not too pleased with themselves, expressing the right way forward for pub food in a post-pickled eggs and pork scratchings world.”
The Tivoli was every bit as good, with a “big bar for proper drinking” and “two big, airy dining rooms”.
***
The Real Food Cafe, Tendril
Chitra Ramaswamy and family stopped off at an independent roadside caff that has been “the ideal refuelling” spot for 20 years on the A82, the “gateway to the Highlands”.
Running “like a well-oiled machine”, it has a classic menu with nods to modern trends: burgers, sausage rolls, chips with everything, plus loaded fries, plant-based ‘tofish’ and chips, and gluten-free fish and chips. What is special is the focus on sustainability and provenance: suppliers from across Scotland are name-checked and posters on the wall explain that “to prevent overfishing, the Real Food Cafe doesn’t use nearby ports like Oban.”
The food was tasty, too: the MSC-certified haddock “succulent, fresh and bang on”, with homemade tartare sauce; the burger “gnarly, juicy and richly flavoured”; the chips “thick cut and properly potatoey”.
***
Skof, Manchester
Charlotte Ivers rummaged through her lexicon of superlatives after a visit to “the most exciting new restaurant in the country” and “the hottest booking in the city — perhaps the country — right now”. Skoff is the first restaurant from Tom Barnes, a protégé of L’Enclume’s Simon Rogan, and most of the staff have worked there too.
But, she stressed, it’s not just a copy of L’Enclume. “It is younger, trendier, made for the city and not the Lakes”. The technical precision and creativity of the cooking were astonishing. Highlights of the 12-course tasting menu included duck in a rich, sweet sauce containing tapioca balls, served with black pudding and a droplet of bone marrow, “absurd and perfect in its decadence”. A dessert of rice sorbet made with milk oolong tea also lodged itself in her memory.
“Every detail here is perfect — a lifetime in the making”, Charlotte said. “What a remarkable thing Barnes has built on the foundations his old boss gave him. I hope Rogan weeps with pride when he visits. I hope they both do.”
*****
Daily Mail
Browns, Oxford
Tom Parker Bowles took his daughter to a restaurant he remembered for “the sexy, sultry feel of the place” in the early 1990s. Both were disappointed. These days, he said, Browns has “all the ambience of a suburban morgue” – “nostalgia has rarely tasted so dull”.
The food ranged from the occasionally decent – a “splendidly ovine” shepherd’s pie with a crisp and golden top – to the “politely inedible” – an under-seasoned chicken skewer on a mess of kale. “Really, this is catering (albeit with a slightly aspirational edge), rather than cooking, and not exactly cheap either”, at £100 with two glasses of average wine.
*****
Financial Times
Victor Garvey at the Midland Grand, St Pancras
For his last “proper review” before switching to a new food column, Tim Hayward headed to “inarguably the best dining room in London” at the “beyond beautiful” Midland Grand Hotel, for its opening night under chef Victor Garvey, of Californian-inflected Sola in Soho.
Never keen on tasting menus, Tim chose a “modest” 7-course version – “I never thought I’d describe £129 as ‘a snip’, but we live in monstrous times.” It followed a pretty standard progression of French-Mediterranean cuisine: a trio of canapes, a foie gras course, fish, duck and dessert.
But Garvey – “a force of nature” in Tim’s view – made something “particularly interesting” of it. “He’s steeped in European tradition, obsessed with modern Michelin idiom, but he’s, well, American. In a good way. He doesn’t let any of that stuff get in the way and instead throws everything he’s got at it with unembarrassed enthusiasm.
“It feels good to have been there, at the start of something spectacular.”
