Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 9th August 2026.
Financial Times
Jay Rayner had been tracking this new venture from chef Dan Smith and sommelier Elliott Ashton-Konig, the crew behind the Fordwich Arms near Canterbury, since before it opened – and found his anticipation was absolutely justified.
The menu consisted of dishes that were “more bespoke than ready-to-wear”, such as oysters with raspberry vinegar and charcoal-infused cream and unmissable pommes dauphine, “golden, airy fingers of the lightest deep-fried mashed potato, accompanied by a proud turban of deep-green dill emulsion”.
“The dish that gives the game away, the one that points up the seriousness of the kitchen here, is a so-called lobster salad, which is a salad much as a Rolex Oyster is just something by which to tell the time and a Maybach is a runabout. Rosy hunks of claw meat rest on a sweet-sour tomato mayonnaise with shiny white currants and segments of citrus, and a little more besides. It is the very best seafood shown up to its best advantage. It’s beautiful.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles was also impressed by this “small, civilised and heavily air conditioned” restaurant, where he enjoyed “one of those rare lunches where they get everything just right”.
“The only problem with the menu is choosing what not to eat”, he said; the solution, it seems, was to sample most of it: Welsh rarebit croquettes “as good as they sound”; some “exhilaratingly fresh” sea bream tostadas; panisse with Iberico ham and pecorino cheese that were “all gone in two salty, nutty bites”; a skewer of short-rib beef, “dense, lavishly rich and gloriously fatty.”
Then mussels, “huge and plump… a dish of creamily voluptuous allure”; wild bass “beautifully cooked”; “and do not miss the lamb chops, cooked over charcoal. The fat is lovingly rendered, the flesh taut, pink and bleating of a life well lived. We gnaw off every last scrap”. For pudding, lemon meringue with lemon ice cream, “both sweet and tartly bracing”.
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent had a taste of the future at a new Korean venture in Manchester’s Piccadilly Plaza that “heralds the end of traditional hospitality”, with food ordered via an at-table screen and ferried by human hand – “think McDonald’s, but as a gargantuan restaurant”.
The place is “cheap, strip-lit, sparsely decorated”, feeling “more like a 1990s service station than a restaurant”, and it caters equally well for experts (Korean students from Manchester University using it as a canteen) as for “tables of pensioners from Rochdale encountering Korean food for the first time”. The food is taken seriously: “a stone bowl of silken tofu sundubu jjigae turned up in a fabulous seafood broth, followed by a chicken dolsot bibimbap which was also highly decent.”
It all added up to a “pleasant, albeit slightly hollow dining experience”. “The drive-thru Costa Coffee-ification of British restaurants continues. Treasure your servers while you have them. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren whisked his family off to the closest hotel restaurant with a swimming pool he could find to his home in north London, where they had fun eating from the ‘Luxury Watford Buffet’ (£94 a head or £46 for children).
“You can get your £94/worth if you are big and fat and greedy enough, which a great many of the guests were”, feasting on platefuls of English pizza, roast pork, beef and chicken, sushi, curry and noodles. Giles took a different route, getting his value by eating 14 poached cold langoustines with garlic aioli and some “perfectly conditioned” Baron Bigod.
“The food quality here is about six out of ten, but the quantity is quite literally infinite,” Giles pronounced. “Who cares about provenance and precision and authenticity when there’s a pool and a beach and pina coladas and ping pong barely half an hour from the national capital?”
***
Camilla Long hailed a “great restaurant” from a “chef who used to run one of Heston’s pubs” (Matt Larcombe) and a sommelier who used to work at Le Gavroche (Rémi Cousin) – although she wondered whether its “closed loop” link to an organic farm up the road in Radlett was too “Marie Antoinette” for current times.
Her doubts were dispelled as she crossed the threshold into a “dreamy”, chicly furnished room that “looks as if it has been lovingly carved out of heritage Norwegian oak by a topless Erling Haaland”, then worked her way through a “serious, well-balanced” menu of “skilful, inventive and interesting dishes”.
“The knockout is the mushroom parfait – a silky fat bomb of emulsified mushroom that’s smooth, plump, creamy: vegan foie gras.” Almost as good was a “hulking” pork chop to share “which comes steaming across the room with mustard and is sensational: melting, pink, cavemannish, and about as good as a pork chop gets.”
***
Clare Sawers felt short-changed by an expensive but ersatz 1920s ‘supper club experience’ –complete with dancing showgirls – in the new restaurant extension at Crossbasket Castle, which has been converted into a five-star hotel at a cost of £30million.
“The menu makes me feel as if I’m on a clandestine date with Lord Tony Baddington from Jilly Cooper’s Rivals”, with “flash-your-cash fare” including caviar and prime Speyside beef (misspelt on the menu as “cote de boef”).
Starters were just about up to scratch (a Loch Fine scallop was “beautifully buttery” while the crab was merely satisfactory) but the mains monkfish and beef fillet were too salty and dessert was not the freshest. “Michel Roux may have put his name to the menus but he has been nowhere near tonight’s plates,” Clare reckoned. “Save your sequins, and your moolah, for somewhere else.”
*****
London Standard
Christy Spring welcomed the subtlety with which founder Man Hon Luk combines Texan technique with Chinese flavours at his new barbecue venue, where the all-important cooking takes place in a “custom 500-gallon smoker sourced, like a divorced dad’s road bike, from eBay”.
“Hon’s feels like a restaurant that serves barbecue, not a barbecue joint. The machismo and meat sweats are left at the door, and all the more welcoming for it. It demands neither the widest arteries nor the deepest pockets.”
The duck pancakes are “a triumph”, while the eight-hour ox-cheek is “tender and yielding, falling apart like a New Year’s resolution”. Lamb breast with Xi’an-style seasoning and beef rib with Sichuan-peppercorn sauce are just as good, while sides of beef-dripping scallion rice and “typhoon-shelter green beans” are every bit as enjoyable as the meat.
*****
The Observer
Rebecca Nicholson checked out this summer’s second opening from Birmingham-based Aktar Islam, following hot on the gilded heels of Oudh 1722 in London: Kush is more accessible price-wise and, she speculated, could be the first of a mini-chain.
The food was “big-bodied, full-flavoured, not at all prissy, the sort of indulgent feast that will make you daydream of opening a trouser button or two on the way home”. The best dish was liver fry with uthappam – “light, bubbly fermented rice cakes, flecked with gems of tomato and red onion… to mop up a pile of soft chicken livers, soaked in a mighty, oily, chilli-fuelled tomato-based curry.”
Kadai paneer (“vividly spiced lumps of cheese and pepper delivering a proper veggie hit”), a creamy, slow-cooked black bean dal makhani and a bright green garlicky spinach and sweetcorn palak were also good. But a Mangalorean prawn curry in a slightly acrid tomato and coconut sauce was a “real disappointment”, and service was disjointed throughout – “clearly Kush is still finding its feet”.
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell was doubly irritated by this new steakhouse in lovely Leadenhall Market, partly because of its “gibberish” name – “was it an idea from a bad ventriloquist? Or a name shouted by the mad uncle of a friend of mine who would only mumble because he said the Nazis had bugged his teeth?” – and partly because “EC3 needs a fresh steakhouse like it needs a new IRA bomb”.
The meat (sirloin and ribeye) was “exemplary… flamed and well rested” but was accompanied by “a fruitless throw of spindly watercress” and “poor” sides of fat chips (“neither chip-shop flabby nor furiously crunchy”), watery creamed spinach and tenderstem “drenched in brown goo”.
Likewise, a starter of grilled prawns was “near perfect, the shellfish charred and juicy, but the orange sauce beneath them was unnecessary”. Luckily, sticky toffee pudding was “proper” and the wine list “sensible”.
