Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 9th November 2025
The Guardian
Grace Dent anointed her “new favourite restaurant”: Australian chef and Bone Daddies founder Ross Shonhan’s seafood specialist at the birthplace of the late QEII (fka ‘Lilibet’) – whose “turbo-chintz, Las Vegas-style royalist fever dream” interior would be “extra-hilarious if the food was dire and the atmosphere stiff, but neither of those is true”.
Instead, Grace said, “Lilibet’s is pure joy. It’s high drama, camp as heck and utterly uncopiable”.
Dishes she raved about included a “really very, very good” freshly made ricotta agnolotti with sage and lemon sauce. “The meal I’ll keep returning for, though, will be the dover sole, expertly filleted tableside and served with Café de Paris butter, with a side of Lilibet’s mash, which of course comes topped with shellfish bisque and lobster meat.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner was rather less impressed than Grace by a place whose “royal connections feel very loose indeed” and where the floral overload left him “feeling like [I’d] been interred in Laura Ashley’s coffin”. But he agreed that “the key is to give yourself up to the unconscious high camp of everything here”.
His first course of deep-fried oysters came in a “claggy, cakey overcoat rather than a light tempura batter”, although they turned out to be the only duds food-wise. Service, though, was a “chaotic panto”. Those oysters took an age to arrive, and were two short of the half-dozen ordered; the waiter seemed unsure what the ‘market price’ of the gurnard was; a whole John Dory arrived when only a fillet, costing £50 less, had been ordered.
“Lilibet’s is obviously silly. It’s also exceedingly spendy. And right now, the service is tripping itself up. But if it can just calm down a little and get is act together, it also has the potential to be an awful lot of fun.”
*****
London Standard
David Ellis gave a remarkably thorough kicking to Stevie Parle’s follow-up to the acclaimed Town in Covent Garden, with a very similar interior fit-out and a kitchen run by Luke Ahearn, a chef David hugely admired at his previous restaurant, Lita.
The Italian-inspired menu “reads dreamily”, David noted. “But something is going wrong somewhere…. Everything that promised so much delivered so little.” Chopped Dexter (aka steak tartare) with fermented green chilli and porcini ketchup was over-salted (as was the slow-cooked beef a couple of dishes later) and tasted “as though I’d swallowed plastic set alight with gasoline”. Some “delicious” grilled sardines were ruined by too much vinegar. An “expertly cooked” seabass was let down by poor shellfish sauce. The best dish, agnolotti in a carbonara sauce, was “a masterpiece of refinement” but was “marred by its price: £21 for seven bites of flour and water and egg”.
A couple of days later, the Standard published a lengthy and admirably good-tempered rebuttal from Parle: “We’ve had over a thousand guests through Motorino in the first two weeks, lots of useful feedback but nothing like this. We’ve sold loads of those delicious sardines but not a single comment about excess vinegar so far. Oily fish need acidity. Maybe some kind of childhood vinegar trauma?”
As for the agnolotti, “a chef I rate called it the best pasta he’s ever eaten. Sadly these days £21 for seven handmade pieces barely covers our costs. Each piece is made from flour, egg, water, cheese and guanciale, and a huge amount of work and time.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell was another critic to sharpen his knife after a meal at a new Italian joint, in his case at a restaurant that managed to irritate him on three counts before he even sat down. It is hidden inside a hotel (The Hoxton) without saying so; the name announces it as a club when it is a standard restaurant; and the faux-Italian name is nonsense – as William pointed out, “it should be either il bambino (the boy) or i bambini (the children)”.
The menu, however, presented a “lip-smacking prospect”, so William and his companion ordered from each section “to honour a proper Italian lunch”, starting with vitello tonnato and zucchini fritti. Sadly, the veal was “as dry as a bone” and the zucchini were “deep-fried roundels” as opposed to the crisp, matchstick-type straws he was looking forward to.
Everything else arrived at once, so they ate the king prawns first and the pasta was cold by the time they reached it, “like last night’s leftovers but less forgiving”.
“What kind of Wagamama, every-dish-comes-the-moment-it’s-ready horror show was this?” William asked. “Il Bambini needs to calm the hell down, reset its service in line with the rich, calm décor, and sort out that flaccid fritti.”
*****
Daily Mail
In a week of multiple disappointments, Tom Parker Bowles was politely but firmly dismissive of this revival of a classic West End seafood institution by the people who took over the Wolseley group from its founders, Corbin & King, declaring airily that “Manzi’s is not bad, but one simply wouldn’t return.”
The sparse and “noticeably older” crowd on the day Tom visited did not help matters: “the room has all the atmosphere of a Trappist wake.”
More importantly, the food was clearly not up to scratch: “a yellowfin tuna tartare lacks that all-essential clean acidity, sullied by an overly creamy dressing. Worse still is my friend Olly’s hake, so aggressively salty it’s inedible. He takes one bite, grimaces and leaves the rest. Hey ho….”
*****
The Times
Fresh from a meal at the so-called ‘Best Restaurant in the World’, Maido in Lima – which he hated – Giles Coren played it safe with a restaurant round the corner from Derby County’s stadium (he was in the vicinity following his beloved QPR), where the beer cost £4.80 a pint.
Giles much preferred it to Maido, declaring Seven “the best restaurant in Derby” – “big, modern, nicely done, multi-levelled, noisy, happy and very casual”.
