Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 10th May 2026
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles joined the chorus of critical praise for the new restaurant from former Kiln head chef (and still co-owner) Meedu Saad, who “truly soars” given the opportunity to create his own cuisine.
The menu is “as thrilling to read as it is exhilarating to eat” – and is unlike anything Tom has experienced before, with combinations like pastilla with pickled walnut, white beans with bottarga, and bird-tongue pasta with spiced oxtail.
The crescendo of Tom’s meal came in the form of veal sweetbreads glazed with a Bordelaise sauce and charred on the grill: “it’s one of the most magnificent pieces of offal I’ve ever tasted, rich and robustly spiced, yet elegant; the perfect union of France and North Africa, and a dish that captures the restaurant’s very essence.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren completed an almost full house of rave reviews for Impala (has any self-respecting critic still not visited?), adding his own tribute to the personalities behind the restaurant: Meedu Saad himself, a bearded, well-covered figure whose “magical power to bring pleasure to strangers” lends him the appearance of “the birthday boy at Santa Claus’s raucous 40th”, alongside Joanna Cromwell, a front-of-house manager with an “epic combination of charm, competence, wit, intellect and fun”.
Giles sat opposite a “massive charcoal fire, piled high, like the sort of thing you’d light under Joan of Arc” and watched “young men with big knives” chopping up animals by flickering firelight – a scene that reminded him of Gareth Ward’s Ynyshir.
Saad’s “staggeringly original and delicious cooking” made for “a truly original meal” with “surprises on every plate, a high wire act to flabbergast the most jaded palate”.
***
Knockinaam Lodge, Portpatrick, Dumfries and Galloway
Chitra Ramaswamy returned to a “lost era of dining” at one of the final weekend meals to be cooked by chef Tony Pierce, who has served a changing tasting menu every day for 32 years at this 10-bedroom hotel in a former Victorian hunting lodge.
His cooking is “unfussy, elegant, ingredient-led, guided by classic French technique and a mantra of not putting too many things on the plate”. Well judge canapés – a gougere piped with St Andrews cheddar, Scotch egg veined with haggis, olives and crisps – were followed by salmon caught nearby and cured in local gin, a white bean velouté of “velveteen depths”, perfectly cooked Galloway beef and a “sublime Yorkshire rhubarb soufflé crossed with a crumble”.
With change on the horizon (the new head chef has yet to be named), Chitra gave the owners one piece of advice: “upright, old-fashioned hotel restaurants like this are virtually extinct in this country, and while no history should be preserved in aspic, Knockinaam Lodge is a jewel worth conserving. My plea? Don’t change too much.”
***
Café Jikoni at V&A East, Stratford
Camilla Long was impressed by the “remarkable” food on offer at this new venture – “lavish, inventive, unlike any museum café menu I’ve ever seen. There are curries (curries!) and toasties and soups and perky lamb sausage rolls and merguez-stuffed flatbreads and salads”.
But while she noted “the beauty and intelligence of its technicolour hotchpotch of ‘mixed heritage’ dishes”, the tone changed with Camilla’s suggestion that, if asked what sort of person Jikoni was, the answer would be: “female NGO worker discovers miraculous Sex and the City bolthole amid burqas and block-printed fabrics. She gets drunk on pomegranate cocktails and shags her Afghan translator.” Blimey.
The soft drinks – including a non-fizzy cola that was “wonderful, a lush charger of dark, quenching, cinnamony goodness” – got got a big thumbs-up. But the food: “Hmmm….” Camilla nibbled her way through a toastie, a chicken pie with a thick orange turmeric crust and a plate of macaroni dal, but “all of them, ultimately, taste the same.” Thankfully the puddings were better, including a reimagined iced bun that looked like something out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and an ”outstanding” pink meringue with coconut, rhubarb and whole black peppercorns.
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner had only good things to say about the more relaxed upstairs neighbour of the classic Grand Divan dining room at Jeremy King’s successfully revived Simpson’s-in-the-Strand – “think of it as Brasserie Zédel, only with a Mockney accent”.
But he warned prospective diners not to misunderstand its appeal. “The cooking isn’t astonishing. You don’t come to be wowed. You come for familiar comfort food, served with unfamiliar charm”, and for the theatrical crowd (“look, there’s Lindsay Duncan”) drawn by portraits of early-20th-century playwrights, J B Priestley, Somerset Maugham, John Galsworthy et al.
Jay returned the next morning for breakfast in the Grand Divan, a “comically expansive take on the full English” accompanied by “every condiment you could think of and a few you probably can’t”, along with a “buttery and unashamedly spiced” kedgeree. “It’s so damned civilised, a word that describes the whole of the reborn Simpson’s-in-the-Strand.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent recommended this Japanese basement spot below a Swiss-owned ‘lifestyle hospitality brand’ hotel as a “determinedly fun and delicious place to have up your sleeve” – and a “vast improvement” on Nobu Shoreditch, its gargantuan and soulless predecessor.
Billed as an ‘izakaya’ – according to Grace, a common tactic among European restaurateurs who don’t want their Japanese-inspired venues to sound off-puttingly sober – it is pitched at both local content creators chasing sandos and a more mature crowd seeking sushi and sake. And it “won’t win any plaudits from Japanese purists, who will turn up their noses at the grilled beef fillet with garlic and soy butter and the soy-glazed salmon skewers”.
But the chutoro sashimi was genuinely excellent – “fresh, fatty, supple, devourable” – and the juicy chicken meatballs were “worth the trip alone”.
*****
The Observer
Mina Holland was impressed by a five-year-old restaurant in Glasgow’s West End which serves “well-priced vegetarian food à la carte alongside natural wine” without making too much of the absence of meat or fish.
Chef Jake Martell’s kitchen produces some “deft and original cooking”, including “a fat cushion of golden, debauched-looking halloumi nestled into a curried green purée; I fall in love”. This was followed by polenta with mushrooms that “explodes joyfully with undisclosed tarragon” and – “surely the acid test for any self-respecting vegetarian joint” – some piquant and zippy chickpeas with tomato sauce and pickled feta.
“Sylvan could be a blueprint for the kind of vegetarian restaurant we need more of, at once comforting and elevated,” Mina reckoned. And it was rammed with a cross section of Glaswegians she was quite sure were not all vegetarians.
