Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 11th October 2026
Indian Café Racer, Birmingham
Grace Dent enjoyed the ride at a cult Brum outfit that started out in the back room of a pub and has now expanded into “fancy new” 65-cover premises. Its name apparently references the 1960s bikers who raced between cafes on Royal Enfield motorbikes, which were then made up the road in Redditch and are now produced in Chennai.
Some of the “silliness” of the original has been tidied away, Grace suspects, but there are still “dashes of eccentricity” about a project that has a “sprinkling of Dishoom” about it. The menu, meanwhile, races around India from Mumbai and Delhi to Chennai and Kolkata.
The cooking is “sometimes bang on, sometimes a little slapdash”. Hits include gobi manchurian (fried cauliflower in sweet-and-sour sauce), “lovable” tandoori king prawns in house masala, and Rajastani lamb that’s slow-cooked and finished with smoked charcoal and butter. The naans, though, are “a bit thin and functional”.
*****
The Observer
Tanya Gold was as happy as Larry in a “deft” restaurant built around “familial love” from a founder, Luca Meola, who started his career very young, peeling 25kg bags of potatoes for a set of Pokémon cards in his father’s restaurant.
She declared “with no caveat” that her risotto agli asparagi was “one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten… Who knew that the woody part could be like this, if enough wine, lemon, aged parmesan and pepper are added? … You bite – or suck – down, the flavours hit the pleasure centres, and your face begins to glow.”
Pizza is less successful because it is not cooked in a wood-fired oven and lacks the requisite blackened crust. But Tonnarelli carbonara is “exquisite” and Pollo Milanese, a breaded, pan-fried chicken breast, is as thin as you might wish and “essentially, a vast, idealised chicken nugget, and that is always good”.
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner ogled the furniture on display at a Palladian mansion housing the London branch of $3billion American home-furnishing emporium RH – “Ikea for plutocrats”, as he put it – whose “utterly magnificent restaurant” has “cathedral-high ceilings”, from which dangle “giant golden chandeliers like crystal udders”.
It’s a place to gawp at and gasp, he warned, “but whatever you do, don’t book a table in it. On my recent visit, the whole operation was a bloody shambles.” Ice had to be ordered three times before it was delivered to accompany sparkling water that arrived warm. The wrong dish arrived at the table. The right dish was delivered to someone else’s table. The kitchen ran out of burgers. There was no manager on the floor.
As for the cooking, it’s “best described as dull food for rich people who don’t eat”. Ceasar salad was “slippery and astringent”, the hard-crusted baguette in a steak sandwich “was doubtless lovely yesterday”, although octopus, sea bass, chips, broccoli and crème brûlée were up to scratch. One final swipe: “I wouldn’t buy a sofa from an outfit which sold me a dinner like this.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren wondered if it was wise to name a restaurant after a nostalgia-inducing music technology from his childhood that was frankly “a rubbish format” and frequently got jammed.
There were promising touches – raw beef and comté croustades and fromage de tête – but panisse was not “hot, fresh, crisp out of the frying pan”, while smoked cod’s roe needed to be served with toasted carbohydrate and not vegetables. The restaurant also missed a nostalgia trick in serving modern natural wine, which Giles disdains, rather than the trad stuff he loves.
Where the meal got properly stuck, like a broken cassette, was with the much-photographed ‘coq au vin jaune pie’ – “an Insta-hit, a meme, a go-to dish, a signature, whatever, having the whole black claw of a chicken sticking out of the top… But it’s all just for show. The claw isn’t attached to anything,” Giles chided. Worse still, there was “no sense of rich dairy cut through by the tartness of wine”, the essence of this great dish. It was just a “perfunctory pub pie”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy joined the tourists visiting the Johnnie Walker Experience, housed in a sumptuously restored Art Deco building that has had more than 1.5 million visitors since it opened five years ago, where “the cherry on the top” is a rooftop bar named for the year Johnnie opened his Kilmarnock grocery.
It’s the sort of place where Chitra expected to find “corporate airport lounge glamour” and little in the way of good food, but they have hired a “genuinely brilliant chef” in Scott Smith (of Fhior and Norn) to create the menu – to brilliant effect.
“The food is good, some of it great”, she enthused, and “exactly what you want to eat atop Edinburgh”. She enjoyed pork belly skewers glazed with koji and served with an “impeccable” brown sauce; “fantastic” barbecued maitake mushrooms; wagyu picanha that was “a truly stunning piece of meat”; and “divinely crisp, salty fries”. A couple of small disappointments: Carlingford oysters were “not nearly cold enough”, while sea bream crudo was “diced too small and overly sweet”.
***
Camilla Long could not resist the lure of this ultra-trendy Japanese spot from Chris D’Sylva (of nearby Dorian) that’s “tricked out like a sauna – three floors straight of blond wood”, has the atmosphere of a “never-ending PR brunch” and is like “being dropped into a Louis Vuitton pickling jar”.
All this might have been annoying, but the place is “filled with personality… and the food is gorgeous”. Camilla enjoyed the “prettiest dish I’ve seen in a long time: little towers of ozone-fresh hamachi” (aka yellowtail) with slivers of peach and pear; excellent chicken karaage; a bowl of vegetables that was “like eating pure mountain dew”; corn tempura “like savoury Rice Krispie cakes”; and “pristine” red prawn gyoza.
But what impressed her most was the “2010s prices”: “I can’t remember when I last saw a £12 ramen in London… There has been a concerted effort to keep things fast, busy, unpretentious – well, non, not unpretentious – but cheap.”
*****
London Standard
Cloth Cornhill, City of London
Josh Barrie visited the new incarnation of Simpson’s Tavern, an ancient City institution closed since a landlord dispute four years ago and now reopened by the team behind Cloth in Smithfield, “with a new name but the same dark wood, the same flickering light and Dickensian air”.
The Cloth boys have done “a touching job”, by Josh’s account, and the food is pretty good. Pollock was “perfectly cooked”, pork chop with sauce Robert was “heaven”, and if the mushrooms and broccoli were overcooked, “maybe that’s how the City folk like it”.
But that was less important than the “communal, sentimental, munificent” spirit of eating here. “I can’t imagine anyone will bemoan this restaurant’s return. Here is an enchanting place, two decades older than the United States … I dare say even Thomas Simpson, who in 1723 established his ‘Fish Ordinary’, which became the tavern, wouldn’t feel out of place here if he was drunk enough to ignore the card machines and everybody taking photos of sausages.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles is a long-time fan of Hawksmoor, “that magnificent bastion of British beef, currently celebrating its 20th anniversary”, and was duly impressed by its newest branch in “one of the finest dining rooms in London” – “all gilt-topped marble pillars, soaring ceilings and some very serious stucco” in Gilbert Scott’s Gothic Revival masterpiece.
Tom and a compadre feasted on good claret, fresh boiled pink prawns, “sublime” grilled scallops served in their shells with garlic butter, and a “kilo of longhorn porterhouse, cut from the rear end of the short loin so you get a chunk of fillet on one side of the T-bone, and a large piece of sirloin on the other… There’s chew, succulence and a slight whisper of tallow.”
He concluded: “Hawksmoor is not your everyday restaurant. Rather an occasional blowout, a glorious treat, and not just a truly towering tribute to great British beef. But to the art of hospitality, too.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell warmed instantly to a new venue on Old Street with a “museum quality about it”, whose off-white walls, candles, decorative pewter dishes and liberal use of Gothic font “hark back to inns of yesteryear”.
The menu “chucks original-sounding ideas at you” – “chunion puff, lobster toast, lamb scrumpet, St Bride’s jerk chicken, merit mushroom or flourish courgette” – and the food earned William’s admiration for its sheer ugliness, its defiance of “Instagram’s all-is-beautiful ethos”.
The chunion turned out to be “one big fat gougère of cheese and onion, and delightfully gooey it was too”, while the “magnificent” lobster toast was “dark brown, horrid-looking in fact, like a giant dog turd flecked with seeds, properly revolting to contemplate” and a flaccid-looking pork and cuttlefish sausage was “the most beautiful ugly thing I’ve tasted in a long while”. The only dud was “a plate of downright awful, unpeeled and flabby, chips”.
