Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 12th July 2025
London Standard
David Ellis visited the new, modernised incarnation of a Thai canteen that won cult status as a “national treasure” for ultra-cheap and tasty cooking at its former Leytonstone address. David, who never visited the original, pronounced a double verdict on its successor: “For food alone, it is a triumph. As a restaurant? A shitshow.”
So what went wrong? Mostly “temporary, could-be-improved things, like the lost orders and repeated requests for water and wine, or no one asking dietaries. The wildly different portion sizes; the spilled plates. The rice turning up 20 minutes before there was anything to join it. The wrong bill.”
As for the food, “there is nothing to say of it other than it was mostly stunningly good… As good a Thai as anywhere. Well, almost.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent embraced a “peculiar, meta, slightly earnest, definitely delicious French restaurant” tucked away inside a repurposed shipping container – a typically Bristol spot that shows how, “with a little imagination and clever sleight of hand, you can turn an impersonal iron box into a tiny slice of France”.
Rabbit, after which it is named, was not available – apparently because local gamekeepers could not shoot enough wild bunnies to keep up with the kitchen’s demands – but other than that Grace enjoyed “a menu that could thaw the iciest of hearts. Who can resist chunky asparagus with sauce gribiche and beurre noisette, or a very good, fluffily light, but rich-with-gruyère souffle Suissesse? Both were charming to look at and to eat.”
All the dishes she sampled met with approval with the exception of a chicken schnitzel with madeira jus that was “a little one-note – that note being ‘fried’”.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren enjoyed himself at a new venue billed as “Brighton’s first seafood boil restaurant, a coastal USA thing where lobsters and crabs and prawns and clams are all cooked together and served ‘family style’ with an array of cutting tools, and guests set about them with gusto, wearing gloves and aprons”.
The seafood was fresh, fat, mostly local and perfectly cooked, while the whole experience was, Giles chortled, “fun. They gave us a mallet! So much more useful than a stupid cracker. Deep into your second bottle and smashing a huge crab with a sledgehammer like you’re putting in fence posts is about as much fun as you can have at the seaside with your clothes on. And the smashed-out white meat was terrific with the chilli sauce.”
His only quibble was the name – “Gothic” connoting “black”, “old”, “dusty”, “evil” and “possibly poisonous”: “I want seafood to be bright and pink and squeaky and daytime, as this all was. Not a lifeless, creaking, cobwebby thing of the night.”
***
Ondine at Seaton House, St Andrews
Chitra Ramaswamy invested in “the most expensive lunch I’ve eaten in ages” at this revival of chef Roy Brett’s “much-loved Edinburgh institution” Ondine, which closed last December after 16 years, at the newest five-star hotel in St Andrews overlooking the hallowed golfing turf of the Old Course.
Oysters are the star turn here. At £30 for six they’re at the top end of oyster pricing, though Ondine also serves them every day from 3-6pm at £1.50 a shuck (£3 for cooked) in “Scotland’s first oyster happy hour” – an offer strongly tipped by Chitra: “To sit in this fine room at teatime, with this view, eating oysters of this calibre at these outrageously good prices, is one of the best things you can do with your hard-earned cash in Scotland.”
Other dishes on the “minimalist and French-leaning” menu were a mixed bag: “lemon sole meunière is a masterclass in fish cookery, the fish soft, fluffy and white as a cumulus cloud”, but some of the cooking “needs finessing” – in particular, both salt-baked beets with whipped crowdie and monkfish au poivre were “way too salty”.
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell was full of praise for the new spinoff from Restaurant 22 (also on Chesterton Road), where he found the food “seriously sublime – the cooking without fault, delivering well-balanced dishes and the finest cheffing nicely short of too many knobs on top.”
Focaccia both soft and crunchy, a vivid pea soup “with little bites of wild garlic to make the dish a strong contender for favourite slurp of 2025”, a terrine of chicken that was “a masterclass of soft, fresh pressing”, a piece of monkfish, a lamb rump and tomato salad were all “beautifully executed”.
The one fail was a duff treacle tart, in William’s view “too smooth, its crust too thin, its texture all wrong. The filling needs those bitey crumbs that fully divorce it from a smooth custard. It should be rustic, earthy and sweet, and tempered with cream. Not trying, as this one does ill-advisedly, to melt in the mouth.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner sampled the delights of Sierra Leonean cooking at the first permanent restaurant from cookery writer and supper-club host Maria Bradford, where he was introduced to unfamiliar ingredients such as the yanghanyanghan pod, bush onion, ‘grains of paradise’, kankankan and shito oil, supplied by shops in Peckham and “her obliging mum back in Freetown”.
“For those of us long aware of Bradford’s work, this is the restaurant we’ve been waiting for,” Jay said. The dishes he tried were interesting, “deeply savoury” and very much more than just a novelty.
“I would go back to Shwen Shwen solely for Bradford’s flaky, golden flat bread, a little like a paratha, sliced thickly with honey and the warmth of fermented chilli.”
