Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 15th June 2025
London Standard
Marvee’s Food Shop, Notting Hill
David Ellis made himself comfortable at south London chef Dom Taylor’s Caribbean restaurant in Ladbroke Grove, named after his mother Marveline and a follow-up to his successful pop-up The Good Front Room at the plush Langham hotel in the West End.
David liked the “black leather lobby chairs”, the vibe, and the terrace “gazing across Portobello Green, with its tall palms and banana trees with leaves like feather flags”. Some of the menu was “baffling” – no starters at all; Belgian-style waffles as a side dish: “does curry need a waffle? Why?” – but the mains were pretty impressive.
“The pork is good but perhaps no more than that, but the curry goat is a soother, a softener, a dish that settles the wrongs. The meat — shoulder at a guess — has been cooked into helplessness: it offers no resistance. Ginger, garlic and cinnamon crackle through it. We shared reluctantly.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent hailed what might well be her “favourite new restaurant of 2025” – “a cool, minimal, romantic ode to Italian cooking that’s housed in a repurposed shipping container on Wapping Wharf in waterside Bristol”, from Mark and Karen Chapman, who opened Cor in Bedminster three years ago.
Ragù caters to a “youngish, knowing audience who are well aware that Britain’s current Italian dining culture was shaped by the River Café, Angela Hartnett and Giorgio Locatelli”, and it offers “to my mind some of the most skilful cooking anywhere in Britain right now”.
Grace singled out three dishes for special praise: a “humble-sounding crespelle in tomato brodo” that included “the greatest, richest, most drinkable-by-the-bucket tomato brodo I’ve ever tasted… What are they doing to tomatoes in that tiny kitchen?” Even better was Ashton Court venison, “cooked rare but as soft as butter, and served on pungent gorgonzola with bone marrow butter.” And for dessert, chocolate budino with sour cherries – “a thick, almost-too-much truffle-type cake with huge, boozy cherries and crumbed amaretti biscuits. It’s like an Italian take on the St Emilion au chocolat, or perhaps the French stole it from the Italians in the first place.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
The Hawthorne, Shepherd’s Bush
Giles Coren took his three favourite London gastropub landlords – Joe Swiers of the Bull & Last near Parliament Hill, Oisin Rogers of the Devonshire near Piccadilly Circus and Heath Ball of the Red Lion & Sun in Highgate – to check out a new pub near his beloved QPR on the Uxbridge Road, from his favourite Cotswold gastropub landlords – Peter Creed and Tom Noest of the Bell at Langford, the Lamb at Shipton-under-Wychwood, the Fox at Broadwell, the Sherborne Arms at Northleach and the Tivoli in Cheltenham.
“Can it work here? Is it coals to Newcastle?” Giles wondered. “Can these little guys with straw in their hair, smelling of cattle shit and gun smoke, bring their humble country thing to the city that invented the gastropub and expect not to be laughed all the way back to the sticks?”
The answer was never in doubt: of course it works – and in spades. “They love the look of the place, all of them… Osh is especially taken with the bar itself, slapping it and saying it’s beautiful”; and they are equally impressed by the food, from the “fabulous” snacks on the blackboard menu to the venison loin of an 18-month-old fallow deer Peter shot at Cornbury Park, which is “unearthly in its sweet, treacly wonders, perfectly roasted and rested, soft like ice cream, charry on the tongue”.
Relieved and reassured, Giles was “glad I was able to bring these legendary men here, and that they approve of this thing I love”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy made no attempt to hide her disappointment at lunch in a café on Easter Road from Emily Cuddeford and Rachel Morgan of Twelve Triangles artisan bakeries, “two of the most influential folk in Scotland’s sourdough megaverse”.
Chitra’s beans and cheese on toast was “a simple thing made well” – or “not so simple” when you factor in the “clever hands to achieve each element”, the three-day sourdough made with heritage grains, house-made cultured butter and so on.
The problem was, this and a cheese toastie were the only hot food on a lunch menu that has been slimmed down “to focus on more continuity across all eight Twelve Triangle bakeries”. What a shame, thought Chitra: “it seems a missed opportunity, considering the fantastic bread, suppliers and mouthwatering recipes in their cookbook”.
***
Charlotte Ivers braved the “blasted seafront, peeling buildings and binbags” of a “seaside town gone to ruin” to visit a tiny 10-seat basement where chef Jack Lury and his wife, Issy Cianchi, have opened a Sri Lankan/European fusion restaurant that draws on their combined heritage.
Here she found cooking that showed “an extraordinary level of ambition… There’s a delicately poached egg with lime foam and seeni sambol (a Sri Lankan relish of caramelised onion). Golden gnocchi with crispy shallots, red onion puree and sharp bursts of mustard seeds. A fresh, light fillet of John Dory cooked in a banana leaf, with asparagus and a lightly curried sauce.”
If this is not quite yet a five-star restaurant, Charlotte said, “it will be soon.” Such teething problems as there are come from the sheer ambition. “Who creates a ten-course menu for their first permanent restaurant? A madman, that’s who. But one of quite clearly astonishing creativity and talent. I implore you to go.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles was also in the mood to disparage a coastal town – this time a holiday hotspot in Devon rendered terminally “smug” by its vast majority of non-resident second-home-owners.
He found solace in a “small, simply decorated room that gazes out over the harbour”, where he dined on ”elegant and restrained” crab bisque followed by garlic prawns that were “plump, taut and muscular, still wearing the fleeting sweetness of the sea”. Then “crab and more crab”: first with linguine then a whole crab, hot and drenched in garlic butter, “the brown carapace meat wobbling and bosky, each joint and claw and limb cracked, picked, sucked and crunched”.
“It goes without saying that the crabs are impeccably fresh, hauled from the pots that morning,” Tom concluded. “Crab Shack is the only thing that would drag me back to Salcombe.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell visited a “Manchester institution” named after its signature dish, the rustic German pasta spätzle “which, folklore tells us, got its name for resembling a quarrel of sparrows” – although to William “the noodles look more like blond worms – little eels, even – than sparrows”.
“All seems well with the world as you guzzle them”, thanks to their “yielding, soft texture” and “the gentle flavours they deliver: the butter and sage, both sweet and herby, and the cured pork cheek and egg yolk creating a cosy carbonara flavour”. Simple dishes of borlotti beans, sausage with sauerkraut and cornichons, and a classic tiramisu followed.
“This central European lunch for a working chap almost made me weep at what the British equivalent might be – a bleak and soggy sandwich.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner headed for Liverpool’s post-industrial ‘Baltic Triangle’, where locally bred chef Paul Durand, formerly of Edinburgh’s 21212 and Moor Hall in Lancashire, has returned to open a restaurant that celebrates the “unique history of the port city” – hence ‘manifest’, as in a ship’s cargo.
This intention is made manifest (sorry; not Jay’s joke) in dishes such as a ‘scouse lamb skewer’ using ingredients that would go into ‘lobscouse’, the local stew from cheap cuts of meat brought to the city by Norwegian sailors – lamb belly, pickled red cabbage, carrots, potatoes. “Does it taste of scouse? No, but it’s a charming narrative and an exceedingly good piece of multi-textured meat cookery,” Jay declared.
“The whole mission statement about reflecting the city might be a little blurred. But the cooking is completely focused and eating here is fun. That’s far more important.”
