Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 13th September 2026
Financial Times
Jay Rayner savoured a meal of “only highlights” from ex-Cycene chef Theo Clench, who has taken over the live-fire kitchen of what used to be called Humo. The experience is best enjoyed from the counter, he said, while watching the young chefs as they “press hunks of charcoal, glowing red through moody lighting, against cuts of pristine seafood”.
The food is clever, ambitious and executed with expertise but not too much pomp, and most importantly, it is “properly delicious”. Courses include a bao-bun made from Yukon Gold potatoes and served with Indian-spiced whipped butter and a tomato broth; slices of aged yellowtail served on a skewer with nashi pear; barbecued oyster in cucumber beurre blanc; a stew of cuttlefish and smoked eel; breast of duck whose confit leg turns up as glazed bonbons; and desserts of blackcurrant ice in a deep green puddle of blackcurrant oil and smoked tofu ice cream with chocolate sauce.
“I have long suspected that many chefs who serve multi-course tasting menus have never sat through them. They have no idea how relentless they can be. This one is not. We are fed but not overfed. The rhythm is perfect, the show divine.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent was the first critic to visit Adam Byatt (of Trinity in Clapham)’s “heavenly-white neighbourhood Italian” just off Wandsworth Common, declaring it a “surefire hit” – an “achingly civilised, Emilia Romagna-influenced, candlelit trattoria where the cloakroom tags are actual Amalfi Coast pebbles engraved with numbers” and the weekly laundry bills for the tablecloths “must make the accountants weep”.
Its environs are thick with wealthy hedgies, but some of Rosina’s prices are “staggeringly pocket-friendly”, including cavatelli cacio e pepe at just £8 and “post-service pasta” (spaghetti with anchovy, chilli and garlic) at £16 – which is also “the first time I’ve seen a restaurant give a glimpse into what its owner eats after hours. More of this, I say.”
A carpaccio of wild sea bass with chilli, Amalfi lemon and a clean, sharp, precise olive oil shifted Grace’s view from “this is perfectly pleasant” to “holy god, this is really quite special”. This was confirmed by a couple of “genuine death row delicacies”: a white risotto that was “a sensory bombardment of unctuous gloop” and some “absolutely remarkable” roasted baby spuds. Turbot was perfectly cooked and tiramisu, whose recipe was credited to an Italian woman called Pina, was “wet, light and stodgy in all the right places”.
*****
The Observer
Making her debut as the Observer’s new restaurant critic, Tanya Gold penned a bitter-sweet love-letter to “a time machine to 1950s Soho” – a “fascinating” institution beloved by the three great mid-20th century British artists, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. This trio now haunt the place: “it’s a private club for the dead, slumming it with the living.”
Neil Borthwick has cooked here since 2018, creating food of great skill and depth. Sensibly, in Tanya’s view, “he does not try to be more interesting than the ghosts, which is impossible.”
Salad of Vesuvio tomato with onion and “croutons the colour of tea” is a marvellous dish, because it is so simple. Disco scallops are bright and fresh, lying in too much garlic butter, “which is the right amount – you want a glut of butter here”. “Everything about the French House is soothing except that it’s the last of its kind: an endling, like Martha the Passenger Pigeon, or a turtle you once loved.”
*****
The Times
Tower House, Richmond
Banquet 88, Wapping
Giles Coren headed to newish waterside restaurants at the western and eastern extremes of London, starting off at the former in a “gorgeous old mid-Victorian clocktower” overlooking the Thames at Richmond (in what he archly calls “deepest Surrey”) from the team behind Gold in Notting Hill.
The vista here was “breathtaking, like being in the Cap d’Antibes”, he said, while the food defied his adage that the quality of the cooking in a restaurant “tends to be inversely proportional to the quality of the view”. His main from the Mediterranean menu was chargrilled squid with lemon, chilli and rocket – “a River Café dish that is not quite there yet but was perfectly okay. And with the difference that, unlike at the RC, you can actually see the river while you’re eating it.”
Banquet 88 is an “extremely ‘Hong Kong dim sum canteen’” by the marina at St Kathrine Docks, and here Giles found cooking that “doesn’t quite measure up to the hype”. “It was fine,” he conceded, before listing numerous shortcomings, such as dumpling casings thicker than ideal; crispy red rice cheung fung “like pink condoms full of Jiff-bag filler”; crystal scallop dumplings that fell apart on contact with chopsticks; big chunks of calamari “blandly beer-battered and piled up like onions rings”; and “chewy, oversweet” char sui iberico pork that was also “weirdly slimy”. Dear oh dear.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy returned to an establishment now five years old that she believes has done more than any other to spark the Scottish capital’s “dazzling gold rush” of brilliant restaurants in recent years – a “modern yet nostalgic Scottish-European brasserie-ish restaurant” that makes her proud to live in the city.
“Pleasure, of the buttery, boozy, beautifully sauced and bedecked-in-pastry kind is at the heart of everything” cooked here by Australian chef Lloyd Morse. A fat-banded hunk of Berkshire pork in a technically flawless marsala sauce is “the most stunning piece of meat I’ve eaten in a very long time”.
Every cut part of the animal is used in dishes like pig’s head and dandelion salad, pig-skin ragu on toast or skewers of chicken combs, gizzards and hearts grilled over charcoal. Whole mackerel and creamed sweetcorn show how well fish and veg are treated. And “do not, I warn you, fill up so much that you can’t manage dessert. They are legendary here”, Chitra declared, after finishing up with chocolate and hazelnut tart and lemon posset with meringue and crème de cassis.
*****
London Standard
Sam Wilson found generous, appetising and already hugely popular Aghan cooking in an east London railway arch venue run by a family who were probably not banking on attracting a deluge of people within two months of opening, as prospective diners queued at the door “visibly in awe of what they’re witnessing”.
Tucking in to the celebratory national dish, a kabuli pulao, Sam marvelled at “rice cooked in broth, aromatics twinkling with lamb fat and topped with a cog of lamb neck to be stripped clean and mixed through the ribbons of carrots and plump raisins”.
A five-hour braised lamb shank is “simmered to a wimp, [and] slinks completely from the bone to end up sculling in a sauce heady with cumin, black pepper, coriander and chilli”, while sabzi is “a metric tonne of spinach wilted down with plenty of garlic and onions… mellow and chlorophyllic”.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles arrived rather late to the party at a place he had been meaning to visit since it opened last year upstairs from the Knave of Hearts pub, a decadent and rakish dining room of “easy, unaffected charm”, where the cooking is “far better than it need be” and the “Martinis are ice cold, dry as hell – and gone in three sips.”
The food is “classic French, with a kick”, including gougères in the lightest of choux-pastry shells, filled with a jalapeño-spiked cheese béchamel, “sweetly intense” Cantabrian anchovies, delicate lobster croquettes and pure, clean tuna crudo. The fabled burger is “a beauty: reassuringly simple”, cooked pink, laden with raw onion, pickles and oozing cheese, with a silver jug of au poivre sauce, for dipping.
But “what really lifts One Club Row from damned good to very fine indeed are the staff. I don’t think I’ve come across a more genuinely lovely bunch in years. As warm as they are professional, they infuse the place with joy.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell sampled the new brand from the team behind Six by Nico, whose promise of “unapologetic, indulgent cooking” he modified to “a pedestrian, mixed bag… Mixed because the service is wonderful and the starters are terrific.”
The impressive starters comprised a Scotch egg enriched by black pudding that “makes you wonder why anyone would ever make one again with plain sausage meat”, a “feisty” squid dish doused in fiery buffalo sauce, a witty delivery of “fish finger” and a plate of corn ribs, “delightfully tickled by the flame, crunchy, messy and, with chilli, lime butter and chorizo”.
But the meal headed downhill with mains of linguine with clams, chilli, garlic and lemon that looked pretty, but was watery and lacking in taste; of admittedly “faultess” prawns and beef served with an “alleged” Cafe de Paris sauce that was a “perfect replica of Heinz tomato soup”; and a “truly horrific” plate of ‘hash brown’ served as “cake-sized wedges, like soaked bookends. Think eating a bible you’ve spotted floating down a river…. [it] should have just gone straight to the compost bucket.”
