Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 16th August 2026
The Guardian
Grace Dent was transported back to a 1980s Duran Duran video by a former Lloyds Bank now converted into a “cinematic” triple-height Lebanese restaurant that is a very different proposition from all those “tiny, homespun restaurants typically anchored around Edgware Road”.
Even so, Kinz is “far from showy”, and the “vibe across much of the menu is elegant sparseness: nothing is over-garnished or served with frippery” – “no bells, no whistles, just Lebanese food cooked with immense pride and an urge to be accurate.”
The stand-out dishes include slow-cooked spiced chicken that is “home cooking in the most complimentary sense”, and a chocolate cake to a recipe from Elene, the mother of founding brothers Jad and Karim Lahoud, that is “dense, dark, damp and oozing”.
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner was very impressed by a former wine importer’s restaurant now taken over by a chef-proprietor of real “personality” – Gaston Savina, a tall and courtly figure with dangly earrings and a pencil moustache who trained in Burgundy.
His masterpiece – the dish Jay remembers him creating on MasterChef a couple of years ago – is ‘pie escargot’, and it is “as hilariously rich and soothing as ever”. “The snails are cooked down to a ragu, but retain that gentle, bitter, almost metallic edge. The dark, sticky mess is topped with a thick, white lawyer of buttery pommes purée … The snail ragu is the ballast, the potato works as a brilliant condiment. It’s rich, comforting and bloody clever.”
Jay also enjoyed a cooling plate of roasted leeks and white fish crudo, some fried artichoke hearts and a sticky tarte tatin of fennel and tomatoes. He looked forward to trying other dishes on more wintry nights: roast chicken with langoustines and Ravigote bisque sauce, or ox cheek Rossini with pan-fried foie gras and black truffle jus.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren was introduced by a Chinese-born colleague to a “young hipsterish bistro” in the basement beneath an east London bar, from chef/owner Hua Yang. She grew up in her parents’ herbal shop in Chongqing, where the cuisine shares with neighbouring Sichuan a dependence on “mala, the wonderous double fire of numbing Sichuan peppercorn heat (ma) and dried chilli peppers (la)”.
The airconditioned space is spartan “and the food is tremendous”. Giles’s favourite dishes included long, rectilinear jelly noodles that were “slippery as newborn mice”; an “extraordinary” gourmet flower mushroom “the size and heft of a cricket ball… with under-a-dead-log-in-the-forest sort of flavours”; and duck duck rice toast that was “an unctuous inch-thick braise of fatty duck meat and sticky rice, between slabs of crunchy fried bread… A stupendous mouthful. A deep-fried stew. A sandwich for heroes.”
The wonderful ‘noodle duvet’ (“very much the duvet of an unmade bed”) was a “kind of smashed, spicy lasagne”, while best of all was a side dish of barely cooked shredded asparagus and wood ear mushroom in a savoury garlic dressing: “simple, cute, sweetish and compelling.”
***
Chitra Ramaswamy revisisted a “marvellous little restaurant” on Leith Walk from chef Roberta Hall-McCarron and front of house Shaun McCarron, the Edinburgh powerhouse couple behind The Little Chartroom and Ardfern, for an update now that the tasting menu has gone and the tiny kitchen and dining room have been rejigged.
It still possesses the “ineffably cool-independent-restaurant-in-the-big-city atmosphere the Hall-McCarrons seem to instantly cook up in any space they take over. These two are incapable of making a bad restaurant.”
Nor is it possible to make a bad choice on the menu, Chitra declared after she and her dining companion worked their way through a “fiendishly clever” cashew ‘faux gras’ tartines, “flawless” starters of rump cap carpaccio and cured trout, and mains of “pearlescent” coley on fondant potato win a velveteen cider butter sauce and a “blushing and outrageously soft” duck breast.
***
Camilla Long was intrigued by the promise of relaxed Japanese dining at this “authentic izakaya” (or tavern), sister restaurant to the steakhouse Goodman across the road and from the team behind the Burger & Lobster chain. Once inside, she found loos of “power marble and black slate” that look like they’ve been designed by Christopher Nolan – “The whole thing screams: cash”. It is a tavern “in the sense that the Devonshire is a pub”.
There were a couple of hitches: “they seem to run out of dishes a lot” and everything she ordered arrived at once, “so a supposedly relaxed, cool evening nearly turns into a circus event.”
But despite her misgivings, Camilla reported a meal of “immense enjoyment”. A salad of three different types of seaweed was “sensational”, ‘crispy rice salmon’ was “an original and inventive dish”, and the fish in general – much of it “airshipped: I suppose they feel it’s triggering to say ‘flown’” – is “the loveliest stuff you can have”.
*****
The Observer
Rebecca Nicholson headed to a new year-long residency at the Globe pub, a Turkish-Cypriot mayhane (tavern) from former Harwood Arms and BiBi chef Keiran Mustafa and Bistro Freddie restaurateur Dom Hamdy, on the very day “foodfluencer” Topjaw dropped a rave review, and “suddenly it was as if we were about to watch Taylor Swift at an open-mic night”.
She was sorely tempted to fill up on the delicious cold mezze dishes. That would be a mistake, she said: Kismet may look casual, with its paper tablecloths, but the cooking is “uncommonly good”, “exceptional”, and “knows its worth”.
The £30 monkfish, for instance, is “swaggering, meaty, and came on a base of yoghurt and chilli butter… That chilli butter is a slyly astonishing thing, with an earthy funk and a hug of spice.”
*****
London Standard
Heather Steele felt after two two “glorious, sun-soaked meals” that Kismet was “destined for great things over the next 12 months, and beyond” – like previous residencies at the Globe Tavern that have now settled in permanent spaces, including Joké Bakare’s Chishuru in Fitzrovia and Khao Bird in Soho.
Digging in to the “wonderful” dips, “We’re tipped off to rake a triangle of melon through the dregs of the atom, a plate of buffalo-milk yoghurt with a whirlpool of glossy, deep red chilli butter that disappears fast.”
The crisp fried lamb’s livers served with lemon juice “will convert many offal naysayers”, while a skillet of bubbling Swiss chard topped with another dollop of the “unmissable atom” is “an enticing way to eat your greens”.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles revisited one of just six remaining branches of Byron, a burger chain founded in 2007 that expanded quickly under private equity ownership and had 67 branches by the time it went into administration in 2020.
Its initial popularity was “all about good ingredients and pared-back simplicity… top-quality British beef patties, cooked pink” – and led the way for others that included MEATliquor, Honest, Bleeker, Patty & Bun, Black Bear and Five Guys.
Now, sadly, “I’m greeted by a thick, dry patty wedged into a thick, dry untoasted bun. There’s no succulence or succour, no juice or joy, just an excess of ketchup and malaise. After a few dyspeptic bites, I give up…. What was once a pioneer is now an also-ran. Byron has gone the way of all flesh.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell headed to Old Dumbarton Road, described by his Glasgow-native pal as “a comfortable area for some wee sup-sups”, where a former general store and coffee shop is now a Spanish wine bar and restaurant with a drinks list “good enough to impress the most knowledgeable of Iberian wine buffs”.
The boldly short and succinct food menu reclaimed Serrano ham and melon, a dish served for convenience at every British posh dining table in the 1970s and early 1980s, “irrespective of the unripeness of the melon or the wretched cheap harvest of the pig”. Here, the ham is firm and flavoursome and the melon soft and truly ripe , making for a “natural and seasonal combination of ingredients”.
William’s dish of the night was “the foulest, most disturbing” in presentation: a sliced, proboscis-like portion of chorizo served on toast and swimming in a sauce of Basque cider and sage, its flavour “deep and enveloping”.
