Our weekly round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 19th January 2025
London Standard
Regency Café, Westminster
David Ellis followed up on the news that the iconic Regency Café is for sale by revisiting what he called the “archetypal ideal of a Propa Caff”, whose good looks – “the art deco signage, the black frontage… the boxing posters and portraits of Spurs in the Sixties, the chequered curtains on the windows, the tea urns” – have made it a Mecca for both tourists and filmmakers (Layer Cake, Rocketman, Pride etc).
Looks aside, David reckoned it fulfils its function well. “I’ve never had a bad breakfast here, and nothing is ever messed with. But you cannot rave about food like this, even if, after a big night, it might inspire grateful prayers.”
Given that the council has said the Regency won’t be sold to developers, David gave a cautious welcome to change, and offered his own suggestion for an improvement: “Someone might even put in loos.”
*****
The Guardian
Toum, Mayfair
Grace Dent delivered her first critical brickbats of the year after a disappointing visit to a Lebanese rotisserie chicken specialist that left her “spitting feathers”.
Close to Hamley’s and an offshoot of nearby Aline, Toum certainly looked the part on social media, with smartly dressed staff and what breathless bloggers described as “impossibly juicy” chickens rotating on a grill behind the chefs’ heads. But on Grace’s lunchtime visit during the busy January sales the rotisseries were empty and stationary, while those smartly dressed managers were locked in a laptop meeting at the bar, ignoring their guests.
As for the food, the humus was fine and pickles excellent. But they came with a “small, chunky, unlovable wretch of a flatbread the size of my palm”, and were followed by a small portion of very average and “mysteriously self-cooking” chicken that had patently been lurking downstairs. The pièce de résistance, however, was a “half aubergine steamed – or had it been boiled? – to the texture of a bloated sanitary towel. It felt like vegetarian cooking by someone who had been emotionally wounded by a vegetarian: this was personal”.
*****
The Observer
The Blue Stoops, Kensington
Jay Rayner was won over by Jamie Allsopp’s new pub from the moment he tasted its home-made pork scratchings, which “have crunch and a pleasing collagen stickiness and are more like a Mexican chicharrón than a friendly tooth-destroyer from the Black Country.”
The scratchings come courtesy of Quo Vadis-trained chef Lorcan Spiteri, whose menu speaks “both fluent pub and fluent cosmopolitan British bistro” – much to the approval of Jay, who toyed with the idea that pub traditionalists might object to cooking of this quality in a pub that was ostensibly designed to showcase the owner’s revival of ancestral beers Allsopp’s and Double Diamond.
“We are not in Burton-on-Trent any more, Dorothy. We’re very much in Kensington, where the mostly European wine list includes funky, skin-contact bottles and you nod at the pricing and say, ‘Not bad, given the neighbourhood’.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Chinese Cricket Club, Blackfriars
Giles Coren clearly expected the worst when he found himself having to treat his family to a Chinese meal “without taking them to an actual proper regional Chinese restaurant serving real Chinese food for real Chinese people of the kind that I love but they hate (and most of you do too)”.
The Chinese Cricket Club is “a big, empty, overlit space” at the back of a hotel on the edge of the City, with little sign of cricket beyond “two bad black and white photographs of the Oval on the wall”.
The food was just as Giles had expected: “bland, generic, loveless and tasted to me as if it had been frozen”; indeed, some was so foul he was brought the edge of retching. His son, though, thought it “fabulous” (and the service was genuinely excellent).
***
Konj Café, Edinburgh
Chitra Ramaswamy lost her heart to an Iranian café serving home-style dishes of such quality that all the reviewers’ clichés she strives to avoid – “cooked to perfection” and the like – “exploded in my mouth… This really is food cooked with love.”
Former air traffic controller Faranak Habibi first opened Konj in a tiny space in Tollcross six years ago, transferring to a more central address next door to the Lyceum late last year. While more spacious, these new premises are just “too Spartan” – so cold that Chitra wore her hat and her guest his coat throughout their lunch.
Nevertheless, Chitra will return. “I can’t wait to go back and see what Habibi cooks up for dinner, which she serves on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.”
***
Josephine Bouchon, Fulham
Noting that “the bistro is back in fashion”, Charlotte Ivers headed for lunch to Claude Bosi’s latest, which she said “delivers on the fantasy” of “candles on the table, red banquettes, walls lined with wine bottles, a grumpy old gent sitting outside chain-smoking”.
Admitting to having over-indulged in vodka the night before, Charlotte was on the Diet Cokes – “pas chic at all” – and only tried a “majestic rotisserie chicken for two” with roast potatoes, green salad and green beans on the side.
The reader might consider this an inadequate sample for a review, but Charlotte was happy to rate the cooking as “what every meal should be: pure and simple. The French got it right centuries ago and we’ve been fiddling in the margins ever since.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
The River Cafe Cafe, Hammersmith
William Sitwell enjoyed a meal at the world-famous River Cafe’s offshoot next-door, declaring that it felt “very much like an office canteen”, thereby harking back to its parent’s origin four decades ago as an in-house dining room for Ruth Rogers’s husband’s architectural practice.
This was intended as a compliment. William was impressed by the “charm and serious quality” of the place, where the simple, unadorned Italian dishes were “a lesson for chefs of the grace to be found in restraint”. “For accomplished balance, flavour and an historic lesson in getting it right, this café is so good they named it twice.”
*****
Financial Times
McDonalds, everywhere
Tim Hayward continued his miniseries of reviews of chains, admitting that he not only occasionally partakes of a Big Mac, but actually enjoys what he describes as “the single most highly evolved and audience-researched manufactured food product there is”.
Or he did until recently. In latter years, McDonalds has made its burgers healthier by reducing artificial preservatives, flavours, sweeteners and colourings. “These, unfortunately, were what defined fast food,” Tim proclaimed: “the cheapest fats, carbs and proteins, rendered delicious by the genius of man’s invention.”
Worse still, McDonalds is now fully automating its operation in a process he described as “the world’s most significant hospitality business preparing to remove humans from the equation” – leaving nothing but “food processing and logistics and I don’t want to write about that.”
From now on, he’ll rely on a Greggs Steak Bake to fulfil his fast-food cravings.
