Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 19th April 2026
The Times
Burro, Covent Garden
Giles Coren hailed the new opening from chef Conor Gadd as “one for the ages”: a “great, rustic Italian in a beautiful airy space with plenty of easy West End glamour.”
Long a fan of Trullo in Islington (which Conor co-founded), Giles reckoned that Burro is a bit smarter, while also being preferable to the “megapricey oligarchal Italians in Mayfair and Notting Hill, full of arrogant greedy waiters, foreign crooks and bald billionaires pawing their hired fluff.”
His meal started with “the finest beer snack of 2026 so far” – fried baby artichokes with bottarga, an ingredient Giles usually dislikes, but here contributing to an “utterly magnificent, shellfishy super-Wotsit”. Wafer-thin crostini with butter and anchovies; sloppy Venetian chicken livers on bruschetta and a “really wonderful piece of brill” all confirmed the view that a meal here was “just like being in Italy”.
***
Brett, Glasgow
Chitra Ramaswamy was thrilled by “the hottest culinary show in town” – dinner at the counter of Cail Bruich’s “younger, brasher sister”, where Colin Anderson and his team are cooking “some of the most big-flavoured, big-hearted, big-ideated food in the land”.
She kicked off with their legendary giant gildas – chicken fat-drenched sourdough, gordal olive and buttery smoked Cantabrian anchovy: “Let the explosions on the tongue commence. If only every meal could begin this way.”
The meal that followed was every bit as good, including a dish “so fiercely adored Anderson has never been able to take it off the menu”: mushroom XO linguini, “a close study in umami” featuring mixed fresh and fermented mushrooms and an intensely flavoured parmesan foam. White asparagus was cooked to order and served with morels stuffed with fermented mushroom trimmings; monkfish tail was first aged for a week and brined, then barbecued and served in a brown butter velouté amped up with fish trimmings; intensely flavoured Yorkshire rhubarb arrived tender and dazzlingly pink.
*****
Daily Telegraph
Burro, Covent Garden
William Sitwell seconded Giles’s view on Conor Gadd’s “crazily good” new venue – adding “divine”, “exceptional” and “truly delicious” to the list of superlatives.
All was “fun and frolics” apart from some ceiling spotlights inherited from the previous occupant (the in-town branch of Petersham Nurseries), “which should be taped over”, and a dessert of tiramisu bombolone (doughnuts) – denounced by William as “a cultural car crash of Italian elegance and US vulgarity”.
His dining companion ordered the monstrosity anyway. “So I made her pay for it as I refused to have any truck with such a foul concept. That it was delicious is immaterial.”
*****
The Guardian
Holy Carrot, Spitalfields
Grace Dent was very taken by the “second sprouting” (boom-boom) of a vegan outfit from Notting Hill, which this time round has modified its stance to be merely vegetarian. Not, Grace hastened to add, as in “junk-food veggie such as Lewis Hamilton’s beleaguered Neat Burger”, or retro Cranks-style “where you end up knee-deep in pulses, nut roasts and elderflower claret”.
Instead, there’s an “elegant, classic restaurant vibe – some tables even have tablecloths, for example. Yes, tablecloths are back in restaurants” – and a menu of dishes that takes in the “real beauty” of a British king oyster mushroom vol-au-vent with buttery peppercorn and dulse sauce; a fresh and pillowy Georgian-style khachapuri that “may well be Spitalfields’ best new brunch dish”; “sexy” tofu croquettes with smoked carrot XO and mustard greens; and a tempeh and smoked tofu schnitzel served on a lake of aromatic Café de Paris butter and topped with celeriac remoulade.
“This is serious plant-based dining… as good as it gets on my side of the leafy, cruciferous fence.”
*****
London Standard
Hell’s Kitchen, Marble Arch
David Ellis endured a pretty awful meal at Gordon Ramsay’s latest restaurant, the first UK branch of his TV show spinoff that is “a hit in Vegas, Miami — all the paragons of good taste”, and which David summed up as “Ramsay does TGI Fridays”.
Occupying a burgundy room where “the only art is photographs of Ramsay in front of various backdrops presumably licensed from Zoom”, the place smells of “cheap hand soap and whatever floor cleaner is used to get rid of sick”. And it is as expensive as Ramsay’s own, but rather more historic, Savoy Grill.
As for the food, steak tartare tasted “mostly of ketchup, the sort of thing a friend who is quite handy in the kitchen might produce but be unhappy with”; scallops were spoilt by grit; the rice in the lobster risotto was overcooked and the lobster in short supply; and the £75 prime USDA steak arrived “lukewarm and in a kind of knock-off Bisto”.
*****
Financial Times
Cometa, Fitzrovia
Jay Rayner says brothers Ollie and Ed Templeton have “called it brilliantly” in choosing Mexican cuisine as the format for their new permanent restaurant in what was the bar at the front of Carousel, their well-known guest-chef showcase.
Ollie uses British seafood to riff on Mexican flavours, so Maldon oysters are served with ‘lemon, petroleo, rasurado’ and a condiment that delivers a “violent shin-kick of chilli heat”; lightly seared scallops arrive in a “puddle of toasty, rust-coloured and oily relish”; and prawn ceviche is accompanied by discs of blue corn tostada.
The biggest stars of the menu come from the list of small sharing plates, including a “deeply savoury”, subtly hot dish of crab and rice, topped with a scoop of cream flavoured with smoked eel. Fried chicken – Cometa’s take on a popular dish she which appeals to “something deeply animal in all of us”– does exactly that: “I’d put it right up there with the very best available in the capital right now.”
*****
Daily Mail
Simpson’s in-the-Strand
Tom Parker Bowles declared restaurateur Jeremy King’s newly restored 200-year-old grande dame in the Strand “an old classic reborn. And, dare I say it, she’s better than she’s ever been before.”
Most importantly, the famous roast beef carved table-side from the trolley was “magnificent”: a rib of Devon-reared Ruby Red accompanied by a billowing Yorkshire pudding, proper gravy, crisp-shelled roast potatoes and horseradish “as fierce as a Pictish warrior”.
“The menu is both nostalgic and thoroughly à la mode. There are oysters and Russian salads, boiled ham with parsley sauce, railway mutton curry and grilled Barnsley chop, alongside pie and pudding of the day. Today is Thursday, so steak and kidney pudding it is, the suet crust ephemerally light, the filling rich, sticky and unashamedly meaty. These are classics, splendidly done.”
*****
The Observer
St Andrew’s stadium, Birmingham
Rebecca Nicholson tasted her way through the kiosks in the fanzone (should that, she wondered, be “scranzone”?) before a match at Birmingham City, to show that here at least stadium catering has evolved beyond the soggy cone of chips she remembers from the early 1990s.
These days, “fried potatoes” are served crunchy, drenched with cauliflower curry and zingy pickle. The Little Greek followed up with a generous halloumi kebab, while Small Fry’s sustainable pollock in a batter made with plain flour, rice flour and sparkling water was “tempura-like, crispy and airy, delicate, not at all greasy, and my favourite detail of the day”.
Fried chicken and cauliflower nuggets from Only Jerkin’ were also “full of flavour and heart”, while Pukka’s balti pie justified its status as a “stadium staple”. In fact, the only duds of the day were the vegan hotdogs, “as any sensible person might have guessed”. Plus, of course, Birmingham City, whose dreams of promotion faded in a “painful” one-all draw against Sheffield United.
