Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week to 21st September 2025
London Standard
Carbone, The Chancery Rosewood, Mayfair
David Ellis suffered a “night of glitz, glamour and ennui” at the latest branch of a New York-based global group which is the headline restaurant of the swanky new Mayfair hotel that he informed us is cruelly nicknamed the “Chancery Premier Inn”.
With its celeb clientele (“Victoria Beckham with her brood sat on the next table”) and low-lit interior of red leather and velvet, there is “no denying its glamour. It feels like dining in an outtake from the Rat Pack’s Ocean’s Eleven”. But service is “patchy”, as is the staggeringly expensive Italian-American food – a plate of lasagne costs £98, while the famous spicy rigatoni vodka comes with “a tomato sauce I think I last had with spaghetti hoops… But no one is coming here for the kitchen, which is best for everyone involved.”
David made clear he won’t be coming back. “In the end you remember you’re in a chain, Pizza Express with the lights down. I longed to be dining at the Dover instead, which is half the price but twice as good.”
*****
Times & Sunday Times
Carbone, The Chancery Rosewood, Mayfair
Charlotte Ivers also dined at the week’s big opening, on the same night as David (see above) – either that or the designer fka Posh Spice is already a regular.
“We are sitting at the bar when Victoria Beckham walks in. I immediately choke on my cocktail, tequila cascading down my shirt. I don’t know why I’m so surprised. A couple of evenings ago, Leonardo DiCaprio was here. Kate Moss too.”
But if Charlotte seemed more excited than David by Carbone’s celeb count, she was more brutal than he was about its cooking: a chicken dish was simply “inedible”.
***
Charlotte Ivers, doubling up this week, also visited London’s oldest Indian restaurant – where the food, she suggested, may or may not be authentically Indian, but the atmosphere “feels specifically British — a relic from a Britain that no longer exists”.
As such, she added her voice to the 17,000 or so who have signed a petition calling on King Charles to overrule the Crown Estate’s plans for the building which would mean the restaurant closing down on the eve of its centenary next year.
“You may never go to Veeraswamy. In fact, I’m not necessarily sure I’d suggest you do. If you are used to modern dining, this place will feel odd in ways both tangible and intangible. But some things matter, in ways that are equally intangible — history, tradition, nostalgia, belonging. We should fight for Veeraswamy.”
***
Giles Coren, a long-time fan of Adam Byatt’s cooking at Trinity in Clapham, declared the chef’s latest outlet in the new Riverside stand at Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage stadium a “triumph” – despite his reflex loathing of the club as a loyal supporter of nearby rivals QPR.
Overlooking the Thames and tree-lined Barnes on the opposite shore, the room was magnificent, he declared – “mag-flaming-nificent” – with a “properly elegant” interior designed in homage to Constance Spry, the mid-century florist and cook who inspired the brasserie.
The menu makes “ancient and dusty-sounding English recipes sing they way they deserve to” – most notably Coronation chicken (co-invented by Spry), which is presented here en croute with a delicate jelly, as something “really new and original and lovely”.
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent lunched at a “enormous new ‘Italian’ restaurant” that is “apparently designed to take money from people with money”. It offers a “sparse, and oddly uninspiring” menu, beginning with breakfast which includes “buttermilk chicken waffles and cornbread with organic Nama Yasai berry jam, though, curiously, not much in the way of fine Italian pastries or coffee”.
Main dishes were generally “lacklustre” and under-seasoned, while tiramisu was “neatly stacked, precise and pretty… plated as if it’s off to Royal Ascot on top of someone’s head” – but joyless.
“Alone in my quiet restaurant hell”, Grace deduced that her “sombre-looking” fellow diners were City types on client or team lunches, eating forlornly with “people they had nothing in common with”. “Campanelle is a great illustration of the pros of working from home.”
*****
Financial Times
The Nettlefold, Burgh Island, Devon
Jay Rayner felt like a fool for his excitement at the prospect of dinner at an Art Deco wedding cake of a hotel designed to transport you to the glamorous 1930s. Instead, he found himself in a 1970s world of overpriced, poorly executed food and “ludicrously performative service”, complete with waiters in baggy cotton gloves.
There was the occasional outbreak of competence – a well-made crab croquette with katsu aioli and a chocolate petit four – “but everything else is that deathly combination of bad ideas poorly executed”. Ham-hock terrine and cod were disastrously over-salted, and three different dishes (tempura mussels, fried chicken and monkfish) showed a “particular fascination” with sweet curry sauces. “Worst of the lot is a staggeringly overcooked chicken breast. The bird was killed twice over.”
“The problem is once you’ve spent an awful lot of money on an experience, it’s hard to admit there’s anything wrong with it. It marks you out as a fool. I feel a little like that.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell enjoyed a “historic dinner” served at a vast wooden bar by chef-patron Ruben Aguilar Bel that was “a demonstration of confident and innovative cooking to remind us that Spain produces some of the world’s greatest chefs”.
The no-choice menu was “gutsy, fun and accessible”, with highlights including scallops “glanced by fire” and served with a slice of jamón (“a mighty and clever pairing”); a piece of halibut that “melted in the mouth”; and a plate of delicate, rich wagyu beef cheek from the Scottish Highlands that was “so original in such a fancy place and a reminder that it’s never all about the clichéd cuts”.
A dessert of pistachio cake with green Thai curry ice cream might have been a “foul-sounding alchemical trick”, but “the ice cream was simply a fabulously silken and herby complement to the cake”.
*****
The Observer
Chalk, Wiston Estate, West Sussex
Guest reviewer Séamas O’Reilly, a columnist at the paper, attempted to make fun of the fusty tastes of his parents-in-law by subjecting them to the “foams and gels and tweezered leaves” of a tasting menu at a fancy sustainable restaurant on a South Downs wine estate.
A dish of grilled mussels, barbecued halibut and haricot beans topped with a mussel and mushroom foam would surely work, looking “almost laughably delicate, like something Mr Bean would be served in a skit. We are told it also features sea beets, rock samphire and celeriac, information my in-laws digest as if the dish in front of them contained zips, tax discs and Tippex.”
It was all a feint, of course. “They love it, avidly scooping up its earthy, complex flavours”. They also savour a “similarly stellar” chicken marinated in koji and kohlrabi in an aerated hollandaise sauce, served on a bed of sweetcorn and girolles, and swoon over desserts of chocolate tonka bean with whey caramel and stewed raspberries with vanilla cream.
