Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 22nd February 2026
The Guardian
Grace Dent hailed the new canteen offshoot from a 25-year-old Vietnamese institution that serves “the best phở in town” – al-dente noodles in a “very meaningful broth”, topped with a choice of beef, beef balls, chicken, prawns or tofu.
“The big question with an institution such as the OG Sông Quê is: can you really recreate the magic elsewhere?” Grace’s answer is a firm Yes, although she has her doubts about its location on the “Spitalfields margins, in that sort-of-Aldgate and close-to-Shoreditch area”. Tom Brown’s Pearly Queen vanished pretty rapidly on the same site, and the venue was empty when she visited for Sunday lunch.
“This is one of those places where I say: use it or lose it. Right now, they have seats going, so take a friend, or a book, and settle down to the best phở in town… if you’re antisocial and like Vietnamese treats, well, right now, Sông Quê will feel like heaven.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren also urged readers to “use it or lose it” at a difficult time for the beleaguered hospitality industry, kicking off his review with a £10-a-head greasy-spoon fry-up at Workman’s Café & Restaurant in Archway and a £30 scoff at the Highgate branch of Pizza Express to support his contention that eating out is “one of the great gifts of modern times”.
He also splashed out £120 at the latest from the Public House group (The Pelican, The Hero, Canteen, Fat Badger etc), who “can’t stop opening winners” – this one a “multistorey gastropub that is a little bit 18th-century Dick Turpin slash Henry Fielding picaresque road novel coaching stop, a little bit Noble Rot and a little bit 1990s Soho House”.
The “pre-Victorian, ur-British minimalist vibe” extends to the food, with excellent beef tartare, crispy lamb breast, cod with salsify, and a freestanding short rib suet pudding with gravy that is “every bit the showstopper you’re hoping for”. Among the puds, even banoffee pie – “silliest dessert on the block” – is “fabulously done here”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy checked out the first Scottish branch of a Scandi-based Japanese outfit that has 13 outlets in London (one more than in its native Copenhagen), and which “smells like a merger of Japanese and Danish cultures — the clean aroma of raw fish intermingled with the woody scent of a sauna after it has cooled down”.
Her meal opened brilliantly with tatakis of beef fillet and salmon that were “flawless”, “divine” and “amazing” – but “everything else pales by comparison”. None of the sushi was as good as it looks, and “like the sushi squished together in a supermarket packet, they all start to taste the same”.
As for the yakitori – the ‘sticks’ in the name – “all, I’m afraid, are disappointing”: chicken with the flavour of “an Ikea meatball”; “very chewy” prawns and beef that “tastes of not much at all. I eat mine dutifully.” Dessert is a “Gü-adjacent chocolate fondant oozing with factory-flavoured matcha.”
***
Camilla Long sampled what she described as “Georgian hipster” cuisine – that is, Georgia’s traditional heavy mountain food — cheese and mushroom dishes, stews — and “sexed up for a younger audience”, at a restaurant whose name apparently means ‘big energy’. “Why do hipster restaurants do this,” she wondered, “choose names that sound like broken family cars? Calong, Mambow, DakaDaka.”
Small plates included penovani, a delicious square pasty with salty cheese and green chilli that was “a Ginsters of dreams”; “excellent” lamb kebabs; and badrijani — an imperious aubergine dish with tahini, corno pepper, dill and coriander, “swamped in an entire graveyard of vampiric garlic; the flavours come at you like 50,000 Russian cossacks”. But the dumplings were “large, chewy and unglamorous, with an unexciting filling. It’s like eating shoes, or umbilical cords.”
Perhaps, Camilla suggested, there were too many small plates for the kitchen to deal with, to the detriment of main dishes. Her main, grilled plaice with sumac, molasses and wild thyme, took ages to arrive “and when it came was huge, meatless and dry, like a padel racket”.
*****
Financial Times
The Porter’s Table, Covent Garden
Jay Rayner took exception to the heavy-handed branding at Guinness’s recently opened urban brewery, a “merch-filled wonderland” whose restaurant features sauces, side dishes and desserts all made with the Dublin stout (which he does not really like – “too much body”). This reached its apogee with a portion of Guinness soda bread served on a “Guinness-branded hunk of cast iron the size of a breeze block”, with a drawer for butter and a Guinness branded butter knife – “in service of what?” Jay wondered. “What’s wrong with a plate?”
Given the lumbering corporate weight of all this, he felt that chef Pip Lacey (formerly of Hicce in King’s Cross) “hasn’t done a bad job”, with dishes including a starter of roasted bone marrow mixed with “the armpit funk” of Baron Bigod cheese; a side of burnt cabbage with fermented carrots and pickled chillies; and a “nice enough” roast chicken. But the place doesn’t feel “organic and alive” in the way of the Devonshire, another shrine to Guinness not far away.
*****
London Standard
David Ellis was drawn to a Hong Kong-inspired venue in a railway arch hidden behind Wonton Charlie’s noodle bar, whose cocooning interior of “brown leather booths and red table tops, of lamps that might have come from a yacht or been stolen off set from a Fellini film” struck him as “an East End riff on The Dover”.
There are, he concedes, “far better Chinese restaurants in London”, but this was somewhere he wanted to linger.
Top menu choices included prawn toast (“Do not share, order a portion each”); a delicious dace dip, “inky as the witching hours, with its fermented funk and mild fishiness swimming up as an aftertaste”; tossed noodles with char siu; and mussels “as big as snooker balls” with black beans and garlic chives.
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell gave short shrift to the new London outpost of an Amsterdam ‘live-fire’ restaurant in the refurbished former Whiteleys shopping centre (now simply The Whiteley), dismissing it as a “sullen and dismal affair” serving dishes that reminded him of “white mush,” “rubber,” and “weak green slush”.
