Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 23rd August 2026
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren enjoyed his meal at a “loose, affordable and fantastic” new wine-bar/restaurant from chef Daniel Smith and sommelier Elliott Ashton-Konig of the Fordwich Arms in Canterbury. If every seaside town in England had one, Giles said, “I’d… well, go to the seaside more.”
After a round of what he called the “bar snacks” (sea-bream tostada, oak-smoked cod’s roe with tapioca crackers, radishes), Giles moved on to a “serious hero dish humbly described as ‘mussels on toast, smoked bacon’”: “A Kentish summer has never tasted better.”
Main courses were a “dreamily classical” fillet of seabass in a creamy, herb-flecked vermouth sauce and two fat charcoal-roasted lamb chops, while desserts were choux bun with strawberries and strawberry sorbet and a “great lemon meringue pie”. It all added up to “an absolutely gleaming meal: precise, thoughtful and relaxed.”
***
Chitra Ramaswamy welcomed the arrival of hipster rotisserie chicken in the ever-more buoyant historic port district of Leith, in a pub from the people behind Nauticus and Dogstar and a chef, Pier Berretta (ex-the Pompadour, and Fhior) who describes himself as “very butter friendly. That may be an understatement.”
Don’t head straight for the chicken, Chitra advised. Start with the snacks and starters, including a Welsh rarebit toastie with “boozy, mustardy, béchamel-y cheese oozing out the sides like a stuck-out tongue, with a big dish of vermilion plum mustard for unrestrained dunking”.
Her half rotisserie chicken was enough to feed two twice, and “my god, the succulence of the meat. … Is it the best rotisserie chicken of my life? Oh yes. I’ll never bother with one from the supermarket again.”
***
Camilla Long knew from the moment she stepped through the door that this new Peruvian restaurant in southeast London would not make the grade – mainly, perhaps, because she regards Greenwich as a “benighted culinary hellhole”.
Once inside the “tipsy little Georgian building”, she was confronted with dozens of tables, all empty”, creating an atmosphere she summed up as “hastily abandoned drug lord wedding on the outskirts of Lima”. There were few complaints about the food, which was delivered with painstaking sincerity and included some “cute” ceviches. By far the best “isn’t even fish, but big chunks of juicy watermelon cloaked in a silky parmesan sauce – how does that even work?”
“I wanted El Alquimista to work,” Camillia concluded. “It’s a good menu, with a talented chef, neither of which you can fake. But you can’t fake atmosphere, or location, and this is a bad location.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent gave her seal of approval to the new all-day bistro in Soho House founder Nick Jones’s still-not-quite-open Clement Hotel, which she visited on an “ordinary Tuesday lunchtime” a couple of months after its much-hyped, celeb- and freebie-dominated opening.
As is the case with “most central London celebrity brasseries,” she said, “the food offering here is designed to mollify and comfort” – but with former River Cafe chef Danny Bohan running the kitchen, everything is excellently executed. Eggs mayonnaise were generously stuffed without resorting to unnecessary caviar, cheese soufflé was “stunning” and “luscious”, sea bass carpaccio was “sweet and sharp in exactly the right proportions”, and a side of summer beetroots was “quite frankly, gorgeous: sweet, plump, properly baked, buttery”.
“Café Clement quietly surpasses expectations, and I’d go back any day. It is fun, joyous and well thought out. Come for the celeb rumpus, and, if none of them is there, stay for the oeufs mayonnaise.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner was scathing in his assessment of the New York import that has taken over the main dining room at Claridge’s, “the grandest of London’s art deco hotels, the one which launched the city’s hotel dining revolution with the Gordon Ramsay takeover in 2001”.
It is monumentally expensive, he said, and supplies “food for bored hotel residents who can’t summon the will to go elsewhere”. Most of the cooking “isn’t so much awful, as just dull”. The best dish of the night, a seared fillet of mackerel, is “tiny, as if portioned for the Ozempic crowd”. Possibly the worst is an £11 portion of chips consisting of “what amounts to one large potato cut into wedges, allegedly triple cooked. They are dense and spongy. There are few greater disappointments in this life than disappointing chips.”
“Around us, families, perhaps off flights from Dubai, pick listlessly at plates of lobster linguini.” Jay finishes his meal with today’s tart of the day, blackcurrant. “It is dry and lifeless as, by now, am I.”
*****
London Standard
Lauren O’Neill found “lots to love” about this rooftop Mexican at the Standard hotel opposite King’s Cross station, recast under Mexico City-born chef Paola Arenas following the departure of Peter Sanchez-Iglesias, whose menus had a more Spanish flavour.
The main drawback, she suggested, was an unevenness across the meal as more personal dishes like halibut with corn husk and pumpkin seeds or bream with mole jostled with the sort of crowd-pleasers required in a hotel restaurant.
There were triumphs, though. “Iberico pork served à la Flintstones — that is on an ostentatiously large bone and on top of a smoothed-out salsa morita — is a little short of fabulous.” Among desserts, rum-spiked tres leches “is a must”, while a dish listed only as ‘piña’ “turns out to be a refreshing and novel combo of grilled pineapple and pineapple sorbet”.
*****
The Observer
Cork & Cage and Boodle Fight, Stirchley, Birmingham
Rebecca Nicholson enjoyed two meals on the same evening along a short stretch of the Pershore Road in southwest Birmingham – a haven of independent restaurants, unlike “the increasingly chain-ified centre, with its Ivy and German Doner Kebab and Rosa’s Thai”.
The first was at Cork & Cage, an employee-owned wine bar that offers a chalkboard food menu of “confident, competent, perfectly simple cooking” on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. A plate of crayfish and white cabbage left the principal ingredient to sing: “I liked their tune so much I ordered another dish, a salad of octopus, chickpeas, olives, red onion and Datterini tomatoes. It was a Niçoise with a glow-up, one that had gone on holiday for a week and returned home with a new face and body.”
Then to Boodle Fight, a “boxfresh” new Filipino spot offering “massive” portions with flavours to match, unlimited rice and “free-flowing” sinigang soup (a sharp tamarind broth). Rebecca loved the spicy ‘dinakdakan’ (a pork offal dish) and ‘fu and fungi sisig’ (wild mushrooms mixed with tofu ‘pork’ pieces and a yellow citrusy mayo), while the signature dish, ‘Help Me I’m Da-ing’ (battered, deep-fried milkfish served with a hot, funky, fish-saucy house dressing) was also “excellent”.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles had a mixed experience at a restaurant with its own regenerative farm nearby: “There’s obviously talent in the kitchen, and the ingredients are first rate. But not everything delights.”
On the plus side, “service is utterly charming” and some of the dishes “very fine indeed”, including white crab meat piled high on a chewy square of burnished hash brown, a panzanella salad “filled with the sweetest, most luscious room-temperature tomatoes”, pig’s head croquette with “a hint of the farmyard, in the best possible way”, and flatbread draped with Baron Bigod cheese and a drizzle of Wild’s own honey.
But the ‘tempura’ batter on the courgettes is “nothing of the sort, far closer in thickness and texture to its chip-shop cousin, and the vegetables are mushy and overcooked”. Worst of all is the lamb, “the fat unrendered, the flesh almost raw and it seems a crying waste of wonderful meat”. “With a few small tweaks, Wild could really soar.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell was bowled over by “food so good it mocks the past” at chef Sally Abé’s “glorious” debut restaurant, which seemed to conjure up both a rose-tined culinary vision of Edwardian England and “a little place in provincial France in the Second World War, where one might have gathered while resisting the worst efforts of marauding Germans”.
“Abé takes the likes of classic savouries and pimps them to heavenly levels”, resulting in “dark and voluptuous” devils on horseback that “will ruin your hokey Christmas attempts forever”. Similarly sublime were angels on horseback (oysters in bacon, cooked in batter) and deeply rich Scotch eggs made with brawn.
The chicken “delivered Sally Clarke levels of perfection. Clarke is one of Britain’s greatest, non-shouty heroes of English seasonal food, unfussy food”. Abé’s version arrived as three succulent slices with crisp skin, beside a bowl of peas and lettuce, and frothy verjus. “Together, it’s a dance of delicate flavours.”
