Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 23rd November 2025
The Guardian
Grace Dent was resolutely unimpressed by a pub that failed to bridge the gap between being an “old-school boozer” and “a cool restaurant that serves food at premium prices” – a trick pulled off so well by the Devonshire near Piccadilly Circus.
The cooking at the Shaston veered between the very delicate – “creamy mash with a lightly spiced scallop and curry leaves” – and the “simply heavy-handed”: “Does a caramel tart need an overdose of salted almonds and some very bitter citrus fruit? Just because you can do these things doesn’t mean you should do them.”
Worse than the food, though, was the singular absence of hospitality: “They’ve seemingly not employed a single member of staff who is able to provide any of the standard niceties of a restaurant’s front of house, such as checking if a customer wants another drink, changing cutlery or side plates between courses, asking if everything is OK, making eye contact, explaining what the dishes are …”
*****
London Standard
David Ellis welcomed the latest incarnation of an old red-brick pub, most recently called Smokehouse, now reimagined by owners Noble Inns (with minimal expenditure) as a classic French bistro with “no flashiness, but plenty of personality”.
The menu earns no points for originality – Coquille Saint-Jacques, pâté en croûte, moules marinière, confit duck, crème brûlée – but that was fine by David: “I could eat it all”. Perhaps, he wondered, comforting French classics is just what we need in “shitshow 2025”.
Apart from a lacklustre steak tartare, every dish he tasted hit the spot. The French onion soup did more than that, coming closer than any he has tried recently (including half a dozen in France) to what he remembers tasting as a child – a concoction “tangy with Worcestershire sauce, stock and sweet onions”.
*****
The Times
Giles Coren liked Kudu in its “magnificent” new West End premises as much as he liked the original in Peckham six years ago – although he bridled at the bill of £313 for lunch for two.
He was particularly enthusiastic about the “Kudu bread,” a brioche-style loaf served in a cast-iron pan with sizzling butter, garlic, almonds and shrimp, calling it “a foaming riot of salty-sweet, fishy-fruity, nutty-pungent flavour” and one of the most exciting things he had eaten in a restaurant in years.
Cod collar with chimichurri was a “triumph” – a dish he would remember for the rest of his life – and if skrei cod was merely “okay, but mimsy and overpresented,” the accompanying roast fish-bone and red wine jus was “sublime”.
***
Chitra Ramasamy gave her seal of approval to a café with a cult following beside the harbour at Newhaven, where the food was “a cut above hipster fare”, including “immaculate chips” and excellent apple crumble.
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell enjoyed himself at the new restaurant that has replaced the Colony Grill Room in the Beaumont hotel – named, William suggested, by the hotel’s owner, the financier Wafic Saïd, after his wife to appease her after he had named a race horse after a friend’s wife (the Lady Carla).
Anticipating a “country-house-hotel posh menu of scallops with apple and cheese” from chef Lisa Goodwin-Allen, William was relieved to find instead a selection of “pork pies and smoked salmon, calf’s liver and bacon, fish fingers and steaks”.
His meal started with a “glorious” and “irresistible” seafood cocktail, “a dish as magnificent as it was retro; bulbous, juicy prawns, sauce creamy but with bite, a tangy slice of grapefruit and some crunchy lettuce”. Almost as good were chicken Kyiv which “exploded with melted butter when sliced into” and was served with “sublime mash and a dainty sprinkle of truffle”, and Mayfair millionaire tart, “a deeply rich and gorgeous concoction”.
*****
The Observer
Observer columnist Séamas O’Reilly headed back to his native Dublin to revisit a tiny restaurant with a huge reputation among chefs and a bizarre name, taken from a dessert rustled up by James Joyce and Nora Barnacle for Samuel Beckett, who was convalescing in a Paris hospital after being stabbed by a pimp.
It’s only open for a few hours at lunchtime, three or four days a week, so owners Gwen McGrath and Ken Doherty can spend time with their two kids – and it’s “so gloriously, Irishly, casual that it makes me want to sing the national anthem. A tube of kitchen roll serves as our – necessary and welcome – napkin for the afternoon.”
The cooking is all “casual brilliance”: grilled bread with a curry leaf aioli and pickled mussels; confit veal tongue and piccalilli; deliciously sticky and sweet lamb ribs. “Having sampled everything on the menu, including wine for two and a generous tip, our bill came to just over €100 a head. A treat? Yes. A marvel? Most certainly.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner headed even further afield, to northern Italy, where he satisfied himself that although the geographical locality of a restaurant is in theory not important, eating a “superb risotto Milanese in Milan” convinced him that “location can matter”.
Risotto is, Jay said, “one of those dishes that is easy to cook, but very hard to get right” – and here in chef Cesare Battisti’s informal osteria (recommended by both Nigella Lawson and Stanley Tucci) the flavours and texture are perfect.
Ratana champions “big-shouldered” Ligurian classic dishes, and everything Jay tasted lived up to expectations: meatballs, lightly smoked trout, silky-skinned tortellini stuffed with salt cod, chocolate mousse with olive oil and salt, and a dark roast espresso – the latter hailed by Jay as “Italy’s greatest contribution to human civilization” (edging aside, presumably, such trifles as the Roman Empire, the Renaissance and opera).
