Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 29th June 2025
London Standard
David Ellis ate at a new Filipino bistro from Omar Shah, a multi-site operator who he said is to Kentish Town what Chris D’Sylva is to Notting Hill, Samyukta Nair to Mayfair and Richard Caring to Berkeley Square.
There was much David liked about the place, but it was let down too often by lack of thought or refinement in the cooking. Prawns were deep-fried in a heavy batter with their shells on – “boiled sweets would have been easier to get through”; pandan rice had “no discernible pandan”; wagyu steak “could have resoled my Weejuns”.
A meal for two with a carafe of Riesling cost £168. “Dining out cannot be cheap in the way it once was. But if the industry is at the very least going to encourage people to come out more often, places need to be sharper than this.”
*****
The Guardian
Bangkok Diners Club, Manchester
Grace Dent predicted great things for Ben and Bo Humpheys, a husband-and-wife team who have replaced highly rated chef Shaun Moffat (now of Winsome) in the upstairs dining room at the smartly revived Edinburgh Castle pub in Ancoats.
If their cooking claims to be new and innovative, as every new restaurant does, Ben & Bo “actually have a valid point”, with a menu that manages to be “authentic and boundary-pushing” at the same time as “a little odd”. The couple have merged influences from Bo’s family-favourite recipes from Isaan and Bangkok in her native Thailand with Korean and Mexican barbecue flavours inspired by Miami smokehouses.
The result, said Grace, is “a cracking little progressive, family-run place that has hit the ground running and will no doubt soon be one of Manchester’s hottest dining tickets. It has a small menu that has totted up many air miles in its making, and a big, generous heart.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren enjoyed an al-fresco dinner with his family at a converted 18th-century watermill in Norfolk so idyllic that “you wouldn’t have to serve such good food if you didn’t want to. You could just charge people to stand here.”
It was reopened last year by Siobhan and Caitriona Peyton, who previously launched the famous Atlantic Bar & Grill in London with their better-known brother, Oliver.
The food more than lived up to the setting, and included a juicy pork rib eye and roasted peaches that “sounds a bit suburban, a bit 1980s, but it works beautifully”; a “golden-edged fillet of halibut with a crisp potato confit, double-shelled broad beans and cherry tomatoes. And then a wonderfully rustic tarte tatin.”
***
Chitra Ramaswamy had her taste-buds – possibly even her mind – blown by a passion project from home cook-turned-restaurateur Lea Wu Hassan, bringing the southwestern Chinese food of her heritage to the people of Glasgow at her BYO in Mount Florida.
“Lucky Glasgow,” declared Chitra, who tasted several regional dishes she had never come across before, including a Shaanxi province speciality billed as ‘mind-blowing homemade geda chunky noodles served in a sizzling garlicky chilli sauce with chilli and garlic aubergine’. “They really are mind-blowing,” confirmed Chitra. “Tingly with Sichuan pepper, garlicky enough to perfume tonight’s sleep, as hot as you’d hope a dish that mentions chilli twice will be.”
Other dishes included rice dumplings stuffed with slightly sweet sticky rice and umami-rich salted duck yolk; “insanely good” pork ribs cooked to a recipe by Lea’s aunt, and rice cakes made with glutinous rice flour and pickled veg, dried red chillies and garlic.
Like Ranjit’s Kitchen, also on Glasgow’s southside, the Real Wan has an “Asian female home cook at the helm, and young white hipsters serving out front. These restaurants are radical, inclusive spaces centring the historically unsung (and unpaid) wisdom of female home cooks of colour.”
***
Charlotte Ivers checked out the latest opening from the Public House Group (the outfit behind the Hero, the Pelican and Canteen), whose kitchen is led by George Williams, “for my money one of the best chefs of his generation”.
The set meal started promisingly, with clever little tacos made from thin-sliced celeriac followed by crunchy nuggets of veal sweetbread that made Charlotte “gasp with joy”, then tiny slivers of pigeon on toast with a burnt apple relish – “like sweet, rich, delicately burnt toast: charcoally and full of childhood memories”.
Her main dish of fillet steak with morels, hasselback potatoes and salad summed up what she liked about the cooking. The salad was “seemingly made up of everything left in the fridge: flame-grilled asparagus, pickled radish, beetroot, courgette, a selection of leaves. It works so well. At heart this is just steak, potatoes and salad. The genius of this place is that it all seems so simple. It isn’t: all the ingredients are so cleverly balanced, so frequently surprising.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles was impressed by a steakhouse from a trio with outlets in Bristol and Cardiff, specialising in British grass-fed beef and produce from their own farm in Somerset.
Char siu pork belly “soft as a sybarite’s resolve, with a crisp curl of crackling and a blob of wonderful barbecue sauce” was followed by short-rib croquettes with a “low, sonorous moo”, then a half-kilo of Chateaubriand, “cooked rare, properly seasoned and gloriously charred… There’s even a whisper of funk.”
“Creating a successful restaurant is about so much more than just food – it’s an eternally whirring machine, made up of a hundred different parts, greased by pure hard graft. Pasture does what it does very well indeed and is proof, if proof be needed, that there are shards of the joyous in the general doom and gloom.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell drooled over the second edition of Claude Bosi’s classic French bistro, whose “hearty, gorgeous, life-enhancing, un-bastardised, fully-fledged, bold and authentic” cooking should be a “clarion call” to chefs: “put down your tweezers… this is what food is, or should be, in 2025.”
Even the baguettes are “miraculously as fine as fresh ones in Paris, sounding as good to break as they are to taste”.
As for the rest of us, “You must hope he does a Joséphine near you”.
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner ate the second best pizza of his life (bettered only by the Mandarin Oriental in Tokyo, of all places) at this newish venue from Sebastian Vince, a former advertising copywriter who became obsessed with creating the perfect pizza dough for his bread stall in Clapham’s Northcote Road – using baker’s yeast rather than the wild yeasts of sourdough. Light and crisp like a New York pizza, the crust puffed up in the Neapolitan style but without the Neapolitan doughiness, it is what Vince calls a ‘London pizza’. The toppings, Jay added, are “generously applied and quality.”
Two years ago, Dorian Waite, who helped turn Honest Burgers into a 39-strong brand, approached Vince to ask if he was interested in rolling Breadstall out. The Berwick Street outlet – with a “workshop vibe” and a “clean blue and white artfully functional logo”– opened in January and is “just the first”.
“Pizza is simple, which means there’s nowhere to hide,” Jay declared. “It’s easy to get it wrong. Right now, Breadstall is getting it right.”
