Your round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 28th June 2026
Financial Times
Jay Rayner was mightily impressed by the “earthy” English food filtered through the sensibility of classical French cuisine at this new spot from chef Sally Abé (ex-Savoy, Claridge’s and Bret Graham’s Harwood Arms). She is already well-known from her TV appearances and a prize-winning memoir, but “this feels like Abé’s breakout: the small but perfectly formed platform allowing her to be very much herself.”
A version of angels on horseback, for instance, was a “perfect mouthful” that summed up for Jay all that is good about Abé’s cooking: “The soft, toffee-ed date comes bound in a crisp corset of streaky bacon and filled with the silkiest of chicken liver parfait, like it’s a savoury-centred chocolate.”
Tempura oyster, Scotch egg (a Harwood classic), an “exuberant” devilled crab, fat mussels in seafood broth, and a “perfect golden-skinned chicken breast” were followed by a whimsical dessert that was a grown-up take on the Tunnock’s teacake.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren suspended his long-held aversion to natural wine and witnessed the future of dining at a bottle shop-turned-dedicated restaurant on the ‘York Way Riviera’, whose kitchen is run by “wunderkind” chef Aidan Richardson.
A Languedoc red called Chateau Beauregard Mirouze, served chilled, was both “insanely cheap” at £5 a glass and “actually rather delicious”. It also went well with the flavour profile of the “young people’s food” on the menu, which erred “towards the sharper, pickled and fermented end of the spectrum (which of course makes natural wines, with their inherent cideriness, taste a bit sweeter).”
The food was excellent, most notably a side dish of ‘slow-cooked grilled short-rib rice’ and a pork chop with fiery apricot and scotch bonnet relish, while the venue was noisy thanks to its loud music and the shrill chatter of a young, mainly female clientele. “Half Cut is cool as f*** and Aidan rocks,” Giles proclaimed. “If you have a daughter (or granddaughter) to treat after A levels, bring her here and she’ll love you for ever.”
***
Chitra Ramaswamy returned to “one of the loveliest dining rooms in the capital” in an old gardener’s cottage below Royal Terrace, fka The Gardener’s Cottage, which closed abruptly two years and has now reopened under the convivial Peter Adshead, previously head sommelier at the Champany Inn, Number One at the Balmoral and the Pompadour. It is an intimate spot where guests eat communally at two tables (plus a separate room), each seating eight – “the only sensible way to dine in such a small and perfectly formed room”.
“The cooking is just as you would want in such environs; accomplished rather than inventive, and classical, elegant and ingredient-led.” A trio of “brilliantly executed” snacks were followed by an “ode to asparagus”, some delightful Peterhead halibut and hogget cooked three ways.
“Anyone who loves the capital will adore the Cottage,” Chitra purred. “It’s as refined, enchanting and charming as Auld Reekie herself.”
***
Camilla Long fancied a change from Italian restaurants so searched out the sort of “hidden foodie place that people talk about” – in this case, the UK’s sole Appalachian restaurant. Not a good move. Appalachian cuisine – if it exists at all – is, she assured us, “mostly weeds and roadkill… basically anything you’ve lashed out of the trees or scratched out of the thin frontier soil”.
The ingredients she tasted were a little less outré than suggested – butter-brined chicken, pork neck, sausage, duck hearts – but she reckoned every dish was either badly over- or under-seasoned. Then she widened her assault, starting with the open kitchen in which she could see “every single ingredient being ghoulishly fiddled with, frotted and fingered” by staff who “look as if they’ve just crawled out of a tent somewhere near the M25”. Her fellow diners were just as bad: foodies all, each one either a “tattooed lunk in a lumberjack shirt or a perfect long-nailed child Asian grasping a phone”.
Nor did Camilla like the “strange and hasty” décor of “the first place I’ve been where the loos are nicer than the restaurant, which is cramped, cold and without personality”. Clearly she won’t be back.
*****
The Observer
Tony Naylor ate among the hip young things of Sheffield in a new city-centre Sicilian spot from restaurateur Jack Wakelin and chef Tom Aronica, the team behind Bench, Pearl at Park Hill and Bench La Cave.
This is no bland high-street trat, he said. “Instead, Sicilian food becomes a pedal-to-the-metal, amps-at-11, sensory assault of flavour and seasoning that, if you know anyone living on black coffee and 40 cigs-a-day, will enable them to taste again. Hallelujah!”
The kitchen can be subtle when required, as in arancini filled with a “clean, lightly briny cuttlefish ragout”, but most of the dishes were “rich, in-your-face and almost LOL-clever”, from grilled and marinated courgettes of an “almost Thai-style complexity”, via pappardelle with mutton, artichokes and ricotta salata bursting with “umami oomph”, to a perfectly cooked whole seabass. “After two-plus hours, I was done, stuffed, punch-drunk on flavour.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent was transported from the streets of central London to an age-old family-run Kefalonian taverna – “up a cobbled back street, with a beleaguered 98-year-old yiayia doing the dishes [and] a one-eared dog on the step waiting for lamb titbits” – at this new spot from chef Nick Molyviatis (ex-Kiln and Singburi) and hospitality veteran Barry Karacostas.
“Zylia is not trying to reimagine Greek-Cypriot cuisine, or deconstructing it, or serving it with smears and foams”. Instead, Grace said, everything feels and tastes unshowily authentic, from a family recipe for taramosalata that is “as light as air and pungent with vivid citrus notes” via sharing dishes of good-quality (and therefore pricey) lamb chops to a single dessert that is well worth ordering – “softly chewy, faintly bitter, very good kaimaki ice-cream made with mastic from Chios and wild orchid root salep, with a thick, dark, intensely tart sour cherry preserve.”
“Zylia is new, fun, noisy and good for the soul. It’s not perfect yet (it opened only a few weeks ago, after all), but its bones are solid”.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles headed for a bleakly anonymous industrial estate beside a building site in distant west London to a venue formerly known as ‘Meat & Grill’ – “not the sort of place you’d stumble across… But if it’s chilli-charged, smoke-scented Hunan-style Chinese cooking you’re after, you won’t find finer than this.”
Chef/owner Cui Yaohua works in a kitchen about the size of a double bed manning “wok burners so fierce that they require a constant stream of cooling water. He cooks alone, battling great licks of flame, a warrior standing firm against the ever-swelling armies of orders. You can hear the roar of gas, the sizzle as meat meets steel. This man is a master.”
Along with the heat, there’s plenty of magic: “sublime”, tender kidney ‘flowers’, wood ear mushrooms, comforting scrambled eggs with tomato, plump, juicy crystal prawns, as pure as they are delicate. “This is some of the best regional Chinese cooking in London. Just don’t go expecting a view.”
*****
London Standard
Ben Lippett returned to a long-established railway arch restaurant (originally a warehouse for Gergovie Wines) well known for its “clean, seasonal cooking and an exceptional wine list, one that favours small producers and natural bottles”.
He opened his account with raw trout accompanied by “nose-tickling” horseradish cream and peppery radishes, followed by a “spectacular” pork terrine – “perfectly seasoned, tender, wrapped in a hearty blanket of pork belly, a mosaic of shoulder meat, snow white fat and crunchy green peppercorns; a sweet and sour pickled prune sits on top, a glazed orb of pleasure”.
A “sensational chicken schnitzel” served with matchsticked kohlrabi with tangy mustard dressing and creamed broad beans marked the savoury crescendo of his meal. This was “smart cooking. No rules broken, no boundaries stretched, just very good seasoning, clever menu writing and immaculate execution.”
