Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 26th October 2025
The Guardian
Grace Dent thoroughly enjoyed a “welcome slice of unpretentious hospitality happiness” in deepest Essex, where chef Tobias Godfrey and his co-owner and partner, Laura Day, have “taken the Chelmsford dining scene by storm” with their enthusiastically eclectic cuisine.
The small-plates menu takes guests on a “whistle-stop tour of the entire culinary cosmos”, from battered sausages and Taiwanese bao to Kashmiri scallops, duck-fried rice with kimchi and mac and cheese with guanciale – “all casual like, as if they aren’t from entirely different continents…. There’s something so endearingly adventurous and devil-may-care about this menu that makes me love the place.”
The cooking may not be refined, but it is full of “big, hearty, pan-global flavours” and is notably generous: the so-called “small plates” are in fact “whopping”, including a “giant-sized beef tartare” that comes with crispy kale, egg yolk and bread.
*****
The Observer
Taking her turn as guest critic, long-time Observer food writer and editor Mina Holland visited the new incarnation of what was previously the experimental Portuguese restaurant Lisboeta, from high-profile chef Nuno Mendes. With Mendes gone, it has been subtly reworked by his former staff (with input from Leandro Carreira, the fishmonger/chef behind The Sea, the Sea) along more familiar lines: as Mina put it, “less pork-fat custard, more piri piri chicken”.
The new version passed the acid test of whether she would like to return. Mina had enjoyed Lisboeta three years ago for “a novel meal without the need for a sequel”. By contrast, Luso was like the Pixar classic film that her children enjoy again and again: “It’s the holy grail for any restaurant – to be the Toy Story of eateries: to do something so well that people go back for more, many times, and find something new to love on each visit.”
Not every dish was perfect – a plate of brill crudo with apple and red pepper vinaigrette “lacks chemistry” – but amêijoas à bulhão pato, clams cooked in the southern Portuguese style with coriander, garlic and white wine, “really deliver”, their “deeply comforting liquor, shellfish’s answer to Jewish penicillin”, while seabass baked in salt may well be the best seabass she will ever eat in London.
One tip: sit in the “serene” upstairs dining room, not the narrow corridor-like room downstairs, where the flashing light of the dishwasher was directly in Mina’s line of vision.
*****
London Standard
David Ellis was thrilled by a fish and seafood restaurant from Ross Shonhan at the address where the late Queen Elizabeth was born, whose “maximalist” interior décor is quite “mad” but whose food made it – much to his surprise – an “instant classic”.
The cooking was both superb and interesting (“when did gurnard, garfish and sea cucumber last appear on a menu in W1?”), with no dud dishes. Among the hits were individual fish presented in a “triptych” of raw, grilled and soup cooked to order, while the “petite” seafood platter was “an overflowing triumph of oysters and mussels and curls of sea bream, of crab tartlets as bright and cheering as a birthday morning, and deep-fried prawn heads”.
Mashed potato arrived “in a rockpool of shellfish bisque and lobster. Have I ever eaten anything better? I couldn’t swear to it,” David concluded. “Look, I’m not really recommending you go, I’m insisting. No offence.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles whiled away a long and merry lunch at a “majestic” new hotel brasserie with “high, stucco-clad ceilings, marble-topped tables and handsome lamps”.
The food – simply cooked over natural flame – was with occasional exceptions spot-on, led by “fat, charred scallops”; “vast piece of monkfish, served on the bone, zingingly fresh, exquisitely cooked and gloriously meaty”; and ex-dairy Southwest sirloin that was “chewy, grown-up beef with heart and soul and swagger… one of the best pieces of cow I’ve eaten for ages, and all that age means a magnificently bosky bovine heft”.
To complete the “class act”, service was “sweet and warm and smart”.
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell found himself the lone guest for Friday lunch at a venue in York whose interior décor and furniture instantly repelled him – “I’d go so far as to say it is the worst-designed restaurant in the world, but I can’t be sure as I’ve only visited about 3,000 in the past 25 years.”
To match the interior, he ordered “what could be the worst named dish of any restaurant in the world: ‘smoked kipper carbonara’.” Much to his surprise, this turned out to be really rather good: a risotto made with smoked kipper, involving perfectly textured rice, some “silken Béarnaise” and a sprinkle of caviar. On the side, some “fabulous” fresh sourdough bread with soft and salty butter.
His veggie pasta and Yorkshire curd tart were not quite so good, but the British cheese was “very fine”, and the glasses of wine he was poured – a Riesling, a rustic Italian cabaletta and a ‘Little Red’ from Tropo in the Adelaide Hills – were uniformly excellent.
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner enjoyed a meal at a “small, gently austere” venue which follows the Japanese tradition of specialising in one particular mode of cooking: in this case katsu, cuts of pork deep-fried in fresh breadcrumbs (although it also serves chicken, prawn, tofu and omelette versions).
This is a much traduced dish, Jay explained. “A lot of British katsu is dry and overcooked, until the meat is like a carpet tile, only with none of the flavour. This is so much better than that. A thickly layered crunch gives way to a soft succulence beneath, puffing meaty gusts at you.”
For those who have “misunderstood the point of coming here”, Jay said there are a couple of noodle bowls and a “particularly good salmon sashimi, aged between sheets of kelp to give it serious tension and depth of flavour”.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Peeking behind the paywall, we can see Giles Coren declared Fish Shop in Ballater, from art dealers Hauser + Wirth’s Artfarm hospitality wing, and close to the royal residence at Balmoral, “fit for the Queen of England”.
Charlotte Ivers praised Eel Sushi in Notting Hill for its “astonishing seafood”, adding that it was not a comfortable place.
In Scotland, Chitra Ramaswamy declared the latest branch of Dishoom, in Glasgow, “worth the wait”.
