Lino, London EC1 Jay Rayner for The Observer saved one of the best until last – for him, Lino turned out to be “among my top places of the year”. It’s “dancing on the knife edge of modernity”; “so much of what they do bellows 2018.” His review also rounds up the rest of his […]
Cantor’s Food Store, Manchester Jay Rayner for The Observer found “Ottolenghi with a Manc accent” (and a pizza oven) in Manchester, at Cantor’s Food Store. It’s run by Eddy Cantor: the food “draws loosely on his Jewish roots”, and is “a happy place, where you could mislay an afternoon or a morning”. Although apparently it’s […]
Restaurant 92, Harrogate Jay Rayner for The Observer waited for 20 minutes at Restarant 92 before any food arrived on the table – and that was just bread. He’d been delayed on the train and was very cold – not the best start. Luckily, Micheal Carr’s cooking won him over, with its “fun ideas”, “enthusiasm” […]
Folkestone Wine Company, Folkestone Grace Dent for The Guardian visited yet another home-from-home seaside location, this time in Kent; where she had to invent a new term for the “imperfectly perfect” (so much so that she wanted to “ditch the review to protect it from idiots”) type of restaurant she found there – the “Snuffly-Ligget”. […]
The Little Chartroom, Edinburgh Marina O’Loughlin for The Sunday Times warily reviewed “small neighbourhood bistro” The Little Chartroom – it’s just the sort of place she’d hate to slate. Luckily, with all credit to chef Roberta Hall and her husband, Shaun McCarron, she didn’t have to. “Exciting soup” to start (“two words I didn’t think […]
The French House, London W1 Grace Dent for The Guardian visits The French House in Soho with some reluctance: it’s a “hollow task to review a restaurant that has tottered on already… for more than 100 years”. But with Neil Borthwick freshly installed at the reigns, she felt obliged to check that he was respecting […]
Röski, Liverpool For The Observer, Jay Rayner recommends that you “find something worth celebrating” in order to eat at Liverpool’s “note perfect” Roski, from former (joint) MasterChef: The Professionals winner, Anton Piotrowski, who Jay remembers judging in 2012. He tried cooking in rural Devon and Plymouth before settling here – all Jay can say is “Lucky […]
1251, London N1 Jimi Famurewa for The Evening Standard ventured to Islington and James Cochran’s new restaurant, who has “once again plundered his Scottish and Saint Vincent heritage (plus the influence of a childhood in Whitstable)”. A “Kentish-Scots-Caribbean” blend may sound like “the stuff of a disastrous ‘fusion cuisine’”, but in Cochran’s hand ” it […]
Kym’s, London EC4 Marina O’Loughlin visited Andrew Wong’s City newcomer Kym’s for The Sunday Times, “an opening… hotly anticipated by restaurant lovers” (and what she calls his “potentially difficult second album”). Could he pull off his Pimlico triumph (the “electrifying” A Wong) in the “expensive banality” surroundings of the Bloomberg arcade? Despite being “mildly devastated” […]
Kym’s, London EC4 Five stars for Andrew Wong’s new City restaurant in The Evening Standard from Fay Maschler. She admits to feeling “proprietorial” about the chef, having been the first to review his reincarnation of his parents Pimlico restaurant in 2012, delighting in the ” skill, wit, inventiveness, subversion and astonishment” of the dim sum (and, […]
