The Guardian’s Marina O’Laughlin once dismissed Balham’s Chez Bruce as ‘ultra-bourgeois and a little dated… onefor the Bufton-Tuftons, with their florid, claret-hoofing faces and fear of the new, I sniffed”. Not so anymore. The critic now seems to understand why it has been Harden’s reporters’ favourite restaurant for the past decade – “I’m forced to suspect […]
AA Gill heads out to The Woodford in search of Ben Murphy’s cuisine (a young chef of just 25 who trained under Pierre Koffmann) and finds that The Only Way is Essex is in fact a real way of life and not, as the Sunday Times’s columnist previously thought, simply a ratings-courting fiction. Incidentally he loves […]
Five stars for food from AA Gill?! A rare occurrence indeed. The first British spin-off (in Covent Garden) of Les Halles restaurant Frenchie wows the Sunday Times critic… “Frenchie is that thing I’d almost given up hoping I would see again: a really, really good modern French bistro. Not nostalgic or revisionist, but a sensible, […]
AA Gill reviews Notting Hill’s new vegetarian restaurant Tiny Leaf in the Sunday Times but decides London still needs a decent veggie venue “It’s the good intentions that sink vegetative restaurants. They are selling the goodness of their intentions in the hope that you’re more interested in filling the karma bank than your stomach. The […]
AA Gill is thoroughly unimpressed by Shaftesbury Avenue’s new Chinese hotpot restaurant Shuang Shuang – an “anxiety-inducing concept” where diners are asked to assemble their own soup from a conveyor belt of ingredients. It’s making The Sunday Times critic nostalgic for the days of turtle soup terrines, Michael Winner, and drinks trolleys… “This is by […]
The Times’s Giles Coren is so annoyed by his fellow diners inability to set aside their phones and enjoy the experience of dining at Sartoria (not to mention Francesco Mazzei’s cuisine) that he can’t taste straight… “The lighting is low but the tables are well covered by spotlights for menu-reading, the acoustics are perfect, thanks […]
Not too many reviews in critics’ corner this week with Marina O’Laughlin’s and Fay Maschler’s columns absent from the Guardian and Evening Standard respectively. We shall have to muddle through without their pronouncements and hope for a return next week. Among the reviews that caught our eye were three for D&D London’s latest dining behemoth, […]
Last week The Times’s Giles Coren was drooling over his keyboard at the very thought of another meal at Brad McDonald’s new Deep South-influenced Soho haunt Shotgun. This week his colleague AA Gill over at the Sunday Times takes said shotgun and fires both barrels at the place in his Table Talk column… “The first […]
AA Gill is back at the Sunday Times’s Table Talk column with a bang as he reviews London’s hottest new opening – Richard Caring’s improbably named Sexy Fish. He finds its a tale of two restaurants; the ostentatious room itself which ‘comes on like one of Ron Burgundy’s pick-up lines’, and then there’s the food […]
This week saw a double helping of reviews for Richard Caring’s latest Mayfair venture, the lavishly appointed and ludicrously (yet somehow brilliantly) named Sexy Fish. Both the Evening Standard’s Grace Dent and the Telegraph’s Joseph Connolly paid the Berkeley Square newcomer a visit, and opinion was very much divided. Grace, being the meeja dahling that […]
