We kick off this week’s review of the reviews with a corker. Everyone should read Marina O’Laughlin’s scathing dissection of NYC interloper Hotel Chantelle in the Guardian, if only to hear the phrase ‘le wanquerie’, from the woman who brought us ‘Mayfair Wankpits’. From the food, to the service, to the very reason behind the […]
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 […]
In July this year Luke Mackay announced plans to open the Hour Glass pub on Brompton Road with hopes of recruiting a ‘GM with bonhomie’ and ‘a chef who isn’t a dick’. Tall order, but The Evening Standard’s Fay Maschler believes the Mackay (the man behind Brompton Food Market in Thurloe Place) has found it in […]
Alan Pickett’s (sort-of) eponymous solo venture Piquet in Fitzrovia gets a double dose of restaurant reviews as both the Standard’s Fay Maschler and Tracey MacLeod of the Independent pop by to try the chef’s Gallic-influenced British dishes. The Indy’s critic finds the service surprisingly stiff and the venue strangely deserted. Fortunately the food also receives […]
If the hipster-driven dude food revolution was prompted by the 2008 recession then, according to Giles Coren at The Times, the arrival of Sackville’s in Mayfair (an opulently expensive ode to beef and truffles) is a sure sign the hard times are well and truly over… “There would be exposed brick, bespoke cocktails and an […]
The Observer’s critic-in-chief Jay Rayner heads to Levanter Fine Foods in Ramsbottom in search of thick-cut Galician beef steaks. Unfortunately they hadn’t arrived yet, but that didn’t stop him enjoying everything else that Joe Botham’s Spanish restaurant had to offer. “We run up a bill of £60 without any booze, but with the lobster, which […]
Jay Rayner weighs in on the north/south restaurant divide question The Observer’s critic-in-chief heads to Manchester to try out the new Hawksmoor and stumbles across a veggie dining room, 1847, serving great food – well, apart from the desserts. Read our roundup of restaurant news in Manchester and enter our Hawksmoor Manchester competition. Meanwhile the […]
Can a pie be life-affirming? Marina O’Laughlin certainly makes Portland’s sound so The Guardian reviewer loves this recently opened Fitzrovia venture from the Quality Chop House’s Will Lander. “…it takes reservations and doesn’t charge like a rhino.” Meanwhile The Observer’s Jay Rayner is on another one of his jaunts, this time in Lyon The critic-in-chief […]
New grill house, West Thirty Six, will open in Golborne Road later this month – the same west London street that already houses John Doe, the charcoal grill spot glowingly reviewed by the Observer’s Jay Rayner on Sunday (4 Jan). The three storey 100-cover restaurant with bar and cocktail lounge, on the former site of the […]
