The Times
Jay Rayner was another critic to remind readers this week that “in certain London postcodes the stupidities just keep on coming”, after visiting the recently opened outpost of a venture that began life in Ibiza. A waiter set the scene by promising food that was “Greek and Mediterranean with a Japanese twist, a declaration which could cause an international incident”.
This approach led to dishes such as spicy crab tagliolini with mint harissa and pineapple chutney, which “reads like ingredient bingo” in Jay’s view, or tarama topped with kaffir lime sauce, “which makes it taste like an aromatherapy candle by Jo Malone, and not in a good way”.
“Every dish we have is a tweezered, over-thought calamity: too sweet, too salty, too aromatic, too in thrall to the tongue-deadening demands of umami, and no amount of edible blooms or grinding beats will disguise the fact.”
Jay Rayner - 2026-07-19The Sunday Times
Doctor-turned-writer Adam Kay, stepping in for Camilla Long who was away, probably wishes he had steered clear of a “very expensive and really rather terrible” Ibiza-based restaurant that “has recently taken a Jet2 flight to London and set up shop among the shirtmakers, wine merchants and members’ clubs of St James’s”.
The beautiful Nash building’s interior had been turned into a dark and heavy cave – “imagine an Iris Murdoch novel in restaurant form”, with a 20ft-tall wine fridge running the width of the room, “so you feel as if you’ve been shrunk by a mad scientist and dumped in the chiller section of Waitrose”.
The menu “veers towards Greek” and every dish was a disaster, from a salad containing “my lifetime’s allowance of capers”, via “wet, overly buttery” chargrilled cabbage and a huge, “bowel-blocking” 300g striploin that the chef refused to cut in half, to a “tough and dusty” meringue that was “a bit like eating a pumice stone”. Coffee was served in mugs with no handles and made of thin pottery “that conducts the heat with cattle-branding efficiency”. The waitress suggested wrapping them in napkins to hold.
Adam Kay - 2026-07-26
