Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles mourned the demise of Orasay, Jackson Boxer’s “paean to British seafood”, but welcomed the chef’s follow-up in the same venue, where he provides “the sort of tucker that you always want to eat, but can’t be arsed to cook at home”.
The conversion has been a triumph, Tom declared, with cooking full of flavours that are “big and bold, but never overwhelming”.
His meal kicked off with a highlight – deep-fried lasagne, “a small, crisp square of truffle-scented succour, all pert pasta and oozing taleggio. What’s not to love? A contender for dish of the year, and we’re barely out of January. Not so much elevated as exalted.”
Tom Parker Bowles - 2025-02-16The Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell delivered a mixed verdict on Jackson Boxer’s follow-up to Orasay on the same site, finding cooking that was “a sort of modern British assembly of current fashions”, but where the “scales tip in favour of the cooking flaws, from flavour to conception”.
First, the hits: grilled prawns were “magnificently on song; soft, suckable and sweet”; bavette steak “chewy in the best way, with oodles of flavour and little morels to jolly one along”; while the soft serve was creamy and accompanied by homemade oat biscuits.
On the debit side, ricotta dumplings were “heavy little pasta weapons, just the ticket for a food fight”, in a lobster sauce “more Bovril than sweet, delicate seafood”; duck fat fries tasted “factory-made industrial”; Castelfranco was an “oversized folly”; and a caramel cream “so firm you could have sat on it”.
William Sitwell - 2025-03-02The Observer
This week’s guest reviewer, fashion designer Bella Freud, admitted she is a tricky customer to cook for given her host of “verbotens”, ranging from garlic, onion and chives to butter. But she still found plenty of “tantalizing delicacies” at Jackson Boxer’s replacement for Orasay (of which she was a fan).
To her designer’s eye, the “simple and elegant” décor was just right, with light from the windows at the front providing a “soft, flattering, European-style ambience”. Attentive, efficient, friendly staff also passed muster – “and no one asked us whether we were enjoying our meal”.
The “pièce de résistance” from an inventive menu, a coffee cardamom caramel, elicited a description that was itself a masterclass in evocative phrase-making: “the texture like a memory from a 19th-century novel. It hit the heart and woke up your appetite all over again. It made you crazy with desire.”
Bella Freud - 2025-04-20
