Evening Standard
David Ellis was impressed by the Mexican food at a permanent new restaurant from Ed and Ollie Templeton which has replaced the wine bar adjacent to their well-known guest-chef showcase, Carousel.
Ollie, who runs the kitchen, has clearly learnt from his decade of hosting high-profile Mexican chefs, and “you sense now they may be cooking the food they’ve always wanted to. They offer only a little choice, as though every dish has been through checks and balances.”
David praised the food as “gloriously unkempt; the encouragement is to let any prissiness go”. Hits included strips of sesame-coated sea bream, thinly sliced tempura pumpkin, “bloody good fried chicken” and crab rice – “little bundles of crab meat dotted in the seafood-soaked rice, haystacks in a field, with a quenelle of smoked eel cream to whip through it”. On the debit side, a sharing dish of monkfish seemed pricey at £60.
David Ellis - 2026-03-15The Times
Jay Rayner says brothers Ollie and Ed Templeton have “called it brilliantly” in choosing Mexican cuisine as the format for their new permanent restaurant in what was the bar at the front of Carousel, their well-known guest-chef showcase.
Ollie uses British seafood to riff on Mexican flavours, so Maldon oysters are served with ‘lemon, petroleo, rasurado’ and a condiment that delivers a “violent shin-kick of chilli heat”; lightly seared scallops arrive in a “puddle of toasty, rust-coloured and oily relish”; and prawn ceviche is accompanied by discs of blue corn tostada.
The biggest stars of the menu come from the list of small sharing plates, including a “deeply savoury”, subtly hot dish of crab and rice, topped with a scoop of cream flavoured with smoked eel. Fried chicken – Cometa’s take on a popular dish she which appeals to “something deeply animal in all of us”– does exactly that: “I’d put it right up there with the very best available in the capital right now.”
Jay Rayner - 2026-04-19
