Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 1st June 2025
The Guardian
Given its Drury Lane address, Stevie Parle’s new restaurant might be considered suitable for pre-theatre dining. Wrong, according to Grace Dent: “the food is far too good to rush through in an hour” – this place is “Unmissable. Five stars”.
It certainly looks the part in “glitzy” theatreland – “a big, beautiful, ballsy, expensive-looking beast; a sleek, capacious, ever-so-slightly Austin Powers-esque, shiny-floored, caramel-coloured pleasure palace.”
It is also a “feeder” and “not for anyone with a meek appetite”, with generous dishes including a “sublime” Kashmiri saffron risotto with roasted bone marrow; a “huge” pork chop with onions, burnt-apple sauce and mustard; beef fat pink fir potatoes “that held good on their promise”; and “the star of the show, a hot-from-the-oven, damp, sticky cherry clafoutis served with much, much too much clotted cream”.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren declared a “consensus” of critical acclaim for Stevie Parle’s new restaurant, noting that Fay Maschler (via her sister), Tom Parker Bowles and the Times food editor Tony Turnbull had all told him there were fans. (To which add Grace Dent, see above, and the Standard’s David Ellis, last week).
For Giles, the irresistible “showstopper” came at the outset, in the shape of “a small, warm loaf of potato sourdough with ‘Town house gravy’, which is a bowl of hot beef dripping”. This was “pure Nigel Slater in its acknowledgement that the lees of a Maillard reaction are the locus of ‘tasty’. That the best stuff in the kitchen is often that which never gets as far as the dining room.”
As for the Kashmiri saffron risotto: “What a dish! As per the dripping principle, this is osso bucco without all the boring shin meat. Just the risotto Milanese with a huge canoe of fat, salty marrow, to be capsized into the rice, stirred in, lapped up, inhaled, communed with…”
Giles returned a couple of days later for a second lunch, ostensibly to “fact-check”. He might do so “every day, if that’s all right with them.”
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One Club Row, Shoreditch
Charlotte Ivers visited another new spot that has opened to critical acclaim, “a little restaurant above a pub” where she instantly felt “there’s nowhere on earth that could possibly be more fun at this precise moment” – “and they have a taxi light outside to show if there are tables available for walk-ins. I love it.”
Combining East London, New York, Jeremy King-style grand café and something new of its own, “it’s a glorious mix of classic and modern… that urges you to empty your bank account”. The best things she ate were barbecued asparagus on labneh with hazelnut and lemon, and pork schnitzel with mustard sauce and – in an “inspired” touch – blobs of tangy, salty gorgonzola.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles lunched with Fay Maschler at a “perfectly decent Marylebone Italian that’s apparently massive on social media. Hey-ho.”
The room (formerly Peruvian restaurant Pachamama, now relaunched under the same ownership) is “unremarkable” and service “can verge on the intrusive”, while the food is of a generally high standard. “This is a kitchen that knows its cipolle”, said Tom, after sampling good versions of arancini, focaccia, spaghetti with tomato sauce and rigatoni cacio e pepe. Less successful were tonnato – “more dressing than sauce” – and fritto misto in batter that was “a touch dense”.
“But would we come back? No. What Nina lacks is that all-essential, oh-so-elusive heart and soul. A quality that is made, not bought.”
*****
London Standard
David Ellis loved the Suzhou-style noodles at this new outfit showcasing the Jiangnan tradition of Chinese cuisine – but gave short shrift to the rest of the menu. Worse still, peremptory service and uncomfortable chairs ensured the place was “not for those who dine out in search of comfort and coddling”.
The noodles, though, were “delicate, fine things” that came in “a healing kind of broth, heavy with five spice, the kind of broth that cures hangovers and heartbreak and says not to worry about the heating bill. It is this to which I would return. It is solace liquified, the culinary opposite of the service.”
The other signature dish, ‘squirrel-shaped bass’, arrived in a “cherry coloured, allegedly sweet-and-sour sauce” that was so sweet “it might have suited a knickerbocker glory.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner visited a “great local restaurant” which opened last year in Horsforth on the northern edge of Leeds, from ex-Terroirs chef Sandy Jarvis and his general manager husband Clement Cousin.
“Its schtick is big, fat French classics, executed with vigour and a kind of precision that is so carefully disguised it just looks like the application of seriously good taste.”
Everything Jay ate hit the spot, providing a “glowing, middle-class Parisian Bistrot Paul Bert fantasy of French bourgeois life made real”.