Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 1st November 2026
Financial Times
Jay Rayner was highly impressed by a small-plates restaurant that opened “down an unpromising service lane last year in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter”. The chef is Lottie Noren, who recently competed in Great British Menu, and her cooking is “many steps up from just fine. There is no clear guiding philosophy, save that it pushes superb produce from the island of Ireland into the service of very good ideas, wherever they might originate.”
Scampi made with the freshest of langoustines landed at Portavogie, on Northern Ireland’s easternmost coast, deserve a rebranding, Jay suggested. “Shall we call them Nuggets of Joy?” A round of crisped pork belly is seasoned with the spices used to cure guanciale, and is topped with a cured egg yolk. “It’s the intense, business end of a carbonara only without the pasta.”
“Beau is smart but wears that smartness lightly. It has one of those menus that grabs your attention and holds it.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent visited an “all-day restaurant, bar, tattoo parlour and hair salon” in the historic and cavernous First White Cloth Hall on Kirkgate, whose all-day menu – from Craig Rogan, who trained at his father Simon’s L’Enclume – looked “rather fabulous”.
The food, though, turned out to be “an uphill struggle” – “puzzling, if not quite a car crash”. A wild mushroom crumpet with Old Winchester and black truffle honey “resembles nothing so much a Warburtons Giant Crumpet topped with chopped chestnut mushrooms fried in butter and a few herbs… it has the texture of a damp Always Ultra. And where is the Old Winchester?”
Grace returned the next morning for breakfast, to be told the meal does not start until 10am, although the doors open at 8, the coffee machine is on and there are at least 11 staff “bumbling about”. “I ask brightly if I might meet the famous chef, mainly out of mischief, but he’s not here.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren enjoyed a “perfect Bath lunch” up a “winding and wonderfully shonky staircase” and into a pair of “beautiful wonky dining rooms” above the bakery.
The cooking was so good he ate two main courses, both “excellent”. The highlight of his meal was a bluefin tuna dish comprising “creamy raw slices of the belly in grassy extra virgin olive oil with lobes of citrus, jalapeños and chives”.
Giles was also impressed by the knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff – and by the good humour with which they handled his disdain for natural wines.
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Chitra Ramaswamy approved of chef Julie Lin combining the cuisines of Mexico and Malaysia at her venue in the Bonnie & Wild food hall, describing it as a “lip-smacking fusion of salt, fat, acid and heat” that plays to the balance of bold flavours in both.
“Best of all are tacos with slow-braised pork shoulder, tender and roundly spiced”, served with bracing sambal enhanced with chillies and shrimp paste, sweetcorn and tart pineapple salsa. Slow-braised beef is soft and aromatic, with “obscene amounts of lemongrass”.
Chitra reckoned the fusion works best with the blue corn tacos – not made in-house, but “superb nonetheless” – but not so well with rice-based dishes, where the poor quality and large quantity of rice throws the flavours off balance and masks some of the “exuberant” highlights.
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Camilla Long wielded her knife in a scathing review of this new venue at The Beaumont hotel near Grosvenor Square, describing it as “another money pit posing as a restaurant”, in a glass building she likened to a “premium MRI/CT/medical screening service advertised by disgraced TV stars on Instagram”.
A dish of “overcooked lobster linguine” was typical of London’s modern luxury hotels in pushing poorly executed dishes of expensive ingredients and disgusting concepts like “caviar on ice cream” on a wealthy transient trade who don’t really care what they eat.
Staff were friendly and knew when to apologise but, she said, “not a single one of them led me to believe they had been in any restaurant before”. The atmosphere felt like “an elaborate organ donation trap and we were both about to be chloroformed”. She “would have preferred a colonoscopy”.
*****
The Observer
Tanya Gold had “never found a South Asian restaurant in London with food as good as this”, she declared after eating at a “grey” canteen with “hospital lighting” and no website (not to be confused with the Hounslow Lahori Karahi in Feltham, which does have a website) – and btw she “hates Gymkhana in Albemarle Street and its two Michelin stars, because it is decorated as the house of the widow of a mid-ranking colonial official in the Raj”.
The Lahori Karahi is “not really a restaurant at all, I decide, but a kitchen with seating and wildly mismatched art”. It has a “vast” menu that “doesn’t care about Partition, because the cuisine doesn’t care”, so there is Karachi chicken; dhansak from Gujarat, jalfrezi from Bengal and chicken tikka masala from Glasgow.
The food is “beautiful, though not at all delicate”. The half mix grill of fish tikka “chunks”, chicken tikka, lamb chops and seekh (lamb) kebab “travels with its own cloud of steam and is immense and wonderful”. “Bombay aloo (potato) is wet, which is how I like to eat it, and impeccably spiced; chicken jalfrezi… is the freshest I have had; pilau is lighter than is usual, because that is how it is supposed to be.”
*****
Daily Mail
Bangkok Diners club, Manchester
William Sitwell visited Exhibition MCR, once a museum, now home to three different restaurant vendors: Italian pasta kitchen Anatra, Chinese barbecue specialist Morejoy and Bangkok Diners Club, which is run by husband-and-wife team Ben and Bo, serving dishes inspired by Bo’s childhood in north-eastern Thailand on what looks like Ben’s nan’s crockery – “Which is not a criticism. Far from it.”
The food from a “tight menu with snacks, plates of things that are raw, smoked, salt-aged and satay-ed, and a few curries”, is “original and flavourful”. First came a “beautiful and delicate” dish of raw bass with a calamansi nam jim dipping sauce; it was “a plate of balletic flair, displaying exceptional poise and balance”.
Smoked duck with orange segments, coriander and cashew was punchy but still subtle, while chicken tom kha was a whole large thigh, with crisp skin and soft flesh, in a wonderfully milky sauce. It came with “quite the best rice dish I’ve tasted in a long while – jasmine cooked in chicken broth”.
*****
Daily Mail
Cloth Cornhill, City of London
Tom Parker Bowles visited found a “faded London classic, thrillingly reinvented” at this ancient City chophouse that seemed little changed, with its original “high-backed booths, along with big bow windows, original tiles, and men. Lots and lots of men”, and a menu that “seems to match the machismo, a manly melange of sausages, steak and Barnsley chops”.
But the place – and its menu – has been subtly updated by its new owners, with “resolutely modern” touches including dishes that are foreign – a “Provençal panisse” – or even vegetarian.
“The Iron Duke would most certainly not approve. Even the ‘dumpling’, that most British of stodgy embellishments, turns out to be a gnocchi, mightily monolithic, overflowing with melted Taleggio and girolles.”
*****
London Standard
Lucas Oakeley welcomed a small, yellow-fronted Spanish/Mexican neighbourhood cantina “where pig’s head carnitas and padrón peppers with mussel escabeche are magicked up in an alcove-like kitchen.”
An “oozing” Spanish omelette topped with a sharp manchego-laced salad and chile de árbol salsa was “bliss”. Sea bass ceviche with tomatoes fermented in their own juices arrived “dressed with a fruity, fiery peach hot sauce that spotlights the quality of the fish”, while meaty cod was poached perfectly and paired with sweet chardonnay grapes and garlicky ajo blanco, in a “showcase of confident cooking”.
“There are some growing pains, yes, but there’s an excitement to eating at a young restaurant. It’s like seeing a band perform at your local decades before their radio-friendly hits and sanitised world tour… They care, so I care.”