Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 15th March 2026
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell hustled a table for the first night of full trading at “the hottest ticket in London”, earning bragging rights as the first national critic into print on restaurateur Jeremy King’s multimillion-pound revival of a revered institution dating back to 1828.
It was everything he could have hoped for, both in culinary terms and – more importantly for William – as a symbolic and political statement: “a monumental f–k you to the Labour Government… a vehemently aggressive show of defiance in a time of relentless attacks on hospitality.”
His meal was “the most fabulous hoot”, “a welcome blast of good cheer”, and “a theatrical tour de force” of chefs in extravagant crumpled hats, of silver salvers and the famous roast beef trolley. The food might be a “mere aside”, but it was perfect: Carlingford oysters and a classic prawn cocktail followed by the roast beef-on-wheels – “two large slices carved by the chef, pink and tender with melting fat” for “a vast Sunday lunch on a Tuesday night”.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren had much fun toying with the notion that Clare Smyth had named her new restaurant after him; as he pointed out, calling it Parkerbowlesucopia would have just been silly. He had less fun eating the food, which was pitched in “high-low, semi-ironic” 1970s mode with dishes listed in inverted commas: “Fish and chips”, “Chicken Kiev cordon bleu” and “Toad in the hole”.
Most of the cooking, he wrote, was “at the level of a good gastropub”, although the bill came in at £400 for two with a good bottle of wine. There was one shining exception: “My vol-au-vent was brilliant, no question about it. A warm, puffy, buttery pastry case full of quality chopped scallop, prawn and mussel, straggled with monk’s beard and surrounded by a moat of foaming champagne velouté. Delicious, posh, deliberately hackneyed.”
As for the Irish-born chef’s potato menu – “gold-framed and put on the table with a flourish of tittering archness” – the dauphinoise was bog-standard, no better than the Corens cook at home, while the fondant was “positively abject”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy can’t stop recommending the “fabulous” £16 steak-and-sides lunch deal at Scotland’s only branch of Hawksmoor, which is set in “an absolute belter of a 1930s building”, a former National Bank of Scotland banking hall.
“Mid-range steakhouses where wonky-toothed Brits can come over all Sinatra, sirloins and martinis are ten a penny in our cities now,” she said, “but Hawksmoor is the Ol’ Blue Eyes of them all.”
Everything Chitra tasted (until a disappointing dessert) was “stellar”. Rump steak was faultless at any price – “not too small, not too big, scorched and butter soft within” – while Caesar salad was “a pile-up of romaine obliterated by a 15-tog duvet of parmesan, fat gold croutons, minimal drapings of Cantabrian anchovy and enough fishy, eggy, creamy dressing to gloss the lips”. They can even cater for veggies: a beetroot dish was “sweet, smoky and luxed-up with horseradish crème fraîche.”
***
Camilla Long dilated at length on the unfortunate name of Charlie Mellor’s new place in the heart of old Soho, aided by her lunch guest, Rupert Everett, as they word-associated filthily from vibrators to butt plugs to remote-controlled electronic sex toys. (It turns out that “vibrato” references Charlie’s earlier career as an operatic tenor.)
As for the restaurant, “it screams: upmarket shagging” with its lush wooden counters, Italian chairs and terrazzo flooring, while “the food is great, no question. There’s a fresh, almost chalky hot pile of lightly battered mixed seafood. A crostino with roasted pepper and bagna cauda, plus the X Factor parsley. A plate of veal tartare is devoured: salty pink beads, littered with parmesan. A hearty little clod of salt cod is comforting.”
The only fault is a “wheedling, obsessive tide of neurotic service” in which every dish is over-explained and “honestly — every wine came with a 478-page Tinder profile”.
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent rather generously declared herself to be “on the fence” about this “rowdy paean to Georgian cuisine” with very loud music, an open kitchen in which “the chaos is fully visible”, and food that is at times alarmingly sub-par.
In its favour, the enthusiastic floor staff were “lovely” and some of the dishes were excellent – notably the “punchy, walnut- and coriander-heavy dips” and the “small, plump grilled aubergines”. But an Ogleshield cheese flatbread “tasted almost identical to a stuffed-crust Domino’s pizza”, while lamb skewers were forgettable and a little overdone.
Worst of all was a whole sea bream cooked on the live fire, which involved many cooks poking the fish and shrugging their shoulders. “Eventually, a plate of mush with one eye and floppy skin attached was placed before me,” Grace reports. “I’m still puzzled how this occurred – one chef friend suggested later that the fish might have been frostbitten in storage, which is why it had turned to gloop.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles admitted he knows nothing about Sierra Leonean food, “but after a meal at Maria Bradford’s exhilarating ‘Afro-fusion’ restaurant, I’m certain that I’ve fallen in love”.
The cooking here was polished and balanced, with “a lightness, a vibrancy, a sheer visceral joy to every bite.” An everyday vegetable like tenderstem broccoli was transformed into a “umami riot” by a lavish coating of sesame paste, peanuts and shito – “that wonderfully complex, elegantly fiery Ghanaian condiment”. King prawns benefitted from “a hefty whack of Bradford’s own Salone Fire hot sauce”.
“But the best is yet to come: a beef short-rib stew that sees a wobbling monolith of fat-laced lasciviousness bathed in an intricately spiced gravy with a slow-building chilli heat… A fresh-baked flatbread, lavished with honey, sits alongside the beef. I only wish there was more.”
*****
London 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.
*****
The Observer
On a rare trip to the northern capital, Joel Golby visited a “go-to if you’re up there” recommendation, and was suitably impressed, if occasionally baffled, by a multi-course meal that opened unpromisingly with a dish of Jerusalem artichokes, toasted hazelnuts and coffee, whose “overall effect, weirdly, was like eating chewy, burnt popcorn”.
What followed was far better, starting with aged beef tartare in a celery-root canolo with parmesan and tomato ponzu that tasted like “an £11, one-bite, perfect cheeseburger”. Joel was “clap-like-a-toddler delighted” at a mushroom and miso-cured egg dish, some torched seabream, a duck breast with umeboshi, and the showstopper of barbecued Cornish scallop “cooked as if it were a perfect white wad of fat, and served with burnt citrus and roe”.
The only problem was the location of the loo – “outside the restaurant, along the newbuild mews and, after a slalom of Astroturf, through a code-to-enter door and round another corner”. He managed not to get lost on the trek there and back but wished the restaurant “was in a building I could love as much as I love the food.”