Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week to 17th August 2025
London Standard
David Ellis popped in to one of the plethora of New York-style pizzerias that have sprung up around London in recent times – this one from Ryan O’Flynn (“Canadian, shush”), who also owns nearby Detroit Pizza.
“Here is New York pizza in its traditional guise: the base is sturdier than that of its Italian forefathers, chewier too. More gluten. Each bite demands two sips of full-fat Coke. It tells of the place it was born from: it has been engineered to be folded and eaten on the go, for a city that is always on the move.”
David liked the look and feel of the place, with white-washed brick walls, “safety-orange tabletops” and a soundtrack of Kurtis Blow and the Beastie Boys, and he had nothing but praise for the pizzas, while admitting that he does not really like the NY version. But Paulie’s was not quite as cheap as it seemed, with prices starting at £4.50 a slice; cookies were £4 each and “an accompanying glass of milk is £3.99, which should be illegal”. He also advised visitors to avoid the buffalo wings – “eerily the same colour as the tabletops, which probably taste better”.
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent savoured “an ornate feast of sweet, sour, sharp, puzzling and powerful” at a Chandos Road venue that is “a roaring hit with Bristol’s diners”, from husband-and-wife team Duncan Robertson and Kyu Jeong Jeon.
Billed as a ‘traditional neighbourhood Korean barbecue restaurant’, Dongnae is “a little more earnest, authentic and pared back” than Bokman, their first restaurant in the city. There’s a “delicate, bespoke and thoughtful” menu of “Korean loveliness”, including octopus and lamb fat kkochi (skewers), assorted punchy kimchis, hand-dived scallops, cockle and mussel bibimbap, Korean beef tartare and “cold, bracing Korean soups”.
Grace’s favourite dish came last: “I didn’t really expect much from dessert, because on the face of it these people seem so very serious, but how foolish I was, because Jeon’s mugwort cake is one of the greatest things I’ve ever tasted. Yes, it looks like it ought to be dished up at a Harry Potter-themed tea party, and yes, it’s blue in places and algae-green in others, but the novelty ends the moment you bite into its complex, soft, creamy, buttery richness.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
The Black Bear Inn, Bettws Newydd, Monmouthshire
On a family trip to west Wales, Giles Coren stopped off just across the border at a tiny, white-painted pub run by ex-Bristol chef Josh Byrne and his wife Hannah. “Brilliant starters” were the star of the show here, notably “Josh’s famous deep-fried potato skins with whipped cod’s roe”: “It puts pressure on a dish when you’ve driven 149 miles thinking about it, but this soared above my expectations … gorgeous, really potatoey, like the mummy and daddy of the first potato chip, hot and glassy crisp, sizzling in the fishy smear.”
Also good were croquettes of ham hock, cheddar and split pea with smoked onion mayo; terrine of chicken and wild boar; little fava bean panisses which “displayed Michelin-level control and precision”; and a “historic Welsh rarebit, my first in actual Wales, the mustardy cheese filling whipped up and risen in the bread slice like a soufflé”.
Further west at St David’s in Pembrokeshire, Giles also put in a good word for Grain, “still the best pizza and beer party in Wales, possibly the world,” and its new Spanish offshoot around the corner (same kitchen), Santos Ty Tapas; plus for breakfast, Brunch House at Oriel y Park, the exhibition space at the top of the high street.
***
Charlotte Ivers sharpened her critical claws for a mauling of the newly relaunched restaurant at the London branch of formerly hip New York boutique hotel NoMad, now part of the Hilton group. Billed as ‘breathing new life’ into classic French cuisine, the menu takes “an equal opportunities approach to the mutilation of Europe’s food culture”.
“It’s in a gorgeous building: the old Bow Street magistrates’ court, famous for welcoming as reluctant guests Oscar Wilde, the Kray twins and assorted suffragettes. None, I think, had committed such heinous crimes as the current residents.”
Charlotte was repulsed by a succession of dishes: steak tartare was “like biting into a car tyre that had just been driven across a muddy field”; courgette panzanella was “a golden monument to tastelessness… two impossibly thin slices of toast balanced on a miserly quantity of tomatoes that could sit on your tongue for a decade without a single tastebud noticing. Some slices of courgette too, but I can’t refer to them without getting upset”; tiramisu “didn’t seem to contain any booze, and barely any coffee”.
“If there were any justice in the world, everyone involved in the creation of Twenty8 NoMad would be banged up in a holding cell in the Hague.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles detected a “splendidly nostalgic 1970s burr” about a restaurant that “has been open less than a month and already has the feel of a local legend. If I lived in Chingford, I’d be there most nights.”
Mary Berry, he felt, would share his approval of the cooking from the chef couple who own it, pastry master Ravneet Gill and her husband Mattie Taiano, who work from a small open kitchen at the back. Their skills combine in a starter of “towering magnificence – their vol-au-vent, the filo pastry buttery and deliriously flaky, filled with tomatoes, slow-cooked in cream. There’s a whisper of thyme and hint of cheese, and lashings of that lovely sauce.”
Other retro highlights included crepe with cream cheese topped with salmon roe, whipped duck-liver parfait and an old-school chocolate cake.
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell suffered a disastrous lunch at Tom Kerridge’s Chelsea pub which closed in June after two years as The Butcher’s Tap and Grill, only to reopen weeks later under a new name – but “more or less exactly the same, like a Tommy Cooper trick that doesn’t work, but without being funny”.
Whatever tweaks had been made, William reckoned it still looks “like a fabricated pub one might find at an airport (more Gatwick North than Heathrow T5 at that)”. A mismatching ‘seasonal’ midsummer menu of winter dishes (spiced brisket, lamb shoulder, confit duck leg) featured a succession of botched dishes (burnt brioche; very salty pork; creamed spinach that was “simply awful, like some cooked-up frozen offer that tastes like stained, soaked paper”). The buttery mash was “fab”, but oh dear, even water was “tarnished by the glasses smelling like a dog bowl”.
“Lunch at The Chalk is such a baffling, head-scratching, misfitting, misfiring calamity that I ask myself: is this really from Tom Kerridge?”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner found himself fretting about a new Chilean-inspired restaurant in Great Portland Street which is decorated with a display of rocks from the country.
He found some good things on the menu – a mussel-shaped tart shell filled with fat orange mussels in an intense fish broth; beef tongue served at room temperature with a rough walnut and tahini sauce; some intensely flavoured desserts – but a number of dishes were “distinctly amateurish”, including sea-bass ceviche “cut in large, worryingly chewy squares, [with] little in the way of acidity” and a grilled ribeye steak topped with “a bird’s nest of deep-fried spiralized potatoes, like knotted chip sticks, which are cold and soggy”.
“You could clearly have two very different experiences at Mareida. You could sit down, admire the rocks and have a terrific meal. Or you could be baffled by the rocks, have something mediocre and wonder why the hell you came.”