Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 25th October 2026
The Guardian
Outlier, Glasgow
Grace Dent followed up a tip from a stranger to have brunch at a four-year-old art space with a kitchen whose “carefully orchestrated can’t-be-arsedness is really quite magical [and] intensely likable”.
She was greeted with dishes like blood peach panzanella with Isle of Wight tomatoes, Toulouse sausage with braised Umbrian lentils, or celery soup with Highland blue cheese, and sandwiches that were “frankly ridiculous”, including a “clodhopper” of fried chicken on home-made milk bun and a “three-inch thick” beef shin toastie with smoked cheddar and fennel jam.
But “it is the cake counter that has proper main-character energy here”, piled high with babka buns, apple crumble and custard cakes, and bright strawberry pastries – all home-baked by people just eight feet away from you. “Outlier has a buzz for good reason. You cannot fake fabulous by simply buying in cool crockery and a freezer full of someone else’s pastry.”
*****
The Observer
Cassette, Covent Garden
Tanya Gold brushed aside the “stupid name” of this new venture from the Levan team, and liked the understated décor and very short menu – “always an excellent sign” – of a restaurant that turned out to be “perfect” but for one whopping error.
Her meal started well with a “superb” endive salad, and reached its high point with a “wonderful” pie of chicken and mushroom braised in white wine wrapped in “the finest puff pastry – soft and hard together, exquisite” (she forgave the “pointless” chicken foot sticking out of the top). “We eat the pie with chips fried in rapeseed and olive oil: they are greenish gold, and very good.”
And the error? Serving a chocolate mousse improved with cream under “a pile of undeniably good olive oil” – “I want to take the chef-pioneer who first ruined a mousse with a small fruit oil, beat him to death, and stick him in one of his own pies… Why olive oil? Why not diesel oil? Or lard?”
*****
Financial Times
Cloth Cornhill, City of London
Jay Rayner gave his seal of approval to the new incarnation of Simpson’s Tavern, the chophouse opened in 1757, whose new owners have “worked hard to make the old look new, and then really quite old again”, resulting in a list of dishes that “plays to a delicious fantasy of Britishness, one which reads, in places, like some 19th-century grandee has hired French chefs, then asked them to cook a bunch of English dishes”.
It’s the sort of food Jay imagines being consumed by a corpulent bishop in a novel by Anthony Trollope: a “stupidly rich” gratin of smoked haddock, fat mussels and leeks in cheesy béchamel; a “bobby dazzler” of a venison, bacon and prune “pie” (or stew with “old-school, flour-thickened gravy” topped with “gnarly, rough” pastry made in-house); a perfectly trimmed lemon sole in a buttery sauce with potted shrimps; a “massive” Barnsley chop with anchovy butter and a pork chop with sauce Robert.
The wine list is “as comprehensive as you would expect from a business founded by two people from the wine trade”, with some “mildly eccentric”, “very precise” pricing in the upper reaches, such as a 1983 Pétrus for £2,549 and a 1993 Romanée-Conti for £3,641.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
The Horses, Clerkenwell
Giles Coren had lunch at the latest pub/restaurant from the Public House group (The Pelican, The Hero, The Hart etc), noting that there’s “almost no point in reviewing” a venture from this team: “You don’t need me to come down here in advance . . . delivering some preposterous score to nine decimal places at the end. You can just go. You always can with them.”
He shared his meal with Jesse Burgess of Topjaw, whose social media posts look could well put Giles’s traditional restaurant criticism out of business. This may have been behind Giles’s self-deprecating mood, as he observed, “Restaurant critics have always been pompous bores writing too many words about too little of any interest to the general consumer.”
As to the food, the duo “gasped” at some mackerel, and ate “pale but fruity tomatoes with goat’s curd and big sourdough croutons”, “big curls of very fresh squid and a golden, crunchy, almost explosive batter”, “round, fruity fillets” of John Dory (“like if fish had bums”) and a fish pie that was “clean and white with just a hint of smoke and very sleek, buttery mash”.
***
Pasture, Birmingham
Camilla Long made her first trip to Brum for 15 years, where she visited a “power-loaded steakhouse to get stuck into”, with waiters who present a variety of dry-aged cuts and weights on a chopping board at the diner’s table, with a flourish.
She felt like she had been “tossed in some epic flavour ocean” as a flurry of high-energy starters arrived, although a plate of char siu pork belly was slightly underpowered – “a small, shy piece of pork hiding behind a light wafer of crackling”.
In contrast, the steaks arrived “rather unadorned”; Camilla had ordered her ribeye medium-rare, but the chef wisely pushed it towards medium, so the fat melted properly, resulting in sweet, plump and beautifully rendered meat.
*****
Daily Mail
La Cage, Kensington
Tom Parker Bowles dropped into a “huge and glossy” new sports bar – or rather a ‘Montreal Sports Brasserie’ – with “tinny and irksome” commercial house music, moodily low lighting and service that was “charming but disorganised”.
The buffalo wings were “sorry specimens, bleak, dry and joyless. And there’s not enough sauce”. “Ribs are worse still, over-sweet and desiccated, tasting of cheap meat and misery”, while Caesar salad “has neither anchovies nor allure, and is the sort of fridge-cold, morose melange served up in a mid-level business hotel”. The pizza was at least “edible”.
The poutine, though, was “excellent – all rubbery, squeaky cheese curds and chips soaking in a mess of gravy,” Tom said. “I suppose if they’re going to get anything right, it may as well be Canada’s (unofficial) national dish.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
Cépage, Notting Hill
William Sitwell was thrilled by the “masterful” cooking from chef-patron Gaston Savina (a former private chef and 2024 MasterChef: The Professionals finalist) at the “gorgeous little neighbourhood joint” he has taken over.
William’s meal of “Melior Oeuf Mayonnaise” with caviar, the chef’s TV-signature “Pie Escargot”, a “delicate yet earthy stew” of braised snails under fluffy potato espuma, and slow-cooked ox cheek with a rustic-looking tart ratatouille amounted to a “glorious manifestation of French food”.
This, combined with a beautifully lit environment of bare brick, marble table tops, candles, artwork and bookshelves, added up to a restaurant that is “absolutely, wonderfully, friggin’ divine”.
*****
London Standard
Kiln, Soho
Guest reviewer Melissa Thompson failed to visit Ben Chapman’s ground-breaking new-wave northern Thai restaurant when it opened 10 years ago, perhaps because she was put off by the hype and ecstatic reviews it generated from the word go.
Making up for lost time, she worked her way happily through “fatty, fragrant” sausages made from cull yaw – older ewes who end their post-lambing days eating grass and herbs in Cornish fields; laap-spiced deep-fried sardines with Sichuan pepper; and barbecue chicken, “probably my favourite of the day. Golden, then blackened in parts from the intense heat, the skin thin and delicately crisped.” Her only disappointment was the dish of claypot noodles with Tamworth belly pork and brown crab, which “feels monochrome after the bright colours of everything else”.
“Kiln deserves its hype,” she concluded. “I may be late to the party, but I’m no less enthusiastic. Here’s to the next 10 years.”