Our weekly round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 25th May 2025
London Standard
David Ellis was first critic into Town, Stevie Parle’s expensively put-together new restaurant in Covent Garden – and gave his thumbs-up to “a Wolseley, reimagined for the modern age”.
“True, no one went to the Wolseley for the food, but I suspect they just might here”: for all the venue’s 60s ad-agency good looks, Parle is a “very good cook”, obsessive about his suppliers, and “Town has no theme other than to serve good food in a knockout space”.
David also noted some decent prices: wine from £8 a glass (including a good house white Bordeaux) and service at just 10 per cent – “especially as said service is extremely adept”.
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent was knocked out by what “may well be my new favourite restaurant… the new, big, generous beating heart of Manchester hospitality” from chef Shaun Moffat, already “toast of the town” for his “swaggeringly elegant but plentiful modern British cooking” at the Edinburgh Castle in Ancoats.
Winsome is “an attractive and lovable room, with a large open kitchen down one side” – “there’s something about the place that makes me want to use it as a canteen, not least out of sheer curiosity as to what Moffat will put on the menu next”.
Grace reckoned his “great cooking… forward-thinking fine dining without any of the faff” combined the best of Fergus Henderson, Mark Hix and the Quality Chop House. “This is Cool Britannia wearing a napkin bib with a side portion of rhubarb jelly and custard for pudding.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Tom Brown at the Capital, Knightsbridge
Giles Coren found himself, for the second week in succession, in the position of cheering up a chef who had just received a critical mauling from another critic – this time the Telegraph’s William Sitwell, who had characterised chef Tom Brown’s new venture as “a monument to the dull and misconceived”.
In fact, Giles’s memory went back further than a week, to the mauling he gave to this very restaurant 12 years ago, when it was run by Tom’s mentor, Nathan Outlaw, and Giles used “(or possibly even coined) the word ‘deeeeeesgusting’”.
This time around, he was happy to described the cooking as is “deeeeeelicious” from the first mouthful – a “triple-decker fresh oyster sandwich in slim, crisp fried bread with a blob of hot sauce and a tangle of seaweed” that was “a lyrical exercise in texture, flavour and seasoning, in two perfect bites”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy swooned over “possibly the best plate of my life” at this restaurant beside Bruntsfield Links – “where golf has been played for 700 years” – from Rachel Chisholm and her partner, chef Phil White, whose hit café and wine bar Margot is almost next door.
She described LeftField as a place of “confident minimalism” with a “bold and considered approach”, serving mostly seafood along with “hyper-seasonal” ingredients.
And the dish? A thick fillet of hake with cockles and beurre blanc studded with Arenkha caviar (an affordable, sustainable substitute made with smoked herring) – “a LeftField favourite and I can see why with its smoky, citrussy, saline profile. On the side? New potatoes roasted in reckless amounts of butter, squashed ever so gently and persuasively in the most Bruntsfield of ways, before being rained upon by truffle and very nutty Rainton Tomme cheese. Jesus.”
***
Fifteen Square Metres, Broadstairs
Charlotte Ivers visited the tiny (hence the name) new venue in a Victorian coastal resort where chef Tony Rodd and his wife Becky have set up after rising costs forced the closure of their Blackheath restaurant Copper & Ink last year.
“Is this just how it goes now?” Charlotte wondered. “London: a place where only soulless canteens, serving caviar slop to the bored super-rich, thrive? If so, the winners from this tragedy are pretty, historic towns a short train ride away. As chefs flee to cheaper pastures, excellent new restaurants are popping up.”
Tony’s cooking here is based on careful thought about which flavours might go well together that usually don’t – “For example: Moroccan chicken tagine rillettes, cleverly paired with crostini and a French-feeling apricot chutney”. Most of it works, she said: “It’s vivifying stuff, fit to restore the frailest Victorian lady.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles was the latest critic to heap praise on this attractive new restaurant showcasing the cooking of head chef Yohei Furuhashi, who’s done time at Toklas, Petersham Nurseries and The River Cafe.
“This is a place that gets everything right: the service, which purrs and glides, warm but well drilled. And the light, which today floods through the vast picture windows, holding the whole room in a mid-spring embrace. And the food… The dishes may be simple, but are immaculately done.”
It is not a cheap restaurant, Tom added, but “You could come in for pasta and a glass of wine and escape for under £30. For cooking this accomplished (and in this particularly gilded part of South Kensington) that’s not so much a deal as a downright steal.”
*****
Financial Times
Little Blue Noodle Bar, The Peninsula, Belgravia
Song He Lou, Chinatown
Jay Rayner sampled two new Chinese noodle bars, at contrasting ends of the luxury spectrum. “Both”, he confessed, “make me profoundly happy.”
First, an offshoot of Canton Blue, the Chinese restaurant at a £1,000-a-night hotel on Hyde Park Corner, where “classy bowls of titivated noodles” cost £15 a pop, or £20 with a Gweilo beer. “There is an almost illicit thrill about stumbling across the affordable amid the padded, money-quilted luxury, as long as the offer is good, which it is,” Jay declared. But he did have a couple of complaints: service is “extremely engaged. They want to know how everything is. All the time. This is not necessarily a positive.” And the £15 noodles can be followed, in absurd juxtaposition, by a diminutive choux bun from Canton Blue’s pastry section – at £18 a pop.
At Song He Lou, “they do not ask how everything is. The seats are not padded and there is no French-style pastry section. But there are very good ramen-like noodles with proper slurp and bite, submerged in broths that are so therapeutic they ought to be available on prescription.”