Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 6th April 2025
London Standard
David Ellis welcomed the opening of Nima Safaei’s third restaurant in Soho – a “spiritual successor” to the inexpensive old-school Italian restaurants that made the district famous.
David’s party of three shared a three-course meal plus wine and service for £110 all in. The food – mainly classic pasta dishes – may not have been adventurous, but “unlike the old guard, these plates are all genuinely good”.
“Safaei has opened somewhere from before, when restaurateurs thought business was all about making their customers feel good. No wonder they call him the Duchess of Soho.”
*****
The Guardian
Voyage with Adam Simmonds, King’s Cross
Grace Dent enjoyed the “stridently finickity” Scandi-style cuisine she found at this restaurant in the Megaro hotel, while warning that “fine-dining refuseniks” might feel that a meal here is “like a trip to a weight-loss camp”.
Dinner consisted of a tasting menu of “painstakingly prepped gastronomical visions” from a chef who has worked his way through Le Manoir, Le Gacvroche, the Ritz, the Halkin, the Lanesborough and L’Escarxgot: “It takes thousands of hours in hot kitchens to cook like Simmonds does.”
The high point of Grace’s meal was a dish of cubed, salt-baked, roasted and fermented celeriac in celeriac broth. Yes, she said, “celeriac cooked in five different ways in a single dish is as time-consuming as it sounds, but it’s worth it for this level of vegetarian joy.”
*****
The Observer
Giovanni’s on The Hayes, Cardiff
This week’s guest reviewer, writer and actress Katy Wix, returned to a veteran Italian restaurant she used to visit with her family as a child. Nothing has changed, she said – “the same smell of wine and hot tomatoes”, the same photos on the wall of Giovanni with celebs from Tom Jones to Dawn French and Princess Diana – but she missed her parents.
Katy described her meal in strikingly vivid terms. Her wine tasted of “leather and mushrooms”; minestrone was “the colour of the soup that was thrown at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and it smells like a forest floor”. It was rough-hewn, nutty and beefy – how she imagined a medieval stew tasted: “I wonder whether Giovanni found the recipe in the margins of an illuminated manuscript”.
Her double-size portion of spaghetti carbonara was “salty and creamy and has the consistency of Crème de la Mer… In the feminist utopia, I will eat this three times a day.” Dessert was white-chocolate and pistachio cheesecake, with a green sauce “drizzled in the shape of the lacing on the back of a corset”. “This dish is the highlight of the meal.”
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren was impressed by a “not especially celebrated or show-offy, but very intelligent-looking” restaurant from chef-patron Stephen Andrews, an “admirable self-taught talent, with the attendant highs and lows of a go-for-it mentality”.
Giles divided the short blackboard menu of dishes into “rugged” and “poncey”, and much preferred the former: namely, a starter of cod collar and chimichurri that was “a triumph the memory of which I shall carry with me to my dying day”, the flesh “slippery and hot, salty and full of sex, dribbling juice and fat, what a glory”.
A main course of skrei cod was “okay, but mimsy and overpresented”, but its accompaniment, a small jug of roasted fish-bone and red wine jus (“I’d say ‘gravy’)”, was “sublime, like the beefiest sauce bordelaise, and I dipped with glee every single one of the excellent potato wedges”.
***
Chitra Ramaswamy enjoyed Sunday lunch at a gastropub in Glasgow’s West End from the team behind Cail Bruich (on the site of their former seafood spot, Shucks). It reminded her of the Noughties: “trifle, rum baba and sticky toffee pudding crowd the dessert menu and the Sunday roast is £37 for three courses, which is the kind of good value I can get really nostalgic about.”
Head chef Declan King knows how to please the crowd, she said, with a “confident menu of British and French classics — it even does a prawn cocktail”. Steak tartare, dry-aged Aberdeen Angus chateaubriand, sole Grenobloise and tarte tatin were all excellent.
There was also an unusual starter that knocked Chitra’s socks off – handmade linguine, Arbroath smokie and cacio e pepe. “An idea so irresistible, so right, that I can’t believe I’ve never come across it before. It’s at once homely and sophisticated, Cullen skink-y, laden with salty, smoked fish and toasty pops of cracked black pepper. Glorious.”
***
Charlotte Ivers was mightily impressed by the bistro food “done impeccably well” by 28-year-old Max Coen at this high-profile and much-praised restaurant. He is, she said, a “remarkably talented” young chef who has worked at Frantzen in Stockholm and Ikoyi in central London.
She was less impressed by Dorian’s profile as “young and cool” and its pitch as “a bistro for locals”. “This, quite obviously, is untrue. The guests here are rich — £4,000 jackets on teenagers. Investment rich, not salary rich.”
“In this sense,” she lamented, “the whole of London is becoming like New York. I hate it.”
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles must have missed his fellow critics’ upbeat reviews of this smart gastropub with a focus on Basque seafood, given that he found the cooking “unexpectedly remarkable”.
Always alert to sexy cuisine, Tom was turned on by what “could be my dish of the year so far: sea urchin with confit egg yolk, a golden, lavishly lascivious mouthful that teeters between the voluptuous and the utterly debased”.
Lobster rice was “as good a version as I’ve eaten anywhere”, chutoro crudo was “exceptional”, and txangurro (or devilled) crab was “exemplary’” – although “the salting is over-aggressive – a rare misstep”.
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell was the latest critic to sing the praises of Dan Chadwick’s new restaurant, “an absolute marvel of non-poncey, unfussy, simply presented, classic great-value dining” whose menu contained
There were also surprises he had not come across before: butifarra, a Catalonian sausage, served in a crab bisque with artichoke. “Sausage in crab sauce? Oh yes, a heavenly mix of soft pork and sweetness.” Panisse with salame rosa was “two long chips of fried chickpeas draped in milky soft mortadella-like ham; a revelation. Think the second coming. In Stroud.”
“If this isn’t my favourite restaurant of 2025 I’m in for a year to remember.”
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner visited a pub on the outskirts of Manchester founded by Hong Kong exiles Priscilla and Brian Hung, who shifted to the UK following the Chinese takeover and named their pub after Harcourt Road, the focal point of the doomed pro-democracy Umbrella Revolution in 2014.
The food is “subtly and sweetly different to the standard Cantonese repertoire”, with ingredients such as butter and condensed milk, and prawn toast with salted egg yolk. And with a mood that is “profoundly pub” – beer, board games, Black Country pork scratchings – the place feels like “a slab of Chinese culture cemented into a cornerstone of British tradition”.
The food, Jay noted with approval, is “not refined. It’s not delicate. It’s solid and comforting; cooking that makes a damp and difficult day so much easier. It’s precision engineered to go with a pint.”
