Our round-up of what the nation’s restaurant critics were writing about in the week up to 30th March 2025
London Standard
David Ellis hailed the “beautiful food and fair prices” at a new arrival in a “cool” neighbourhood, which landed in the very week that chancellor Rachel Reeves’s “thuggish budget is playing hell with hospitality”.
The venue, Câv, seems to be “financed by gumption alone” – “as if someone opened The Dover in their garage, using pocket money” – with a business plan that involves inviting chefs for residencies. First up is Tasca, from chef Josh Dallaway and sommelier Sinéad Murdoch, each “a warm, unceremonious presence”, offering Spanish and Portuguese cuisine that embraces the French influence found in Lisbon.
The dishes, most notably seafood and an outstanding black pudding, were all to a high standard, while “an uncommon, aged vinho verde from Casa de Mouraz is marked up barely at all: what sells for £25 in the shop is £39 here. Elsewhere it might be £100.”
*****
The Guardian
Grace Dent lunched at a new independent from Joo Young Won, the Korean-born former head chef at Galvin at Windows – a very different restaurant that traded in French haute cuisine to a Mayfair clientele.
This new operation, she said, was “wilfully niche”. “This is not a Korean restaurant, but neither is it not a Korean restaurant. It is a melange, an experiment, a delicious, Korean-flecked hotch-potch”, with unlikely-sounding dishes such as kimchi fritters – which worked surprisingly well.
Menu highlights included a griddled onglet that was “nothing short of fantastic” and “incredibly good” seafood jjamppong with aïoli – “like a spicy bouillabaisse [with] a vibrant orange, garlicky emulsion with enough bite to make your forehead sweat.”
*****
The Observer
Food-loving politician-turned-telly personality Ed Balls was the latest guest reviewer for The Observer, visiting a Japanese restaurant opened 21 years ago by the present owner’s mother. Here he witnessed a “truly damascene conversion”, enticing his 86-year-old father to sample sashimi after a life-long aversion to raw fish.
Japanese restaurants are close to Ed’s heart: he and his wife, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, celebrate their wedding anniversary every year at a yakitori bar; he also brought his mother to Shiki for her last restaurant meal before dementia made such outings impossible: “she loved the food and the hugely patient and thoughtful staff”.
Ed and his father chomped their way through plates of sushi, sashimi, edamame beans, “excellent miso soup”, “light, but fabulously crunchy” tempura and “stunning” beef noodles, washed down by “my favourite combination: cold Asahi beer and a small flask of warm and nutty sake. I know the connoisseurs say sake should always be drunk cold. But I’m not a connoisseur and I don’t.” The bill, he said, was “unexpectedly reasonable”.
*****
The Times & Sunday Times
Giles Coren was thrilled by a “wild ride through the foodie backstreets of an imaginary EuroTaiwanese wonderland”, at a self-styled ‘modern Asian restaurant’ recommended to him by an eminent but unnamed KC and fronted by an Irishman named Brendan.
The food, which included a “mental sesame prawn toast” made with brioche and parmesan (“obviously”) and a Basque-style burnt cheesecake that was “arguably the best in the world”, was certainly not for the traditionalist.
Most of it, though, was “extraordinary”, with “a couple of duds to keep everyone on their toes. El Bulli was the same. The Fat Duck too. If there’s no grit, there ain’t no pearl.”
***
Chitra Ramaswamy nominated this basement spot from Scoop (the people behind Ox and Finch, Ka Pow and Baba) as the “hottest new restaurant in town” – grabbing the crown from Margo, its “sexy sister” upstairs.
The offspring of “a retro European vinyl bar [that] got jiggy with a 1980s-ish Manhattan diner”, it combines a top-tier sound system with a serious cocktail kitchen and a “smoking hot charcoal grill” – making it ideal for late-night dining, of course, but also surprisingly good for lunch.
“Here’s the really unlikely part,” added Chitra: “the food is immense. Think Carlingford oysters grilled with spiced beef fat, Levantine-ish dips served with hot grilled pita gleaming with butter, grilled chicken wings, Texan hotlinks, jerk spiced pork neck, and so on.”
***
Charlotte Ivers broke the news that a “properly good modern European restaurant has opened in Barnes” (well, it opened in September 2023) – a “beautiful little place on the river” that looks like a pub from the outside and like a rural French bistro on the inside.
“Unlike every other modern European place in the country, the Waterman’s Arms doesn’t suggest you share. We do so anyway,” she said, picking out for special praise some “exciting” semolina gnocchi with fresh tomato sauce, paella-like seafood rice and a “charming” semi-savoury oat and almond cake.
Charlotte took her editor as a guest and he was apparently pleased with his meal. But given that he lives nearby and she had already complained about the dearth of good restaurants in Barnes, he surely knew about the Waterman’s already.
*****
Daily Mail
Tom Parker Bowles eased himself into the bar then the dining room at an establishment that “has been open for just over a year, but gets better each time I go” – “it’s like climbing into that wardrobe and emerging in a restaurant Narnia, or leaving drab Kansas to awake in a technicoloured Oz”.
“All London is here” on the Saturday night of Tom’s latest visit – “a mixture of actors and directors, bright young things, supermodels, locals and toffs.”
The atmosphere is “gently seductive” and the staff “impeccable, whip-smart, warm and there when you need them”, while the food is “far better than you might expect, the menu listing clubby comfort-food classics with an Italian-American burr: cheeseburgers and lobster rolls, spaghetti with meatballs and grilled Dover sole.”
*****
Daily Telegraph
William Sitwell was mostly pleased with the ‘British tapas’ he found in an “elegant townhouse” near the 18th-century bridge over the River Kennet, although at times it was “trying a tad too hard” – as with the ‘no-waste’ butter: “I did hark back after those days when it wasn’t compulsory be clever with butter”.
There was a “glorious dish” of cheese custard and dish of the day was a “large rustic layer of pork belly”, but a plate of flageolets had too much bite and too thick a dusting of herbs, while the chocolate mousse, bathed unnecessarily in olive oil, was “more pale and interesting than deeply rich and sexy”.
*****
Financial Times
Jay Rayner has a new favourite yakitori restaurant in London – as good, he says, as any he has tried in Tokyo. A “polished box on the edge of the City”, it was opened in November by Kuangyi Wei, a Beijing-born management consultant who was bereft when her favourite yakitori, Angelo Sato’s Humble Chicken, switched to a tasting-menu format.
She found a Japanese head chef on an online backpackers’ forum, uses only Fosse Meadows chickens (“the bourgeoisie of fowl”) and offers at least 17 different cuts – “including parts even the chicken may not be aware it has”.
They all, of course, taste of chicken, Jay said – “but in the most intense way; by turns crisp and succulent, as if each skewer is the very best part of the Sunday roast that you were holding out for. The difference between each may seem marginal, but there’s a nerdy delight to be taken in the small contrasts of texture and seasoning.”
