AA Gill reviews

Sunday, January 29, 2012 - I started with venison tartare with walnuts and sorrel, and this just knocked all the smart aleck out of my mouth. It was terrific. A blinder. Minced deer with woodland flavours - evocative, rare, proper food. The Blonde had a duck egg cooked on a block of hot salt, with sourdough breadcrumbs and onion. This too was a surprisingly robust mouthful and nicely extravagant with the sodium...Tom Aikens, who was cooking, is still one of our most talented chefs, but classically he's someone whose skills trip up his brilliance. He needs to trust his ingredients more and rely on his craft less.

Friday, January 27, 2012 - The manager insisted we try the butter chicken, though I thought it was over-whelmed by its sauce. There were minced-meat kebabs, hot and nicely made. Upstairs in the street-food restaurant, there was a fresh and hot selection of breads, and one of the most addictively delicious of all Indian dishes, idli, soft puffed rice cakes, eaten with sambar, a Tamil vegetable stew from southern India. There was chilli paneer and bhel puri - the moreish bites (chaat) that were once served on railway platforms...The service was friendly and helpful. This is a place that is trying to take Indian food out of the after-pub ghetto, into something that will compete with tapas and Italians and oriental restaurants.

Sunday, January 15, 2012 - We began with dim sum, steamed and fried: coriander and shrimp, pork with truffle, prawn tempura, black cod with mango sauce. All were good, particularly the black cod, which came in its own Weetabix cocoon. A duck salad with green apple dressing was disappointing, tasting strangely of neither apple nor duck, but small Kinder Egg toys. The maki of soft-shell crab was back on track. Yellowtail with coriander and a spot of chilli was better than the original across the road in Nobu...The bill was a deficit-inducing 288 pounds.

Sunday, January 08, 2012 - We started with prawn toasts. They were okay. Grilled chicken wings were too pub-grub, with a pair of dipping sauces that were too similar and showed indecision rather than choice. Salmon salad with coconut caramel dressing was boring, and a fragrant fish curry was sloppy, two-dimensional and unlovely...Granger & Co is plainly doing every-thing right. Notting Hill is desperate for somewhere new and trendy and modern to eat. And this perfectly fits the locals' wish list. The truth, that the food is imprecise, rushed, muddy, awkward and apparently untasted, is, annoyingly, beside the point.

Sunday, January 01, 2012 - A Reuben sandwich, which was the main event, was more focaccia than rye bread and it really wasn't good enough, made with pastrami instead of corned beef. It ought to be powerfully, huggably moreish, and it wasn't...Mishkin's is the wrong sort of nosh. I asked if the restaurant was kosher. Heavens no, the waiter giggled. Really not. We do dairy. The hot dog is all pork. Really? It turns out to be a thing called a Big Apple dog, although all the hot dogs in New York are made with beef, or veal, because they were made by Jews. In the end, the food here isn't very good.

Sunday, December 11, 2011 - I had the now-ubiquitous wagyu sirloin, which I ordered rare, and came medium, verging on well done. It was the only thing that was well done. It gave off the faint flavour of Wonderloaf soaked in warm dripping, and it cost 85 of your English pounds, which makes it the most expensive steak in this part of the world...The kitchen has a swanky charcoal grill from Argentina. Apparently, they delivered it without the instructions. The Blonde went for the New York strip steak, which was the real new deal. Good flavour, a manly chew, but still a touch overcooked. I had a suspicion that neither of these cuts had been hung for long enough.

Sunday, November 20, 2011 - A cylinder of polenta filled with salted dry cod in its own sauce with crispy bacon was the sort of dish cooks make up for television, or bets. What the sauce is that cod makes, I didn't like to ask. And please don't tell me, but it was unpleasantly fishy. Octopus, zolfini beans, cream and lardo was not a lot better...The puddings wouldn't have attracted a wasp with diabetes, and most of the dishes, which came in silly plates, had temperature issues. They were either worryingly chilly or tepid in parts. Which might have been trendy, or it might just have been forgetfulness and boredom.

Sunday, November 13, 2011 - I had beans and ham hock, which was a viscous sludge of broad beans with pink shards of salty pig, and came with a piece of very dry bread. It was insistently evocative of the workhouse and amateur productions of Oliver Twist...There was also a plate of salad that was so badly made, it might have been someone's therapy: mutilated vegetables with slimy grey couscous. The counter boasted a dish devised by Edward Gorey, savoury custard in pastry studded with limp parsnips and carrots. Root pie. Mmmm-mmm. Pudding was pumpkin cheesecake. I ordered it as a cynically self-mortifying joke. Grudgingly, I have to admit that it wasn't entirely vile, though obviously not an improvement on missionary cheesecake.

Sunday, November 06, 2011 - We kicked off with chicken hearts on a wooden skewer, like the hen undead, liberally quicklimed with dried chilli flakes. The hearts were tiny, hard and tepid, and they beat me. The chilli was uncompromisingly vicious. Duck tongues came as a generous crock of quack in brown sauce. They were clitorally cloacal, with cartilaginous strips up their middles, so you had to salaciously nibble the meat off them. They were edible and unusual, and possibly a talking point, though not for the duck. But, honestly, I'm not going to be ordering them again in a hurry.

Sunday, October 30, 2011 - We began with onion and pear shavings. Don't laugh, don't sneer. It was inspired, and I'm still tickled by its cleverness, the brilliance of the juxtaposition. On with a slow-cooked hen's egg with girolles - a heavenly evocation of autumn and cosiness - and an added trickle of apricot jam. No, it wouldn't have been my first thought, either, but like an adopted child this brought tears to your eyes...I'm wary of absolutes, and leagues and top tables of best, better and bestest, but if you ask me, and I suppose you are, to recommend just one gobstopping, heart-racing dinner in all of London, it would be Hedone.

Sunday, October 23, 2011 - We started with a wild-mushroom risotto that was slimy and tasted of dried-funghi water and had the slurry-wet smell of cellar mould. And the vitello tonnato, which was an anaemic mayonnaise chugged over meat that was underage beef, not veal...The room and the food leave barely a trace of memory. Trying to resurrect the experience is like trying to remember the faces of bus drivers. This is a restaurant constructed to attract everybody, but will please nobody.

Sunday, October 02, 2011 - Altogether lunch was a curate's egg - an expression that comes from a Punch cartoon. The good things were fine, the more actual cooking that was involved, the more surely the dishes defeated the kitchen. The service was charm itself. And now for the bill. Without alcohol, and not eating as many dishes as the menu suggested, it was 150 for the three of us...The quality of the production and the ingenuity of the dishes can't justify prices of about 12 pounds a plate.

Sunday, September 25, 2011 - Puck was in the house, and moved from table to table with the easy assurance of a longtime shoulder-slapping celebrity - Arnie in a white coat. 'What's your favourite?' I insisted. 'Well, that would be the American corn-fed rib eye,' he admitted. It turned out to be a very good dry-aged slab of meat, carefully double cooked to keep it relaxed yet with a smoky edge, the seasoning added with a card-sharp sleight of hand...So, as a steak restaurant, Cut is pretty damn good. The atmosphere is friendly without warmth, erotic without libido, experienced rather than sophisticated. And it costs.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - The menu is very simple, which is a relief (every other menu I've eaten from recently looks as if it were written by Dan Brown) - antipasti and charcuterie; stuff from a wood-burning oven; pizzas, salads, puddings. We kicked off with bone-marrow bruschetta, some mortadella, which is a wonderful sausage horribly libelled by its family connection to baloney, and some coppa. Next course, there was crispy pork belly, deliciously unctuous, and which the Blonde said was better than the River Cafe's. A chopped-up chicken and very good, really excellent, beef lasagne. The pizzas, though, are the thing.

Sunday, September 04, 2011 - From the small plates, I might single out grilled sardines with tahini, lemon cream and flatbread; fennel with feta and pistachio-salted caramel; sticky pulled pork with papaya and mango; crab and cassava croquettes; and, best, spiced lamb kofta with a tomato tagine, saffron yoghurt and crispy shallots. All these little dishes are as good and enticing a collection of robustly flavoured and stoutly made food as you could hope for. Indeed, I think most people eat solely from this bit of the menu.

Sunday, August 14, 2011 - Soseki is, as all Japanese restaurants are, expensive. And it's in the City. Its ethical intentions and pescatorial concerns, and its quiet beauty in the centre of all this greedy ugliness, are laudable and go some way to mitigating the fact that, though the food is well made and prettily presented and smilingly served, it isn't quite good enough. You can eat better Japanese in London, though not perhaps with such a clear and comfortable conscience.

Sunday, July 24, 2011 - The best was my fish stew with Sardinian fregola. This stood out as being an unusual dish in this company. I suspect it's the one the chef puts on for his own sense of self-worth and pride. It is one of the great plates of Europe, and while I've had it fierier and rougher, this was an understandably refined and polite version, but still worth the trip from the west. Prices are expense-account expensive: main courses about 25 pounds, starters 16. There are no carpets or curtains, and a lot of beaming boss men. It's painfully cacophonous, like a seal colony. Most of the tables are pairs of blokes pumping each other symbolically.

Sunday, July 17, 2011 - My rack of lamb came with fregola, a sort of Sardinian couscous, and chickpeas. The peas only just made it to the plural: there weren't enough to play a game of jacks. The lamb was boring. So, all in all, not very good, in a room wanting atmosphere, with food that had a higher opinion of itself on the plate than it could sustain in the mouth. What did make it memorable, indeed, unforgettable, were the prices. This is one of the most staggeringly expensive restaurants in London. In terms of value, it may well be peerless.

Sunday, July 10, 2011 - The room is simple and underwhelming, with a large hand-painted design of, would you believe, medlars. The aesthetic high point are the light fittings, which are as brightly hideous as anything I've seen screwed to a wall. The menu, on the other hand, is an elegant and inviting list of comestibles, better than you're likely to be offered anywhere down this end of London...The food is really unexpectedly good, and at 25 pounds for three courses, for a lunch of this quality, the best value anywhere in Chelsea.

Sunday, June 26, 2011 - The beef came on an iron trivet. It was adequate rather than generous. It had been sliced, and contained large, pale jelly gobs of adipose fat. It was undercooked for this particular cut. I'd left the timing up to the kitchen. The meat had the texture of fat-slag thigh. The mechanics of eating felt like something you should do in a gym. I ordered bearnaise, which was cold, fatty mayonnaise, and tarragon and anchovy butter that was fatty fish. Neither was enough to lift the meat, which was soon tepid, then congealed. Eating it was to stuff hunger, not tickle pleasure.

Sunday, June 05, 2011 - It;s like eating a home-economics history project, a National Trust re-creation. This restoration or reconstruction of both building and menu is a mule born gelded, a sterile exercise that bears nothing, fires blanks, leads to nothing but more of the past. It's an exercise in sentimental hindsight. To remake the past, either as a carpet or a pie, is not to relive its glory, it's to deny the present its moment. There is no vivacity here. No optimism. No elan or panache. No fecundity. This food is just a passing regret, the taste of loss in an edible museum.

Monday, May 09, 2011 - We were told to choose three dishes each per course. Finding one dish per course is stressful enough; finding nine was insufferable, not to mention expensive. This is food made for the greater glory of the kitchen, not the sustenance of the customer...Contemporary flash ingredients attached to each other in much the same way Mary Portas gets dressed. The textures tended to be on the slippery side; the flavours safe, with occasional 'Get you' spikes of contrariness. Everything was small, and effortfully arranged, and particularly difficult to share with pleasure or ease.

Sunday, May 01, 2011 - Karoline and the Blonde had fish: sea trout with samphire, and halibut with kale and anchovies, both accomplished with delicacy, but served with generosity...I had a sirloin steak. There is only so much you can expect from a steak. It's fine. But it's simple and repetitive. This one was very American. Sweet and fatty, with that soft, grainy texture that usually comes from being corn-fed. It's a steak-fancier's steak. Pudding was a good creme brulee, which, naturally, they called burnt English cream. Service was knowledgeable and attentive and good-natured. It is very expensive here.

Sunday, April 17, 2011 - The pierogi dumplings are those substantial parcels full of woodland, peasant goodness that are so characteristically Mitteleuropa: neither sunny ravioli, nor sulky dim sum. They are like the internal organs of Russian dolls. For main course, Camilla had pulpety - veal meatballs. Pulpety is such a pretty word: you might consider it for your next girl-child, or small dog. It came with mashed potatoes and dill sauce. I had the topside of beef, poached in its own effluvia, with vegetables, served with horseradish. If you ever consider leaving the sour soup for another dish, this is the one: big and meaty, but tender and yielding.

Sunday, April 10, 2011 - For the main course, there's black pudding with apples, stuffed cabbage, a de rigueur steak, a rack of lamb. We shared a cote de veau, cooked pink, served with its own juice, and some crisp, fatty fries. Pudding is, as ever with bistros, limited...Fatima said her food was fine, some of it, particularly my snails, very fine. She would come again because the room was cosy, for lunch, but probably not dinner. I'm more inclined to be generous. The foie is worth a visit on its own.

Sunday, April 03, 2011 - There was an incredibly good wood pigeon that apparently came from Norfolk, and some mutton, which is rarely seen on restaurant menus, but is always welcome. And a Cornish monkfish, though I suspect it was the fisherman who was Cornish, rather than the fish. There was a stateless brill, accompanied by greens from Suffolk...Everything tastes of outdoors, like the wind off a moor or autumn birches freshly turned out. Moss and peat, rain and fungal stumps. It's clever and it's poignant, quietly sad.

Sunday, March 27, 2011 - There was some particularly wonderful lardo di colonnata (white bacon fat) and unctuous but underseasoned rillettes. Then there's a section from the plancha. It was all good, the artichokes and Shetland mussels with leeks and bacon were particularly fine...Brawn is a restaurant that suits the way most people want to eat now: Scandinavianly unpretentious, simple but educated. It knows about food, but isn't a bore about it. It's hard to fault the essence of an honest commitment to good things in a good room, but this meat-heavy menu, with familiar dip-in dishes from summer-holiday destinations and fashionable cookbooks, with its nod to Victorian heartiness, is growing as ubiquitous as Pizza Hut.

Sunday, March 20, 2011 - I had scallops on black pudding, an overfamiliar combination, and while the scallops were perfectly nicely presented, the black pudding was too timid. It was an usher rather than the groom. The addition of a tart apple sauce was a good idea. Rod had a lobster ravioli that looked like a femidom on a plate, but had a lovely delicate shellfish sweet freshness about it...I had a good bit of halibut, properly pronounced without the unnecessary H. It came with salsify and a wilted little gem, and a dab of cream and vermouth sauce, all very agreeable. Alan and Rod were both enthusiastic about the food.

Sunday, March 13, 2011 - My main course was Venetian calves' liver; the Blonde had beef carpaccio with celery and parmesan. The chef said the calves' liver was the finest in the country, and it may well have been. It could possibly have been the greatest calves' liver in the universe. In the history of bovine offal, however, he didn't really show it off to its best advantage. It was a bland and underwhelming example of a dish that should be as show-stealing as a closet full of singing gondoliers. Pudding was an almond and chocolate torte with pistachio ice cream. I expect this is ordered more often than it's eaten. The service is a work in progress.

Sunday, February 20, 2011 - The Royal Academy looks good. The art is at home among the careful and unostentatious fixtures and fittings. A wild sea bass ceviche cooked in lime was clean, calorie-less and medicinal. Longhorn steak tartare was properly made and tasted fresh and muscly...And then it all went horribly wrong. My main course of lemon sole with beetroot salad and a citrus dressing was not a nice thing. The fish was little fillets rolled into earplugs and poached until they turned into wads of nose-blown tissue paper, covered in a tasteless white cream. Pork cheek with pommes mousseline was a plop of sticky potato slime, covered in a piggy potty goo that had all the meaty flavour cooked out of it.

Sunday, February 13, 2011 - This isn't food nostalgia or National Trust lunch. It isn't patriotism on a plate. The point is that this is an exemplary menu of perfect balance and brilliance. The preparation and the concept manage to be a very British contrariness, both comforting and surprising, inventive but familiar. This food is unthreatening but commands attention and there isn't a mouthful that doesn't insist on the next mouthful. And another after that, which in the end is the aim of all cooking.

Sunday, February 06, 2011 - I started with a melange of seasonal vegetables, turnips and radishes, shallots and beetroot, a revelation of care and excellence. Each ingredient tasted as you remember, but more so, bigger, brighter, louder, smarter. Together, they were a chant of winter flavours. The Blonde had ravioli in clear stock that was made with the addition of apple juice. Again, a clever surprise of warmth and clarity and season...Altogether this bosky cuisine is a revelation, not just of taste, but of spirit and conviction, and the elan of the cook. It is also splendidly expensive. Personally, I don't begrudge him a red sou.

Sunday, January 30, 2011 - If I'd written this review immediately after my first dinner, it would probably have got one star more than it'll get today. The service is friendly and fast, the cost of 260 for five people perfectly good value, but the food was just off the mark, cooked slightly too long, carelessly, seasoning and saucing imprecise. Plates a bit smeary. It felt both rushed and successful, which is the most common affliction for good restaurants. Too many covers and, if it's working, why bother fixing it? Well, Les Deux Salons is still a good restaurant; I'll happily go back. But it needs to take the kitchen in hand: it's slipping away.

Sunday, January 23, 2011 - A poached egg with salsa verde on Stornoway black pudding was a fine Scots mealy pudding that goes breakfastly with egg, but the salsa was de trop. Coconut sticky pork ribs were just dreadful. Smoked coconut tamarind laksa with chicken lime-leaf dumpling, vermicelli noodles, crispy shallots and coriander was more of a mouthful to order than to eat...It was like an open audition for competing ingredients as cacophonous and illegible as the room. Small plates of shared food are not just minimised big plates of food. They need to be brighter, clearer, sharper and more welcoming. This was a fussed mess from start to finish.

Sunday, January 09, 2011 - The squid was bright and crisp and came with a scarlet sauce; the soft-shell crabs were hot and crunchy and had a chaff of chilli and curry leaves. I had the best hot-and-sour soup I've eaten in this country...Spicy prawns with lily bulbs, jasmine tea-smoked chicken, duck, spare ribs with plum sauce, lotus root with asparagus, pak-choi, rice noodles, all arrived with those explosive gusts of flavour and texture that are the defining pleasure of a Chinese: intense, like fireworks. There, then gone, replaced with the next flash.

Sunday, December 19, 2010 - I loved the rabbit terrine with chanterelles, date puree and caper and raisin dressing - elegant and carefully constructed. But best was Wicklow venison, with pumpkin, black pudding and the wacky, comedy addition of pecan nuts...L'Ecrivain is a very decent, hospitable, friendly, stay-a-while hybrid restaurant. Local and native, indigenous, but marbled with French technique and flair. It tasted of hope and recovery, and stoicism, and humour, and poetry, and all those Irish things that are more important than money.

Sunday, December 12, 2010 - The tables are clotted with hideous tchotchke, inedible, unusable decoration, and it has slatted and blinded itself against its point, the clue of its name. You can't see the river any more. The menu is insecure enough to try and impress merely with girth and size. Gastronomically it's a mess, incoherent, a committee of middle-management caterers choosing internationally bland and expensively undemanding food to appeal to the widest number of expense-account business drones.

Sunday, December 05, 2010 - It was all so long ago, so sepia, that I can't remember any of it. Normally I have a pretty engraved memory for food, but whatever this was, it slid past the alimentary recall without leaving an impression. There was some venison, a lobstery crayfish thing with foam, a partridge that had been dismembered and teased. Was the pudding chocolate? Is there honey still for tea? Can't remember. I think it was all quite good...What amazes me is that anyone is still trying to flog this ridiculously laughable theatre of life, this Princess Di memorial version of an elegant age. The place they tried to re-create never existed.

Sunday, November 21, 2010 - The menu is very Russian. We kicked off with samosa-type pastries, which are like Cornish pasties made by someone who's never had a Cornish pasty, which is obviously an improvement. And there was manti dumplings, reminiscent of those Polish, Hungarian, Russian pierogi, which, again, probably originate from the Mongol border, and a thick soup made with hand-pulled lapsha noodles...This isn't svelte or sophisticated food. It's outdoor, booted and quilted food, to be consumed on felt blankets in a biting wind, drinking small glasses of salty black tea. And that, I suspect, is why the Russians like it.

Sunday, November 14, 2010 - Cured salmon was parsimonious, for a place in the home of salmon. A tempura squid was blankly bland. I wonder if the chef had actually tasted it, and, if so, where he imagined the pleasure in eating it would be gleaned? Possibly in the righteous exercise. The best thing was a dressed crab, fresh and sweet and meaty. A lobster thermidor was too small, and made without panache...Ondine is perfectly adequate in almost every department, but excels in none. In most other cities in Britain, it would be more than welcome. In the rest of Scotland, it would be miraculous. But here and now, it is underpowered and underwhelming.

Sunday, October 31, 2010 - The opulence has been removed, along with the very low tables, and replaced with a more utilitarian setting. The menu is simpler and shorter, but without being any more enticing. The shared food comes in numbers that never divide evenly by the people eating...We started with yakitori-style chicken wings - sticky, bony and filthy, like a hillbilly wedding reception. Seaweed salad, the dredgings from a terrapin's tank. The prawn and langoustine tempura was desperately overcooked - both dried out and soggy.

Sunday, October 24, 2010 - Crostini should be light and utterly delicious. This was in keeping with the bar downstairs: coarse, repetitive and boring. The polpetto - small octopuses - was like a queue of plastic toys, with the faint flavour of rubber fish...The food was disappointing, occasionally verging on unpleasant, but the atmosphere is nice, the room buzzed and its heart is in the right place. I suspect the kitchen is really not up to servicing even a restaurant this small. But it is too pleasant a little dining room to waste.

Sunday, October 17, 2010 - The maitre d' pointed me towards the halibut with more garlic and spinach and a langoustine bisque. This was a brick of fish the size of Ryan Giggs's wallet. It had been cooked for twice as long as necessary. And then left under hot lights to make sure it was really dead. The langoustine bisque was, I suspect, fish soup with cream. It was a horrible waste of what had once been a good bit of fish. A chocolate tart was a thick mouth of sticky cocoa foreplay. By southern standards, all this was very cheap - 40 quid for three courses, water and coffee - but people told me that up here it was really very expensive.

Sunday, October 03, 2010 - The honorable member had a tian of crab that was dainty and light, a coalition of crabbiness and avocados, and then a stuffed guinea fowl, with a wodge of layered potato, onion, cream and Beaufort cheese. That was excellent; but the best of all was my thin Strasbourg tart. This is an old-fashioned, Franco-German pizza, an elegant, crisp crust dressed with a negligee of sauerkraut, poitrine and Strasbourg sausage. Sensationnel. Ausgezeichnet. A wonderful regional dish that I can't think you'll find anywhere else in London. Perfect for lunch. There was too much for me to finish, and it was 10.80.

Sunday, September 26, 2010 - The Blonde had a pizza with sweet ham and ricotta that was claggy and thick-tongued. She liked the semolina flour on the crust. I had a breakfast roll of eggy cheesy Italian-sausagey stuff. This is a mule of an idea: part wrap, part calzone - a bready bag of tomato water, rubbery cheese and dribbly, droppable sludge. Really not worth the considerable effort to keep it all out of your lap...It's a very cleverly and carefully manipulated menu here. It's not going to get in the way of the main event.

Sunday, September 05, 2010 - The linguine was slick and muscular. It was a come-again dish. As was the risotto, with prawns, made memorable by a pungent stock that tasted like it had been made out of the Little Mermaid's thong. The list of main courses isn't as exciting as the previous three. Cod with celeriac and anchovy. Mackerel with rocket, grapefruit, a radish and balsamic apple vinegar is quite obviously trying too hard: it's like plastic surgery for an unpopular fish. Puddings are the usual frivolous Latin nonsense.

Sunday, August 22, 2010 - All this took nearly three hours to serve and, collectively, about three and a half minutes to eat. For all its modern, atonal, chic suavity, the variety of ingredients in combination were limited, the flavours cloddish. Food this slight and mimsy has to be intense, surprising and utterly clear and self-confident. What we got was muddy, haphazard, careless, clumsy and boastful. It is food that is constructed by people who won't have to eat it, and made for the worst of all kitchen orthodoxies, to show off and intimidate. It is the worst example of the small and fragile renaissance in Spanish cooking that comes from Ferran Adria.

Sunday, August 08, 2010 - The thing that I love above all the dog and terrapin of Vietnam's wide cuisine, is pho, the deep, do-it-yourself bowls of broth with added fresh herbs, chilli, vinegar and soy. Mine was made with beef and noodles, and it was heaven - worth going to Battersea for all on its own. A big meal bowl for 5.50; the best value for anything cooked in all of Britain. There was also an exceptional dish of goat with galangal...The staff were swift and efficient yet also unusually jolly and good-natured.

Sunday, August 01, 2010 - The casual look of this restaurant sets up the food. It informs you what to expect, and it's lying. Here we have tablecloths, but the menu says retro cafe. What comes on the plate is far more accomplished. The kitchen is grander than this room implies; Koffman can't reduce his natural affinity with ingredients and method. This is food that is full of technique and precision and well-modulated manners and wit, but it is without context, devoid of terroir.

Sunday, July 18, 2010 - It was all very neat and polite, and exceedingly bland, except for the broad beans, which managed to taste of soap. Then a summer truffle risotto. Anne said she wanted to take a large bowl of it into a corner and put her head in it...It's food that's been uncoupled from appetite, or pleasure, beyond a polite quietness. It's made with skill, but without elan. With manners, but no enthusiasm.

Sunday, July 11, 2010 - The lobster had departed this life some days ago. There was a faint whiff of crustacean sarcophagus about it; I would guess from the size of its tail that it was Canadian. That and the fact that every other lobster in London is Canadian. It tasted of a dumb pinkness, luckily overcome by a small packet of mayonnaise...The salmon with beans could only have been welcomed by a shop assistant on an extreme diet. It was easier not to eat than to eat; quite a good choice for round here. Most of the clients are shop assistants on extreme diets. I had a lemon meringue that tasted like an egg poached in Jif.

Sunday, June 06, 2010 - The dining room at the back has been decorated not so much in a style as in a hurry, without thought that people might want to eat here. The random overhead spotlights give faces that amusing, shiny dentist's-chair look, and the menu comes with a concept...The shared-food deal doesn't work for odd numbers. A plate of prawns came with two prawns, so you needed two plates, and got one leftover prawn. The chicken tikka thing was a pair of small thighs. How do you comfortably share chicken extremities? We also ordered sea bass, a square of fish transplant in a sauce of rendered Pritt Stick.

Sunday, May 30, 2010 - The menu is a riff from a tarted-up bistro. There's a lot of charcuterie, which is a good thing. I approve of abused pig bits, and they're unfashionable in restaurants these days. When was the last time you were offered pate? Here they have four: coarse country, fine country, compote of beef cheek, and lamb. There's some well-made salami and ham. It's all a good start. The main courses are less impressive. My beer-braised featherblade was the best: an intensely reduced slow-cooked shredded bit of beef. Grilled lamb chops with tabbouleh were fine; halibut with asparagus wasn't.

Sunday, May 23, 2010 - The rack of lamb was tough but had a good flavour. The chorizo risotto was a savoury Spanish rice pudding that mugged the fish it came with. Puddings were best. A well-made lemon tart, a nice praline cake and a chocolate and hazelnut strudel...Just as it's easy to patronise this place for what it is, so it's easy to criticise it for what it's not. What it does right is know its locals. The wine list is long and inviting, and most tables were drinking, which is rare in the city. And I imagine the clientele are loyal and regular.

Sunday, May 09, 2010 - Nothing on the menu is anything you've eaten elsewhere. Even if its basics are familiar, it arrives as an original deconstruction with decorative features. We began with corn cakes and mashed avocado and a chilli jelly, a brilliant combination of competing flavours. Then wild mushroom arancini with a shiitake brew, which was an Italian fried funghi rice ball and an unbelievably, almost unbearably intense mushroom tea...It's incredibly good food, and I mean that in a credibly defying sense. It has understood the essential truth of vegetarianism: that it's just food.

Sunday, April 25, 2010 - The menu is short and brilliantly desirable. I began with snails and meatballs, which were both musty and meaty, with layers of corrupting flavours that were fugitive and memorable. Thierry had a clean and pale skate terrine that was pressed and precious and pristine, like a mermaid's packed lunch...Bruno manages, in all their hearty meatiness, to make his dishes taste as if they were prepared in a brothel full of expressionists and consumptive romantics. Welcome back, Bruno, we needed you.

Sunday, April 18, 2010 - For main course, Esther and I shared a john dory. The moment the waiter presented it, I knew it had been overcooked, or liberated from the Natural History Museum. Giles had a steak with stewed shin. It was safe and simple, and the best bit of the evening...Everything about this restaurant is hopelessly passe, utterly has-been. It's sad that anybody could still want to create a room this inhospitable and offer an evening that implies such an utter lack of sensitivity or understanding or contemporary awareness.

Sunday, April 11, 2010 - The menu was a surprise: half a dozen snails with braised oxtail, parsley and bone marrow (that alone was worth the trip); warm smoked-eel tart with rhubarb; salted ox tongue with cauliflower-cheese croquettes; a mollet quail's egg scotched in roe deer...this stuff is made with an easy, relaxed, even jaunty accomplishment. It's better than you'd reasonably expect in a gastropub, or, indeed, any rural restaurant in the Cotswolds. Pudding is like the last five minutes of a romcom: soppy, sweet, wet and warm, a big sentimental sob, with custard...Very good, the Harwood Arms, and worth the toff-slumming.

Sunday, March 28, 2010 - Yellowfin tuna with aubergine caviar and coriander was only an affectation and 7 quid away from Yo! Sushi. For main courses, there was bland farmed roe venison, with more chestnuts and chocolate, and a competent Bresse pigeon made in a polite Moroccan fashion as a tagine. It was good, but really could have done with being bigger and bolder...The service is a bit like being frisked by lonely moles.

Sunday, February 21, 2010 - I had mince and potatoes. It was replete with juicy flavour, goodness and rectitude. It was a spread-eagled burger, a hot tartare. And I ate enough of it to get a lump in the throat and remember my grandma...Dean Street's service is familiar, in a clubbable and inclusive way. The prices are expensive, but far from exorbitant. The other customers are those passing denizens of Soho, the mediaocracy. Dean Street Townhouse is a knowing place. A clever place. It may be too clever by half.

Monday, December 21, 2009 - They’ve knocked through from Sheekey’s proper on St Martin’s Court, a walk-through between Charing Cross Road and St Martin’s Lane, surrounded by theatres. Sheekey’s has become the best and most histrionically popular of the after-curtain dining rooms. The new oyster bar has the comforting look (comfort is the look) of having always been here. It’s part midtown Manhattan and part Left Bank Paris.

Sunday, November 29, 2009 - Inside, it's recognisably the swanky cousin of the original: it's black and white, there are David Bailey photos of Jean Shrimpton on the wall, the manager is our own Sebastian and I recognised a couple of waiters, and the menu looks the same, as does the table furniture...This is all stuff you want to eat: fishcakes, bang bang chicken, and the fish and chips, made with New England cod, was better than most you'd get back in Blighty. I had a strip steak, one of my favourite cuts, and a native to New York. It was sublime: well aged, hung and cut on the bone

Thursday, November 19, 2009 - It's a sort of Italian tapas bar that looks as if it's been cleverly transported from Greenwich Village. It has the stripped-back industrial feel of bare brick, with the iconic addition of subway tiles and a tin roof...You start with crostini; chicken liver; mortadella, gorgonzola and walnuts; potato and parmesan croquettes; salt cod on polenta. Then there is a particularly good duck with peppercorns and olives, pork belly with radicchio and hazelnut, a mackerel tartare and cuttlefish with gremolata. Vegetables include fennel with cobnuts. All this is well constructed; it's more compilation than cooking.

Sunday, November 01, 2009 - Cod's tongues with girolles were good, but I don't want this to sound too much like an obstacle course in sweaty eating: there is plenty of perfectly straightforward fish and familiar bits from familiar animal bums. Not all of it seamless; a salt marsh mutton, kidney and oyster pie was just too Hardyesque...The sourcing of all Hix's ingredients is exemplary. The preparation is a little careless, a touch smilingly amateur. Personally, I can live with that.

Sunday, October 18, 2009 - The menu I was given was an immediate, intense joy of unforced, ingredient-led innovation and common sense. I didn't know where to start. And while I thought about it, I ordered roast bone marrow with snails, a longitudinally sawn shin, delicately baked, with the addition of fat snails, chanterelles and a parsley and onion salad. The snails poached with cardamom and star anise and fennel seeds and a dab of garlic sauce. I took a mouthful and knew that I couldn't traverse life's highlands with someone who didn't love this dish more than they loved me.

Sunday, October 04, 2009 - I led off with a beetroot soup, which wasn't borscht. It tasted loud, loud and insistent. Each mouthful shouted the same exclamation, like an orange madman at a bus stop. In truth, if it hadn't said beetroot on the card, I'd have had no idea that was what it was made with. And then vitello tonnato, which was made with neither veal nor tuna...The trouble here is the food is prim and well educated; it has perfect manners and a commendable self-possession. It just doesn't particularly care if you like it or not.

Sunday, August 30, 2009 - Chilean sea bass, one of the most utterly delicious of all fish, cooked with those small mushrooms you find grown in the corners of damp bedrooms, was delicious. The most remarkable and distinguished thing, though, was pudding, a Peranakan mango cake...The service is speedy and informed. The food has earned its star, and as I looked around, I would bet that every other table here had been furnished by the concierge of a four-star hotel. I would recommend Kai, I would come back, except for one thing: the bill.

Sunday, July 19, 2009 - A plate of smoked salmon was, though, unimpeachably excellent and well sourced. I had lamb cutlets with a herb crust, the businessman's favourite - meat that comes with a handle, well cooked, and the best time of year for lamb. The chef is Irish, so there was excellent champ, and crubeens breaded and fried, pigs' trotters, which tasted good, but were a bit dry, their accompanying condiment too claggy. Peach melba was properly made, but with the addition of something biscuity in the bottom. With coffee and two glasses of wine, the bill was 135.

Sunday, July 12, 2009 - We started with sardines that tasted muddy and exhausted, and some seafood pasta that was made in the English way, as a stew with spaghetti in it. Much too much business. It was like eating Nemo. The main event, the pizza, is very good, served by the yard, a wodge of unleavened bread with chewy, sticky, napalm stuff on top. The oven is hot, the pizzas filling. What more do you want? If you have one of those 'nothing but pizza will do' cravings that seem to afflict most of the world once a week, this is the place to have it. The service is jolly, and the room noisy and crowded...

Sunday, July 05, 2009 - The food is really not at all bad, bordering on really quite good. The menu does breakfast, and then there's a sort of grab bag of constructed lunch. I had a vitello tonnato that was generous and nicely made, with those small intense capers, and not the ones that look like frogs' testicles. Flora had pasta with a tomatoey crab sauce, which she said was really good, but then she's a teenager and has been living on toast and Pringles for six months. For pudding, she had strawberries and cream. I had a knickerbocker glory, which ought to be gay, but isn't. Multi-storey ice creams are redneck kitsch, not camp kitsch.

Sunday, April 26, 2009 - This week’s restaurant, the Double Club, is a pop-up establishment that has been so successful, it doesn’t look like popping off… It is interesting and rather good, served with a jaunty care. The place itself really is achingly, rockingly fashionable, thrustingly sexy, modish and smart, clever, and icy cool. It does feel like the only room to be in.

Sunday, April 19, 2009 - The dining room is large and sunny with a glass roof, and looks modern, but is too happily corporate for my taste, a little like the cafeteria in a German youth hostel. But the menu is wonderful. It starts with English tapas: egg and crayfish mayonnaise, fingers of welsh rarebit, sweetbreads and foie gras on toast, corned-beef pasties with HP Sauce. All made fresh and perfectly conceived. You can have steak and chips; sausage and mash; or smoked chicken and waldorf salad. Again, exactly what you’d want in a smart pub in Fulham.

Sunday, March 29, 2009 - The messy, noisy, relaxed and culturally familiar hospitality that is unbeatable in an Indian restaurant. The menu’s reliable and mostly familiar, with a couple of strange and inventive additions. There’s wild boar, and a selection of dim sum, which I think is a mistake. I don’t want to eat Chinese nibbles with northern Indian food. They don’t sit happily together. What was particularly good was a couple of fish curries. Not the frozen, mouse-baby prawns that you generally find on Indian menus. In India there is an enormous amount of fish from Goa, the Coromandel Coast and Bengal.

Sunday, March 08, 2009 - The menu here is short, lively, confusing, but fine for a room that still maintains its pubbishness. I had a piece of cod that may well have been fresh to the kitchen, but I’d have guessed had been away for the weekend with the fishmonger. It had that dry, papery taste that yearns for beer batter…This isn’t a place you travel to for the food, but you’d be perfectly happy to eat here if you were coming to meet friends. What the girls liked best were some fearsomely legless cocktails.

Sunday, February 22, 2009 - We had a collection of tapas things from a short and uninspiring menu. The salted almonds tasted of salt, the toasted broad beans tasted of wood chip. The plate of Spanish sausage and ham was generous, and perfectly decent. The ham croquettes were fine…Tapas is meant to be bar food — the accompaniment to drinking. It’s not dinner or lunch. It’s not a meal. It’s there to soak up and add interest. It relies on being served fast, to crowds, with a high-volume turnover, and it’s not made by cooks. It needs to be pulsatingly fresh. Brindisa is half an idea, but it’s the wrong half.

Sunday, February 15, 2009 - The restaurant at the back is noisy and comfortable; the menu is promising. A lot of dishes are arranged by style of cooking and main ingredient, and identified by region. And then came the concept: toy portions brought at random to share, which filled the Blonde’s heart with joy. She loves to pick, and gets inconsolable plate envy. But it made my stomach groan. Dinner is not a democracy.

Sunday, January 25, 2009 - It comes as a choice of three continents: there’s Australian beef, which is braised and finished with corn, and American and Irish, which are all produced raw on a board for your examination like it’s a brothel...If what you crave is a good steak at a realistic price, then this is your place. All the side bits and pieces, the mustards and sauces, salads and chips, are adequate, but they’re not the point. It’s all about meat.

Sunday, January 11, 2009 - The room is supposed to be reminiscent of an Edwardian railway carriage. It’s more like Liberace’s bathroom dropped into a Texan diner. It’s been put together by David Collins, who I respect professionally and am fond of personally, but the only explanation for this room can be a bet, a dare, or a deranged marbler and paint-finisher who’s holding his family hostage. I think it’s trying to do what the Wolseley does: serve four meals a day. But it’s difficult to tell.

Thursday, January 01, 2009 - This is a fine room, with the trademark view of the kitchen. The lighting is subtle, the chairs comfortable. There’s plenty of space, and the menu is all the things that Conran brought to English palates 30 years ago and I’d almost forgotten about. French, rural, bourgeois food — as enjoyed by Englishmen with paunches and floozies touring Provence in open-topped Alvises… Boundary is nostalgically contemporary, a very welcome restaurant at a time when to open any dining room is an act of wilful optimism.

Sunday, December 14, 2008 - Corrigan is one of the most emotional and intuitive chefs. His skill isn’t learnt, it’s felt. His dishes are all big, tempest-tossed bodice-rippers, and this menu has got to be the best Mills & Boon I’ve seen this year. It leans heavily on seasonal game: there are game terrines, broths and suet puddings. There’s wild salmon and eel and grouse pie; there’s roe deer and saddles of hare, partridges, mallards and pheasants. And if you think you don’t like game, then you need to book a table here now.

Sunday, December 07, 2008 - The food is better than the room, and probably as fine as any in London, but it came in annoying stutters and starts. While the food is memorably subcontinental, the presentation is forgettably continental, which is irritating. To let us know that it’s chic and contemporary, and not some bhangra curry shop, they’ve ditched the collegiate nature of the Indian table, and they’ve also whacked up the prices. Eight prawns? Yours for £50. They were good, but at £6 each they should have done your laundry as well.

Sunday, November 16, 2008 - Depending on the delicacy of your own social digestion, the River Caff either fills you with syrupy feelings of excitement, warmth and nameless intellectual superiority, or it makes you want to join a nihilist terror cell and buy a length of rope. It represents everything you hate: peasant food made absurdly chic and expensive, served to smug, parasitic liberals. Well, I know where I stand. I know where I belong. I’m on the inside, smirking out.

Sunday, October 26, 2008 - Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley is a patrician’s dining room, a hushed, heavy, ponderous place where the light is eked out like the housemaster’s sherry, the waiters walk on eggshells and talk in thick, frothy accents, the customers are groups of wet-lipped and dry-eyed men, bottom-sniffing. It has the meaty atmosphere of an expensive food brothel, catering to the sated. Wareing is a man I’ve always considered as being among the best cooks in the country.

Sunday, October 12, 2008 - Although this is Hartnett’s restaurant, the head chef is credited as being Diego Cardoso. Everything else on the menu is very good. We started with a pressed rabbit terrine with a merlot vinaigrette. This was the best bunny pâté I’ve had, encompassing all that’s finest in Thumper: subtle timing, a lovable softness, tenderness, a great sense of humour and jelly. But having none of his flaws: toughness, dryness and buck teeth.

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - It was with a heavy bowel, and empty expectations, that I went to Andaman at the St James's Hotel, over-cheffed by a German with a troika of astral projections...

Sunday, August 31, 2008 - I’ve left very little space for this week’s restaurant, because it’s Oliver Peyton, and I like Oliver, and it isn’t very good. Peyton’s restaurants are an almanac of life in London over the past couple of decades...The Lawn, the latest, is the cafe inside (and outside) Bishop’s Palace in Bishop’s Park, Fulham. If you can walk there pushing a pram, then you might think it’s a local amenity, though if you are pushing a pram, you might think it pricey for a public building in a park.

Sunday, August 17, 2008 - The food is far better than they deserve, or notice. It’s good value, the room smells of deep-fried Basque, and there’s weird piped music. But then, Spanish music all sounds like someone stamping on seagulls. The service was Spanish in the Fawlty Towers sense, and the waiter at the door asked for the name we booked in. The Blonde gave hers. He frowned. “You have another name?” he asked. Which is a particularly asinine question, even for a Spaniard. “How about Timbo?” I said. “Ah, yes, Mr Timbo. This way.” The old Sloane-cloned name.

Sunday, August 03, 2008 - So, what's a restaurant like this for? I couldn't say. I don't know anyone who wants to eat like this, who would put up with the stress and the interruptions and the business and the fawning and the constant attention; the information, the formality and the rictus politeness. This was a 50-thank-yous dinner. It's grand, nostalgic, arrogant, laughable, laudable and impossibly awkward. Dinner that has lost its way. Grand hotels are the refugee camps for French haute cuisine. If you were thinking of giving to Oxfam, perhaps you might consider eating at the Connaught instead.

Sunday, July 27, 2008 - Ambassade de l’Ile is the oddest restaurant I’ve reviewed all year. I truly believed I would never see this sort of place again outside of France, or the kitscher Gulf hotels. This site was famously Chanterelle, an airy, light room, beloved of cultured and passive gay men. Then it was the friendly and worthy Danish restaurant Lundum’s, and now it’s this, what can only be described as a French theme restaurant.

Sunday, June 29, 2008 - This is a very good restaurant. Relaxed about everything, except the cooking, and the service was attentive, but then it would be. The Style desk had booked me in as Mr Relief, so-ho-ho. They didn’t even look at the book when I walked in. “You’ll be dining with Mr Clarkson then.” The big nipple, yes.

Sunday, February 10, 2008 - It is a Japanese restaurant. Japanese food is the infinity pool of eating out. The name means something opaquely obvious and random in the Japanese way, like “sake’s good for you”. They make you take off your shoes, which I can’t bear. It’s a sort of striptease dress code. And, instead of sitting on the floor, which I hate even more, they’ve compromised and lowered the floor under the table. The effect is neither squatting nor sitting, more like trying to eat fish with sticks at an infant school. It’s arse torture.

Sunday, January 13, 2008 - As I looked round, I realised that nobody in this room was actually paying for their food: it was all on expenses. And, ultimately, all expense accounts are paid for by people who use goods and services. I hope it’s scant joy for you to know that, although you will never eat, nor be able to afford to eat, at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, you are still able to pay for those who do.