Giles Coren reviews

Saturday, January 28, 2012 - The Peking duck was beautifully roasted, amber and sleek, and swiftly fork-rolled into folded pancakes for us at the table. For me, the hoi sin sauce overwhelmed the plush, plump flesh a little. I'll throw that plum jam over aromatic crispy roadkill down the high street, but proper Peking duck like this I'd hardly garnish...There was a bowl of chocolate-brown cubes of long-braised pork belly, sweet and melting, very Shanghai, and then fiery king prawns wrestling in a nest of edible green tea.

Saturday, January 14, 2012 - The burgers were fantastic. As good as a decent American drive-thru. Soft, sweet, rich and modestly sized, serving to remind me how badly they are generally done here. Most interestingly, they came properly rare...Chicken wings were fantastic, deep-fried pickled cucumbers were strange and sweet and brilliant (in the gloom, if you didn't know, you could think they were bananas until halfway through the mouthful) and chilli fries were the best and only example of that dish I have ever had in Europe. It's all slapped onto trays without plates. Great fun. Basically a children's restaurant. The staff, I think, were very nice. Although I couldn't see or hear them.

Saturday, January 07, 2012 - It was all fine. Three years ago these dishes would have been incredibly refreshing to see on a London menu. But at this stage in the genre's arc, I allowed myself to conclude that the ragout was underseasoned and a little watery, and that it was a shame the egg was overfried and some of the breadcrumbs ever so slightly burnt. I dare say that's all part of the laid-back vibe, but if I'd been cooking this for friends at home I'd have been aiming for not-burnt-at-all and the egg super-runny.

Saturday, December 17, 2011 - Esther loved the tumbler of spicy cod-cheek popcorn and thought the meatloaf with a soft egg in was standout fantastic, which it was. The Reuben sandwich (cheese, sauerkraut, pastrami) was a very well made manifestation of a dish that should never have been invented in the first place. The 'all pork Big Apple dog dragged through the garden' was as delicious as it was hilariously (and knowingly) wrong. The onion rings were a little stodgy. The various gin cocktails were excellent, if wildly out of context. This place is a hoot. The portions are huge. The prices are low. Go. Nosh. Enjoy.

Saturday, November 26, 2011 - The food is good: light, fluffy char siu pao (those little white rice puffs of barbecued pork); har gao (prawn dumplings) that are smaller than usual, beautifully translucent and containing not chopped but whole shrimp; a peppery foie gras and beef dumpling with just enough fat from the liver to mellow the tightness of the beef; and soup dumplings, xia long pao, that are perfectly made and weighted. The lobster dumpling is plain and exquisite, as are the scallop cheung fun (rice flour cannelloni), which are light and translucent again, and with scallop that is barely cooked, retaining all its sweetness and zip...They do clean little shellfish dumplings very well, but there is nothing fiery, offaly, strange, challenging or uncomfortable here - except the service.

Saturday, November 12, 2011 - Cumbrian rose veal cooked in buttermilk, cobnuts, savoy and mead sauce. Veal perfect. Small medallion. Dark brown sauce very sticky. Three nuts...Bilberries, dried caramel, natural yoghurt and iced lemon thyme. Weeny deconstructed crumble. Caramel was crunchy dust. Coffee good. Wine list limited. Gizzi Erskine in there with her mum. Loving it. Place not very diner-oriented. Dishes not really surprising enough. This level of atmospheric austerity rather demands quiet fireworks on the plate. Lot of money. 300.

Saturday, October 29, 2011 - I got a good, grainy bouillabaisse in a wide, flat bowl with a strong stock, small, sweet mussels, a nice fat piece of grey mullet, fried first, and a lovely sweet piece of pollock poached in the stew itself. Neil had big, fresh, muscly hake on wilted Baby Gem lettuce from the specials menu and a brilliant, light, fluffy 'berry Eton mess'. I had excellent artisanal ice cream (ginger, rum and raisin, maple and pecan)...Lussmans is, in fact, everything a modern local restaurant should be, so thank heavens for that.

Saturday, October 22, 2011 - I don't normally mention the money before I've got to the food. But this was ridiculous. Half a grand for a steak and a glass of red...I just thought, Puck it, I'll have this beer-fed and massaged foie gras of steaks at 76 quid for a wee six-ouncer, and see if it's worth it. They said the chef would serve it medium rare. I said fine. But they overcooked it. So that was a waste of time. Close to 80 quid's worth of weirdly fattened Texan tourist accidentally cooked all the way through (not surprising when you read on the menu that all the meat is 'Grilled Over Hard Wood & Charcoal Then Finished Under a 650 Degree Broiler'). It was still perfectly nice in a Garfunkel's sort of way, but rather ruined as a delicacy.

Saturday, October 15, 2011 - Some of the balls are fine, though none was served hot enough for my liking. Beef and ricotta in tomato sauce were good old-fashioned Lady and the Tramp efforts, the sauce a bit sugary, but in tune with this larger-arsed society of ours. 'Greek lamb' were underseasoned but well served by their yoghurt dressing. 'Pork, And Rosemary' were served daringly pink in an awful parmesan sauce and with a superfluous comma, but had a great gamey taste and a herby lift that the lamb could have done with...A meatball restaurant is a nice idea, and well-timed for hard months ahead. But it is very, very niche and not done quite well enough here to suggest it will last till the spring.

Saturday, October 08, 2011 - I loved the simple excellence of the food so much that I went back with Esther the following week - it is the highest accolade I can give a place, to say I liked it so much I wanted to share it with her - and we polished off most of the rest of the menu: a duck-egg tart on perfect millefeuille pastry with a halved duck heart and girolles; ham hock and foie gras terrine; grilled plaice with surf clams; a beautiful pork chop with braised cheek, celeriac, black cabbage and awesome rectilinear panes of crackling...I can't think of a gentler, more understated and confident restaurant opening in years.

Saturday, September 24, 2011 - We started with some jellyfish, as I always do. It is the edamame of the sea: not filling, great texture, good mainframe for spice, good with beer, perfect appetiser. Here it was set off with plentiful chilli and fresh coriander, and relatively safe in the kitchen for having no bones...In amongst the red, dry and fiery carnage was a redeeming skewer of delicious chicken hearts, though, which pleased me enormously. Sweating heavily from the spice, I enjoyed bang bang king prawns served in their own weight of rough chopped red and green chilli and a much milder dish of braised pork belly (the deep fat full of good barnyard stinkiness) on glass noodles and a sauce of staggering brownness.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - The clams in chilli, parsley and white wine (spaghetti vongole without the spaghetti) were good, but should have come with bread for the juices; the artichoke dip with crostini, warm in a ramekin, almost souffle-like, was very jolly; the chermoula-spiced poussin had a nice char to it and was prettily presented under a lacing of jalapenos...This is a fabulous-looking spot on a benighted block that desperately needs it, with a good atmosphere, great floor staff and a well-balanced menu. But until they seriously overhaul their standards of practice, I really cannot suggest you go there.

Saturday, August 06, 2011 - The only decent thing was a monkfish soup with lardo and lovely sticky focaccia croutons and a poke of red chilli, but everything else was mimsy and ill-seasoned, from the slightly tangy breaded sardines on burrata (I guess oily fish can tang on a Monday) to the dreary grilled squid on mashed potato... The coffee was terrible, and for petits fours we were served Haribo sweets in a posh box. I mock you not: cola bottles, gummi bears, even a couple of flying saucers. So, at the last, this average-to-poor restaurant revealed itself actually to be stone-cold mental.

Saturday, July 30, 2011 - The borek, whose crunch is their raison d'etre, were limp and flabby; crispy fried baby squid was dry and crusted in oily brown breadcrumbs; hoummos was served, inexplicably, with shrimps on it - no two foods ever went less well together...There was stone chicken. You'd have lot more moisture and life if you'd just had the stone. I don't know how you can get a chicken this wrong. You only have to cook it a bit less, that's all...There was stone chicken. You'd have got more moisture and life if you'd just had the stone. I don't know how you can get a chicken this wrong. You only have to cook it a bit less, that's all.

Saturday, July 23, 2011 - I ordered toad-in-the-hole, or 'frog-in-a-ditch' as the pavement blackboard wittily had it. I cannot tell you how depressing it was: a wide, flat, chewy, coldish Yorkshire pudding containing two supermarket bangers, four lumps of wet broccoli and some carrots. Broccoli and carrots in a toad? It should be steaming hot and chewy-crunchy, full of salt and pork. But this was a lukewarm airline meal served in an old man's hat...I hate to shred a place. But the Penny Black is a disaster. We've spent 20 years putting pride back into English cooking; this place reminded me why we used to be embarrassed by it.

Saturday, July 09, 2011 - It's a beautiful, romantic little place, perched up above street level, all wooden and cool and secluded and full of jingly-jangly Japanese music. And there was lovely, kind, well-informed service and immaculate presentation of the quite small array of dishes...The white fish we ate - turbot, plaice, brill - all came from Cornwall, and was morally unimpeachable. But the thing is that such fishes as these, uncooked, are rather chewy and wan, and do not make for the most thrilling sushi. The scallops were delicious though, succulent and plump and full of fleshy texture and scattered with sweet, bulbous salmon roe. And the yellowtail was good. And the yellowfin tuna was okay, too.

Monday, June 27, 2011 - I'd put up with any room in the world for the mini Iberico pork and foie gras burger, soft and lush and sweet and rich...Courgette flowers stuffed with goat's cheese and drizzled with honey came still attached to their baby vegetable, bright green and small but wonderfully tumescent, full of crunch and sweetness. Chargrilled beef sirloin was sliced and came on a slate or board (I forget which) with a beautiful thyme-scented aioli piled into a marrow bone and chips cooked in, of course, the fat of Iberico pork.

Saturday, June 18, 2011 - The best thing by a mile was the truffle egg toast, a huge slab of truffly cheese on toast with a hole in the middle containing runny egg yolk. Magnificent...You would want, ideally, not to have a hangover for the softshell crab with Tabasco aioli - which is done very well indeed, lovely and crisp and dry - because eating a whole animal, shell, brains, guts and all, is for sober people only. Better off with the nice soft minute steak under a pair of fried eggs. And then the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which was a clever, beige ice-cream triangle, and very nice if you like that sort of thing.

Saturday, June 11, 2011 - It is very expensive, and the service is high French and much too fussy for me (especially when you're outdoors in shirtsleeves sitting at John Lewis garden furniture), but the cooking is sublime...I had 12 of the best snails I've ever had, in garlic and tomato butter. So fat and sweet and salty and moreish, I could have eaten a thousand. And then coq aux morilles, which was three hefty joints of perfect chicken with chunks of smoked bacon and mushrooms in terrific juices. Though there was too much fuss in the service, which involved a man dressed as Abraham Lincoln laboriously transferring every item in the stew from a copper pan to a plate with a neat ball of mash on it for what felt like nearly a week.

Saturday, April 23, 2011 - There's a black pudding soup that is oddly bland and a good cold noodle dish - both of which achieve the special softness of texture Koreans appear to crave - and then a glorious thing indeed involving an almost red-hot stone bowl into which rice, beef and vegetables are poured, crackling and protesting, then a raw egg and some chilli sauce, stir, stir, smoke, smoke, until it's all blended and hot and deep and religious with a funky brown crust seared into the porous sides of the dish, to be scratched out and crunched...All in, it is about 60 quid not counting the soju. Some very top food. A very singular experience.

Saturday, April 16, 2011 - My sister has chosen grilled kidneys with bacon and mustard sauce and, after cutting in, makes a disappointed, slightly frightened face that I have known for 30 years. I immediately hand over my delicious, light fricassee of monkfish and halibut with champagne veloute, cucumber and chervil, and take in exchange the muscular, red-in-the-middle kidneys. The bacon is very fine, the mustard sauce dark gold and brilliantly aggressive. The cooking here, while very correct ('The chef is called Harris,' says Winner, 'his brother is at Racine'), is somewhat old maid-ish. But the rocking kidneys show other, robuster skills.

Saturday, April 09, 2011 - Lovely looking place, Nopi. Giant gold pedestal as you walk in, with three sourdoughs the size of wagon wheels piled on top for slicing and sending out with diddy saucers of olive oil. And then a long white room...The food was good. The wonderfully fresh mackerel fillet on shards of plump coconut with the holiday haze of mint and peanut was a standout (though I could have done without the unheralded dill), the partly boned quail was dense and complex and more than a mini chicken and the verjuice was a quite brilliant wheeze, the bread was fantastic and the carrot and apple juice sensational.

Saturday, April 02, 2011 - Fore rib of Galloway beef and wild leeks with mustard and milk skin (top of the Horlicks, essentially) was fascinating apart from the beef; loin and shank of Herdwick mutton (he loves a Herdwick, does Hruskova) was served on more of the flame-bothered hay; halibut with smoked bone marrow was off so they gave us brill...Oh, and there's a great little wine list from which we had a bottle of the Garces Silva family's Amayna Chilean sauvignon, a favourite of mine because it tastes more expensive than it is.

Saturday, March 26, 2011 - From a list of 'petites bouchees' we had slices of bonsai pissaladiere, every bit as ballsy with anchovy and onion as fat ones from a bog-standard Nicoise bakery, but here all delicate and crisp; barbajuans, which were fried ravioli, two each of cheese, spinach and chicken liver and exquisitely done, little golden savoury bonbons that made you swoon and roll your eyes...But the stand-out thing for me was a side dish of 'puntalette pasta gratin', a sort of savoury rice pudding of rice-shaped pasta with a texture quite unlike anything I have ever known. I could eat it, and nothing else, for ever.

Saturday, March 12, 2011 - Although the colour scheme and fonts are very French, the menu is laid out like great British menus tend to be these days...We were pushed off the foie gras terrine by the maitre d' ('Though I think it is an excellent terrine') towards a warm duck liver pate ('More interesting for the texture') which reminded me in its coarseness of the chopped liver my mother used to make (wait, still does make), except warm, a little darker and more peppery, and served with a big fluffy gougere. Nice, modest, low-key.

Saturday, February 19, 2011 - The food is fine but pricey. I had a nice piece of grilled halibut for 19.50 that was no bigger than a packet of Swan Vestas. The 13.50 burger is a very good one. A slab of game terrine at 8.50 was pushing twice the going rate, but was firm and coarse and lively. The chilli squid was poor: crispy enough but over-battered, so tasting mostly of frying oil, and with very little spice and nip and clatter. Even E & O in Notting Hill does it better. Best value was a side of underpowered but prettily presented cauliflower cheese.

Saturday, February 12, 2011 - The food was terrific. Flawless of its kind. To start we had brilliant prawn cocktail and two great canoes of split front cow leg full of marrow, roasted in the 'shell' with onions, and just as sweet and rich and fatty as as slow-poached toddlers and shallots in ghee. And then great, great steak. Best you'll find anywhere. In this case, a porterhouse for two, cooked medium rare at Hawksmoor's suggestion and had deep black charry cooking flavours and sweet pink fruity juices. The fillet was uncommonly flavourful, the sirloin unusually tender. There was no texture-taste compromise to consider, it was all good. All, all good.

Saturday, February 05, 2011 - There was an immaculate little plate of chickpeas, dainty in their rich, caramelly, perfectly spiced juice with three small lobes of roasted monkfish; and some quite wonderful beef dumplings positively exploding with suetty fluffiness and life, slicked with sticky meat juices...But, alas, there was also a feeble, stringy short rib in a little cast iron pot with a very weedy broth that was more like old veg water than anything else, and a stew of plaice, crab, tarragon and haricot beans that was rather baked-beany.

Wednesday, February 02, 2011 - To look at, it was a single tangerine: bright orange, with that mottled skin, and its dark green stalk and leaf. But then, when you cut in, that skin melted away to reveal the purest, finest foie gras parfait. A gasp, and then a laugh, and then a wonderful taste...And then the dishes settled down into something resembling modern European haute cuisine, though with a clear sense of Heston running through the technique: his expert control of slow cooking in pretty much all the animal protein and the pervading acidity throughout that keeps every dish from slumping into mere Michelin three-star dross.

Saturday, January 29, 2011 - It is intimate, sensitive to its community, well lit, rather noisy and packed with good-looking young people who haven't got much money...I had a really cracking haunch of venison with a red wine and chocolate gravy. I'm not a deer and chocolate man, but this was exquisite, the chocolate just giving a shine to the sauce and a bittersweet lift, but nothing more. There was good clam and bacon chowder, slow-cooked collar of bacon in a huge pile with excellent, meaty pease pudding and heaps of cavolo nero.

Saturday, January 22, 2011 - The rice was excellent, I should say that. Warm as a clean hand and just faintly tangy. And five of the fifteen finny fellows were in fine enough fettle. But the other ten were not. And overpowering assemblies of onion, jalapeno pepper and foie gras, even subjected to some showy spot-welding, could not disguise that...We drove home with the rank yang of vinegar and onion bleak on our breath, which would have been fine if we were coming from a chip shop after spending a tenner. Except that we had done 120 quid without alcohol and were still starving.

Saturday, January 01, 2011 - I'm fairly sure 'schab' is pork, because what I got was nice, lean, fried pork fillet with some slow-cooked belly and sauerkraut and mashed potato. Far more than I could eat...Cheese did feature on a lot of the dishes, along with many kinds of meat, all together on the plate. And it was a huge menu with maybe ten pork dishes, ten beef, ten veal, ten chicken and ten fish. The cooking was all pretty good, and the place was very colourful and alive with Polish pop music on the radio. I think this place is an absolute hoot.

Saturday, December 11, 2010 - The food starts coming: tiny puntillitas, the babiest of baby squid, deep-fried, dry and salty; three discs of freshest scallop in albarino; gozleme, a soft flatbread served hot with feta and spinach; some stunning fried chickpeas; chunkily chopped raw venison, rich and ferrous, barely seared with a piquillo pepper sauce...and then the stand-out dish. The fideos with prawns, saffron and aioli, which are little inch-long strands of vermicelli-like pasta, cooked in a serious prawn stock and served with some lean, lithe little prawns and a splodge of fantastic, light, not-too-garlicky aioli - is a perfect thing.

Saturday, November 20, 2010 - I had an excellent artichoke and almond soup, mild and well-mannered, and then venison with a juniper sauce on wet polenta, mild again, and Esther had lovely fresh Cornish squid, fried and served on lentils with parsley oil, and then a cracking pizza. I don't seem to have a copy of the pizza menu, but it was a spicy sausage effort, good and crisp, with a bright, unsweet sugo...Everything was hot, fresh, delicious and not overpriced. The only bum note was a drab tiramisu, but this is an elegant, fun, conscientious, totally on-message, modern local restaurant.

Saturday, November 13, 2010 - Tinello will be one of the big successes of this year. It takes the new Italian ball from Bocca and Polpo and the rest, and runs with it in a new direction. With an injection of Locatelli class in the finishing and the service, and with wonderfully accurate, serious cooking for the price bracket, this place takes the whole thing upmarket without completely disappearing up its own arse.

Saturday, October 16, 2010 - Simple things done well include grilled chorizo on lentils, the eggs Benedict, an excellent beefburger (soft floury bap, good meat, no frills, far better than any 'gourmet' hamburger chain), big juicy sardines on sourdough toast with roast tomatoes, fat chips, a good mid-priced plate of Spanish charcuterie, and any number of salads...The supper menu moves up half a level in fanciness and I dare say will appeal to all sorts of people who don't much fancy the shout and scrape and smell of the pub.

Saturday, September 25, 2010 - Oh, the food. Impeccable. And priced like somebody has no interest in getting rich. Starters might be thinly sliced ox heart with mushrooms, the bruschetta (nicely charred) with fresh coco blanc and summer girolles, which is like the best baked beans on toast in the world, or deep-fried rhomboids of squash and taleggio, beautifully clean and dry, or some of the best home-made pasta you'll find anywhere: the pappardelle with beef shin ragu made Esther's eyes roll back in her head.

Saturday, August 21, 2010 - What I thought was this: the staff were very nice and very good-looking; the room is very comfortable and very modern; the cocktails are peerless; the steaks are beautiful with excellent fries and good Bearnaise; but they haven't quite got the hang of the whole shellfish thing. I've been twice and both times had oysters that were not cold enough and one or two had been clumsily opened, and prawns that were a bit squishy...Downey generally gets these things right, and this is 80 per cent of the way to excellent.

Saturday, August 07, 2010 - The best thing, for me, was the Coquilles St Jacques a l'encre, in which the scallops reclined on a bright white apostrophe of pureed cauliflower, itself snuggled by a matching apostrophe of deep black squid ink. My rabbit in mustard was less diddy: multiple quarters of bunny, some stuffed, all sweet and tasting of Dijon. Pudding was almost the best thing of all...aside from an unimpeachable pistachio souffle (and a less lovely black velvet sorbet), there was a sort of caramelised ile flottante, a fluffy pillow of softest meringue under a golden sugar carapace that was just ravishing, and worth the trip in itself.

Saturday, July 03, 2010 - Milk-fed lamb shoulder, slow-roasted in the wood oven with garlic, thyme, chickpeas and tomatoes, came on the bone, weeping its pale juices over sizzling vegetables in a big enamelled ironware pot, filling the antiseptic space with the roasty odours of early Mediterranean summer. The meat that fell away was sweet and mild - when they were done, I grabbed the bone and stripped it bare...The service is wonderful, too. The staff know their food and wine inside out, they're friendly and helpful and as surprised, I think, as I was at how good the food they are serving is.

Saturday, June 26, 2010 - It's only udon noodles here, made as well as I've had outside Japan, and you can have them in the soup or served cold on the side. Much better that way, outside, and dipped in the soup as you go, giving you the lovely, cool, al dente subtlety of the pasta in blameless harmony with the hot, rich soup (mine had pieces of soft gamey duck, but there's the usual choices of beef, chicken, tofu, all that). The tempura is impeccable. A plate of mixed veg - okra, broccoli, red pepper, asparagus, mushroom, courgette, something else I forget - was beautifully dry and sparky.

Saturday, June 19, 2010 - The food started well and then rapidly fell to bits. The ribs were good. But ribs always are, and the very first salt-sweet mouthfuls of this sort of food, whatever the standard, are always gratifying. Wild boar rolls were tasty enough porkflaps rolled around young asparagus. Wagyu bavette, cut into mouthfuls and served with that mulchy hijiki seaweed and a very rich, sweet dressing was pleasant enough...It's an okay gimmick for ordering but it comes first here as a consideration, ahead of the kitchen, and not to put the kitchen first is death to any restaurant.

Monday, June 07, 2010 - There was a poached duck egg, brutally trimmed (looking like a perfect little Chinese dumpling), on the pea-tastingest green pea veloute ever; then a roasted scallop on a shellfishy brown butter jus that contained, I think, little pods of lime that would pop occasionally in the mouth and suddenly sparkle and dance, deep in the fishy denseness; and then slivers of rarest Angus beef, sexily seared and served with a veal bone split lengthways and roasted...This is unarguably great cooking. This is two Michelin stars nailed on from the get-go. This is the whole point of posh restaurants.

Saturday, June 05, 2010 - Roasted quail, dark brown and sticky, pepped with pickled radish and then made woody and light with hazelnuts. And most marvellous of all, Landes foie gras, sauted and dressed with a pistachio crumble and rhubarb...I cannot praise this perfect, precise, strangely effortless cooking enough. Little grace notes come back to me occasionally even as I reflect on the grandstand dishes: a wild garlic flower lounging in the handle of a casserole, tiny studs of sticky salsify somewhere, the skin-graft thinness of a meringue on a panna cotta pre-dessert. Only the dreariness of the room quieted the thrill in my soul.

Saturday, May 01, 2010 - This is molecular gastronomy gone cosy and local. If chef Christoffer Hruskova, a Dane, had tried to serve this stuff in 1997 - when Blumenthal himself was still banging out steak and chips - he would have been taken out and burnt for a witch. Some of it works really, really well. I'd never had smoked bone marrow before, and while it didn't necessarily sit well on coils of shaved pickled beetroot, carrot and courgette, ramped up as if on stilts above a pale pink vegetable consomme, it was extraordinary stuff.

Saturday, April 24, 2010 - Esther shared a John Dory the size of a Wolverhampton teenager and said it was very dry. And there was a plate of pork and black pudding that was wan and feeble. Of the mains, only mine was any good: two nice rounds of fillet steak, blackened but rare, with a sweetish tangle of braised shin...And all this not-nice food was served with endless fiddle-faddle and interruption: every attempt at conversation cut dead by staff interjection as they lunged in to tell us how to choose a starter and a main so as to end up with a meal, or to point out that the black stuff arriving in the cup was coffee.

Saturday, April 17, 2010 - We had ham croquetas, pimientos de Padron (not salty enough), fried artichokes, sauteed sweetbreads with beans, a really good escalivada (which is piles of grilled strips of red pepper and aubergine and onions in oil), and then some exceptionally good, rich veal cheeks braised in pedro ximenez, that dark, treacly sherry in which you could really taste the treacliness, and then plates of cheese, manchego and garrotxa, with glasses of oloroso. You know, I think Barrica is maybe something to write home about, after all.

Saturday, April 10, 2010 - My friends started with an excellent old-skool French onion soup (plus Emmental crouton) and foie gras du chef (no cheese at all). Esther had deep-fried Munster balls which I thought were great (but then I'm a sucker for fried cheese), and I had that tremendous tarte flambee Strasbourgeoise, which was, in isolation, light, crispy, savoury, sublime. After that, the tarte flambee aux pommes was almost too much...L'Art du Fromage is a brilliant little place. Honest, wholehearted, fascinating, original and charming.

Saturday, April 03, 2010 - Pale, tender veal was schnitzelled then sliced, the egg was a lukewarm mini-scramble in a butter pot, the salad was perfect cross sections of raw cauliflower, leaves, capers and a couple of perfect radishes. Esther's hock was spread on fingers of beautifully seasoned toasted bread with fantastic piccalilli...The haggis croquettes were brilliant, big and crunchy and full of tangy meat straggle, the kale was a little wet and salty, the two pretty chops were, oddly, overdone. Perfectly tasty but rather a waste.

Saturday, March 27, 2010 - There was a pointless pre-starter involving dull arancini and then my mother had a lobster and avocado starter that was nothing but a 24 quid teaspoonful of filling from a posh club sandwich. Esther had a veal and artichoke and truffle thing which the waiter insisted was a terrine but wasn't (it was delicious but too tiny to count as food) and I had a small artichoke soup with a pale sliver of tasteless lobster and a liquorice element to it that was so bitter and rank I started to think Beck must be a great chef after all, because you would need a serious mastery of the elements of cooking to create something this nasty.

Saturday, March 20, 2010 - The Calabrese pizza is made with the same old incredibly sugary tomato sugo they always use. So while it may be 'our hottest pizza yet - slices of spicy Italian Calabrese sausage D.O.P. with fiery green chillies', it tasted like a faintly Mexicanised jam roly-poly. And the impressive-looking, square, wholemealy-type base was as slack and doughy as ever. The Mia Sofia was better, with a lot of mushrooms and a faint scent of truffle. But it suffered from the same disastrously sloppy base.

Saturday, March 06, 2010 - Esther had a lump of burrata on some chopped tomatoes, I had a dry melanzane parmigiana cut into a cylinder with a pastry shaper like some MasterChef horror of the Loyd Grossman era. Esther had a good risotto, I had a good pasta. I had a very good cup of coffee (so these particular Italians have mastered pasta and coffee - ring out the bells). With a bottle of 42 quid wine (probably the fourth cheapest on the list) and the pleasure of being treated like scum, the bill came to 135 quid. It was a goddam scandal.

Saturday, February 27, 2010 - The sushi was first class. Scallops were polar fresh and buttery, split and twisted on to warm sticky rice - there is no better mouthful on Earth...I also had excellent, sticky, grilled eel teriyaki. And then some sea bass with shiitake mushrooms and a truffle and garlic dressing reminiscent of the crazy dishes I love at Dinings. But Dinings is a different sort of fun. Here we are high up in the roof. There is a vast terrace with stunning night views over Regent Street, which will offer live music in the spring.

Saturday, February 20, 2010 - At the waitress's suggestion we order 'Boiled Fish Slices in Extremely Spicy Soup'. The fish is sea bass - which is a culinary solecism seeing as Sichuan is landlocked and traditionally uses only river and lake fish in its cooking - and takes on the spice and soup flavours brilliantly. But I couldn't even imagine drinking the soup. One mouthful would burn its way straight through me They cook beautifully, the waitresses will hold your hand through the complexities, it's not especially expensive. It's a dream.

Saturday, February 13, 2010 - Esther and I had some first-rate squid a la plancha with a zingy aioli and a plate of big clams with ham, garlic and chilli in about a quart of olive oil, and different glasses of I don't know what excellent white wines from their 200 bins, and then shared a first-class cassoulet with a salad of leaves from Secretts Farm (dressed very oily and salty as the Frenchies will), a plate of smoked duck breast with beetroot and hazelnuts and a carafe of red wine so natural it was just a bunch of grapes squeezed straight into the glass from a Frenchwoman's armpit.

Saturday, January 09, 2010 - It is a lovely old place, right in the middle of the first field you come to driving north out of London...The food was excellent. The menu was a bit longer than I like to see in pubs (12 mains plus specials) but they do their own smoking of meat and fish, have a wonderful way with pan-fried foie gras entier served alongside shavings of foie gras terrine draped over crisp toast and salad, made a decent job of livening up a guinea fowl, and plated aged serrano ham with a poached egg in parsnip crumbs quite beautifully.

Saturday, January 09, 2010 - The cooking is still mostly very good: a house speciality of thick, meaty twists of grilled squid on an unusual, very salty 'potato sauce' is not something you see everywhere, nor are baby artichokes and rocket on a slick pool of fonduta di Ragusano. Esther wasn't crazy about her lobster linguine main. Very salty again, and rather overpowered by saffron. My sea bass, though, had been kept simple and left to speak for itself, and it said, 'Hello, I am an excellent piece of fish.' So that was good.

Sunday, December 06, 2009 - I loved everything about Seven Park Place. I loved the grandeur of the furnishings and the intimacy of the room, which felt old-fashioned and Parisian in the best possible way. I was delighted by the suggestion to split glasses of wine in two so we could drink half-portions of suitable plonk and finish sober. I liked the waiting staff, who knew when to stay and when to go...This is a grown-up, serious restaurant for people who eat out a lot and want a treat, who can afford it, and won't be intimidated by its elegance.

Saturday, October 31, 2009 - All you really need to know is that Pizza East is, like almost everything Nick Jones opens, absolutely bang on the money...It aspires to an American rather than Italian model of the perfect pizzeria. It sits in its Shoreditch location perfectly: acres of wooden floor space, untreated plaster walls, exposed piping overhead, low-hanging chandeliers giving slick party lighting, bar counters and kitchens everywhere, hot staff flinging hot pizzas and a thousand other corking dishes blasted to hell in its diabolic wood ovens.

Saturday, October 10, 2009 - The starter was a wood pigeon and foie gras terrine: robust, red breast meat leaved with foie gras, and brightly coloured sweet dribbles around the plate. Perfectly done...Then, let me see: line-caught sea bass. This was very clever. An elegant skinless fillet with a small rectangle of the super-crisped skin positioned top left of the fillet like a postage stamp. There was a pouch of shimmering emerald cabbage leaves containing mushrooms, and a shellfish sauce.

Saturday, September 19, 2009 - The atmosphere is strangely Middle Eastern in that the place is blatantly a cafe - uncovered tables, erratic service, empty tables left half-cleared, the business almost exclusively walk-ins – but the food was brilliant. Just brilliant...Tabouleh and fattoush were both freshly chopped and freshly dressed. The sujuk (spicy beef sausages) were plump and new and juicy, the foul bezeit (broad beans in lemon juice with garlic and coriander) were very good, and the moujadara (rice and lentils) even better.

Saturday, August 08, 2009 - An amuse-bouche of pig's trotter, sliced translucent thin and blobbed with apple puree, and then, dodging the menu's more poshly plated versions of the tapas we already knew, a bowl of sauteed mushrooms, asparagus and yucca (cassava) with a 'low temperature organic egg' which looked and tasted correct enough...Some of the best Iberian cooking around, some duds. Go. Have a cool beer and a plate of ham downstairs, then head upstairs for a bowl of fish tripe to blow your mind.

Saturday, August 01, 2009 - There was an okay deboned quail and good wasabi prawns. And then I ordered the 'slow-cooked pork belly, feijoada bean puree, chilli mango' because it sounded at least Brazilian, and because I hate myself. I thought it was bland and dusty but Kielty said it was the best thing he had eaten in ages. Mind you, an hour before he had told me, 'I'm Irish. As far as I'm concerned, food is either burnt or soggy' - and as the feijoada appeared to be both, I guess that was the attraction.

Saturday, June 27, 2009 - The paid-for platefuls were all very accomplished and served in nice small portions. My starter was one wee scallop, raw, sliced, with a dressing of sea urchin, and for the main I had a piece of salmon. Flopsy had warm lobster with caramelised endive and vanilla butter, then turbot, and enjoyed them both...The pastry chef is a genius - Flopsy had a Death Star made from spherical white chocolate and I had an exploding gold thing - and the sommelier could charm the legs off a piano.

Saturday, May 09, 2009 - In the end, she managed two avocado rolls, and said they were lovely (they were fine) and that she was full. But I had also ordered age dofu, which was two squares of wonderfully fresh bean curd, fried to a firm crisp on the outside and a wondrously smooth consistency inside (rather like calves’ brains), with a slick, shiny sauce, teak-coloured and full of umi, which she adored, and ate nearly two forkfuls of. “This tofu is so lush I reckon they must have killed it about an hour ago,” she said. “Tofu in restaurants is mostly like munching galoshes.”

Saturday, May 02, 2009 - I ordered widely and greedily, and the food came sequentially, at an easy pace. The most new and unusual for me were the Shaanxi flatbread sandwiches (jia mo): little flattish buns, quite sweet, filled with stewed pork or cumin-spiced beef, like tiny hamburgers…There are plenty of noodles and rice dishes too, but that’s not really the point. The point is new and exciting stodge-packaged protein mouthfuls, friendly service, cute decor, mellow environment and a fresh new way to enjoy the most exciting food in the world.

Saturday, April 18, 2009 - Despite being well below ground level, the dining room has towering ceilings and a great sense of space and wonder…Down in the bowels, kitchen staff toil elegantly behind a huge glass wall. Oeuf en cocotte forestière and salade Périgourdine were triumphs, and the reliability of the classic French bistro cooking carried through into an excellent halibut slab with hollandaise for £18, a pretty good whole trotter stuffed with morels for £15, half a Landes chicken from the rotisserie and a fat slice from a pork totem pole I caught sight of in the kitchen, barked with golden crackling.

Saturday, April 11, 2009 - The chef here, Tomonari Chiba, is an ex-Nobu man and there’s a lot of “new-style” sashimi (the flesh essentially escabeched) done very well. But I went pretty traditional on the raw fish and was rewarded with chu-toro and o-toro as good as I’ve had in London, on perfectly made sushi rice. I had good tempura, great seaweed salad, and a neat little bowl of lobster miso soup from the blackboard…Funny name, unexpected location, slightly unsettling space, and very possibly the most interesting food in England. Go on, choose your priorities.

Saturday, March 21, 2009 - The Garrick’s Head is a new venture by the guys from the excellent King William on the edge of town, which I reviewed here a few years ago, and which follows its model of robust English pub cooking, chunky 18th-century tavern elegance and big, well-sourced dishes, this time based around a fantastic charcoal grill. The meat is all free-range or organic and comes from Somerset or Wiltshire, the cheese is from local dairies, the veg from Bath market gardens, and there are four real ales and two Somerset ciders…

Saturday, February 21, 2009 - Ambassade is housed in a detached, red-brick Edwardian curio, set back from the main drag with large sofas in the tinted windows and loads of flags on the roof. You might easily mistake it for a posh furniture showroom, or a Lego embassy…For the mains, we had the duck à la presse in two services, since I had spotted the big silver duck press in the corner and already spent half an hour trying to explain to David what it was for. First up came lovely long fillets of breast with their golden, gleaming skin on top and a sauce made from the slightly bitter juices pressed from the carcass…

Saturday, January 03, 2009 - We took the menu’s advice and ended up with pretty much everything on the menu at a cost of £160 for solid matter alone, which is a fair whack for a posh curry, even in Marylebone. All four pakoras, at £33, was a very good start: light, crispy, sparklingly spiced proteins with the zap and fizz of Cantonese or Japanese food. Fresh parallelograms of Isle of Wight plaice, deep-fried with “coastal spices” and served with cool, crushed pea and mint was all the good bits of fish and chips without the pointless stodge.

Saturday, December 13, 2008 - There are oysters, clams, “our herrings” and the main courses are dominated by game (roe venison done as a sort of Wellington and very good indeed, partridge, hare, pheasant, grouse, mallard à l’orange…). It’s rugged-sounding stuff, tamed but not egregiously Park-Laned. It’s what restaurants are about just now, and this is among the best of them. It’s certainly the most ballsy, the most shoulder-thumping, the heartiest, the most Irish. But maybe that’s only because Richard was in.

Saturday, November 22, 2008 - The place is beautifully conceived with a big, loungey bar, lots of low, soft, white leather seating, excellent cocktails, and really first-rate bar snacks, shunted out to us within seconds of our ordering our first round, which included little cubes of roasted pork belly on the crackling, mouth-sized bruschettas (or bruschetti, or whatever the plural of tomatoes on toast is in Italian), piping hot cheese balls, shelled roasted pistachios and the like...

Saturday, November 15, 2008 - People have gone mental for the Giaconda Dining Room in grotty old Denmark Street behind Charing Cross Road. GDR is exactly what old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness foodies think ought to be opening at a time like this (and at all other times): a straightforward French corner bistro, using cheap cuts, packing a lot of people into a small space and smiling a lot.

Saturday, November 08, 2008 - We wound round the bar, past a little posh deli they’ve installed, to the ground-floor dining room, which was packed and chatty, and ate a three-course (three choices per course) set lunch for a staggering £15. And it was fabulous, too. The food here has been put in the hands of Angela Hartnett, who hasn’t opened a restaurant in, ooh, weeks, and she has brought in a head chef called Colin Buchan (the chain of command can be snake-long in a GR Holdings gaff, but it always seems to work pretty well).

Saturday, November 01, 2008 - Max glanced around at the new River Café. “Best thing about it,” he said, “is it’s the same. Same staff. Same shape. Ah, they’ve moved the wood-fired oven,” he said, indicating a vast white dome with a small door in it, like an igloo. “It used to be at the side but you see here where they’ve bent it round to make the kitchen into an ‘L’ shape, it means they can get some extra tables in close to the action. And I see they’ve used Corian, very nice.” They’ve also put in a cheese room and a private work/dining room with a remote control screen that Rose was very excited to show us.

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - I am aware that I will have to be careful with the Bull and Last, a pub 150 yards from my front door which has recently changed hands and is now serving some of the best pub food I’ve ever eaten, because I have been this way before. On January 12, 2002, in only my second review in this slot, I raved about a new gastropub, constructed on the site of an old carpet warehouse, which had opened even closer to my house, a matter of some 50 or 60 yards away.

Saturday, October 11, 2008 - With the opening of the St Pancras Grand last month, on the Eurostar concourse itself, just opposite the celebrated Champagne Bar, I think I can briefly relax. For I think it is well on the way to becoming as good an example of a modern British restaurant as we have. At least in looks, menu, service and intention, if not always, just at the moment, in the plated article itself. But that’s mere detail; the Froggies will be so bowled over by the time they get their food that they won’t even notice its shortcomings.

Sunday, October 05, 2008 - Marcus Wareing’s original Pétrus restaurant at 33 St James’s was the first restaurant I reviewed in a national publication. Marcus had come up the road from L’Oranger, a few doors down, and taken the place over in partnership with Gordon Ramsay, who had himself just left Aubergine to set up on his own on the site of the old Tante Claire in Royal Hospital Road.

Saturday, September 27, 2008 - I didn’t know until halfway through my dinner at the Modern Pantry how bored I was with New Old Skool British Plush – you know, all that oysters, kedgeree, Barnsley chop, plum duff malarkey…And now, just in time, “fusion” makes a comeback. And it could come back in no more fitting or confident hands than Anna Hansen, Peter Gordon’s buddy from the Sugar Club and Providores.

Sunday, September 21, 2008 - In the week that she opened Murano, her first new restaurant since the closure of her dining room at the Connaught last year, Angela Hartnett accepted a commission to write the "Diary" column on the comment pages of The Observer…

Saturday, August 23, 2008 - It’s a funky, warehousey, Shoreditchy sort of place…with clean lines, a long, sexy bar, hard-edged, boxy tables and stools, and a rather minimalist outside space...The staff are kind and solicitous, and were quick to say that we should notify them of any allergies. Although I could not see anything on the menu of twiddled-up crudités to which one could possibly be allergic. Nuts, I suppose (from which Saf makes its “cheese”), and wheat, which is used only sparingly.

Saturday, August 02, 2008 - The opening of Osteria Emilia has been long-awaited by the inhabitants of Lower Hampstead ever since its imminent arrival was announced by Giacobazzi's, the incomparable Italian deli on Fleet Road opposite which it has been built, and with whom it shares its owner.

Saturday, July 26, 2008 - For this is the latest venture from Tom and Ed Martin (all Westminster boys are called Tom or Ed, it's why nobody believes I went there) who have had great success in the past with the Well in Clerkenwell and the Gun in Docklands, and have now brought their little empire west.

Saturday, July 19, 2008 - The ceilings are high, and the bar is long and racked with bottles – downstairs there is another dining room, bigger but lower-ceilinged, equally sleek, with the longest sushi bar I’ve ever seen, which I only discovered later en route to the loos – and the tables are nicely spaced with plump chairs and banquettes and a plasticcy, Sixties vibe that I like. No airs and graces.

Saturday, June 21, 2008 - As you'd expect around here. Downstairs, people stand about in the bar and eat at unbookable, undressed tables. Upstairs, the scene is pared-down Georgian splendour: wood, heritage paint, leather chairs, linen drapes… As posh, easily, as Lindsay House. Or Blenheim Palace.

Saturday, May 03, 2008 - I didn’t take much notice of the menu. Just ordered the Byron burger: “dry cure bacon, mature cheddar, Byron BBQ sauce” – my three favourite burger toppings all in one – and then ate it, and thought: “That’s about the best burger I’ve ever had.”

Friday, January 11, 2008 - Bocca looks like a lot of funky new restaurants tend to look now, with a long eating bar at the front to give depth and zoom and a bit of hard yakka to the space, and then an urgent cluster of hard eating tables, in this case with a lot of reclaimed wood and quite a lot of wobbles...The dishes are rustic, regional, absolutely untranslated, utterly authentic, unbelievably winning. From the Crudi e Salumi section we had a tuna tartare with orange zest, capers and pine nuts (Sicilia), whose colour and clarity could almost make you cry.

Saturday, December 22, 2007 - Fairly expensive, but then restaurants are. Good puddings. Quite a few wines by the glass. Pleasant, confident service, all the finesse you’d expect from a team put together by David Moore. The cooking is smart and tight, but it’s not about big portions of piping hot food served on round plates, mostly brown in colour and flavoured with barnyard ballsiness, it’s about… something else.

Saturday, September 21, 2002 - We ordered the menu prestige and various drinks from assorted members of the splendid, shimmering staff. I fiddled with my knife until it hit an empty glass and went: "Clonggggg!" and Roger's first mouthful of fizzy water went down the wrong way. He tried to pretend he wasn't choking a couple of times and then coughed loudly and wiped the fizz that trickled from his nose.