Giles Coren reviews

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, in turn, 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, September 13, 2008 - We liked the menu, my sister and I, reflecting, as it did, a light Italian touch combined with the sort of thorough source acknowledgement more often associated with new British, more gastropubby restaurants. So it was all “loin of Scottish lamb with grissini herb crust”, “home smoked Gressingham duck breast with Sicilian citrus salad” and “carnaroli risotto, English peas”. A brilliant development, if you ask me. It’s classy Italian cooking without the air miles.

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, July 05, 2008 - I cannot prove that that went on at Cha Cha Moon (well, I can prove the critics were there on special invite-only nights, but not who cooked for them), but it is the only explanation I can possibly offer for the four and five-star ratings that Alan Yau has been receiving in the press for this shameless mockery of a restaurant, which is an insult to every man, woman and child who ever paid for a mouthful of hot food in London.

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.”

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.