Rowan Moore reviews

Thursday, September 24, 2009 - Green's is good. It is good like a Jermyn Street shirt or a Savile Row suit is supposed to be, with everything done impeccably and as it should be, without too much fanciness...Flavours pinged nicely around a starter of black pudding, bacon-rolled sausages, apple compote and bread sauce, a sort of bonsai version of a Smithfield breakfast. Meat dishes like braised rump of lamb were highly competent and not fancy. The wine list was varied and quite long but thoughtful, and there is an imposing array of whiskies. The fish and chips were outstanding.

Thursday, September 10, 2009 - The main thing that Noiya tries to do is offer more imaginative variants of the standard Indian restaurant fare...It does a good job, with a crispness and cleanness of scents and flavours and an avoidance of excessive gunk. Basics like okra are served with simplicity, chopped small and retaining its crunch and freshness. Only sometimes does the food succumb to an overdose of elaboration. You are served slowly, but with good nature, and you can sit on an outdoor terrace...

Thursday, August 06, 2009 - It calls itself 'a daring reinvention of the urban cafe'. The concept has been lunch-y - salads, pasta, sandwiches, cakes, coffee, delivered with a fashionable flourish. 'If fashion could be captured in edible form, it would look like Napket,' went one review...but the food doesn't deliver on the promise to 'take things that are everyday and simple and make them into the most luxurious things in the world'. There was also a lack of soul, as if the elements too closely resembled the powerpoint presentation made to investors.

Thursday, June 04, 2009 - Rosie’s Deli Café is cute and busy-looking but neater and sprucer than most of its neighbours. There are more hearts, and postcards, and packages of paprika and torrone daintily arranged. The place is tiny, with a few tables inside and a few more out under the glass roof…Book and deli, but especially the book, are a teeny-weeny bit too winsome for my taste, but the food is tasty and well done, without lifting itself above similar delis like Leila’s in Shoreditch. And the combination of nice food with the miraculous place that is Brixton Market means that, although this is far from my own stamping grounds, I’ll be back.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - El Pirata Detapas is not a radically new concept, but an iteration of something that has already worked its way into London’s culinary DNA. It offers a judicious mixture of the familiar — padron peppers, chorizo, prawns in olive oil, garlic and chilli — with sallies into sophistication, such as an octopus carpaccio with mandarin caviar, capers and paprika. It also offers slow-roasted pork belly with red wine, pear and parsnip purée, which happens to combine most of my favourite foodstuffs…

Wednesday, January 21, 2009 - A quarter-century later the Brasserie has revamped itself and the food is a delight, releasing delicate sequences of flavours in your mouth, little firework displays of taste. Extreme hotness is avoided, keeping your tastebuds alive. It is balanced and light, from the scallops with tomato chutney to masala sea bass and the cardamom kulfi. The monkfish is moist and firm. Prawns taste, as they rarely do, like beings that have come out of the sea. Soft-shell crabs are true to their name.

Saturday, September 13, 2008 - My relationship with the name Inamo, brief though it is, has been one of peaks and troughs. At first it sounded promising, enigmatically poised somewhere between Japan and China, like a fictional land in the novels of Haruki Murakami, or at least one of the finely tuned restaurants — Hakkasan, Busaba, Yauatcha — of Alan Yau. Then, with a lurch and plummet, realisation dawned: it's in-a-mo, as in "in a moment". Geddit?