I have come to the conclusion that all Italian restaurants set in old railway arches are brilliant. I’m basing this assertion on the fact that all Italian restaurants set in old railway arches I’ve ever been to have been brilliant, and I see no reason to just write it off as a coincidence. First there was Archway in Battersea, where an ex-River Cafe team serve a menu of exciting Modern Italian food. Then the third (or fourth? Or fifth? I’ve lost count) branch of Bancone in Borough Market serving house made pasta to a way higher standard you have any right to expect from what is now essentially a chain. And now, underneath what I think is the abandoned track that once terminated at the grand Liverpool Exchange station, is Chinzano.

The first thing you’ll notice about the place is how nicely spaced the tables are. We’ve become so accustomed to being squeezed into antisocially cramped restaurant environments, where you’re very often closer to a stranger on the next table than your own +1, that for somewhere to have proper distances between guests is a genuinely pleasant surprise. I’m not necessarily blaming restaurants trying to maximise the return on their floorspace, and presumably the rent in L3 is not quite in the same ballpark as Farringdon or Marylebone, but the fact is that Chinzano probably could have shoehorned in a half a dozen more tables into this room, and that they haven’t is to their credit.

Also to their credit is the use of a frozen glass to serve a negroni. Again, not every restaurant has the luxury of the freezer space to store glassware, but it’s these little details that make the difference when you’re otherwise just one of a multiple dozen places in Liverpool that can mix gin, Campari and vermouth together. And very nice it was too.

And so was everything else. This is an off-menu special of grilled peach panzanella that impressed in many different ways at once. Chunks of crunchy fried bread sat beneath a robustly seasoned collection of summer vegetables, all topped off with a bulb of burrata. It would have been a very enjoyable thing as a straightforward panzanella but the grilled peaches added a lovely sweet/smoky touch and the creamy burrata was clearly top quality.

Another off-menu special was this fried courgette flower stuffed with salt cod mousse, which came alongside a dollop of fantastic aioli. I’ve had this dish in various places and in various forms over the years, but I can’t remember a version as successful as this, packing so much flavour into the seafood element and boasting a batter so light and delicate it was close to Japanese tempura.

Next, an extraordinary take on tuna crudo which ranks as one of the best things to have been done to raw fish I’ve enjoyed in a long time. Chunks of fresh tuna were bathed in a fantastic tomato and nduja dressing, lifting and highlighting the seafood without overwhelming it and providing an addictive punch of chilli while slices of cool radish on top provided some crunch. This was a bold, exciting and intelligent balance of textures, colours and flavours that demonstrates a kitchen right on top of their Italian food game.

Mains were no less impressive. Pork chop had a beautiful dark crust from the grill but was supremely tender and tasty within, and the hazelnut and potato dressing had all sorts of lovely textures and roasted nut flavours going on. It was also a hugely generous portion - you got plenty for your £26.

And crab taglioni was basically the perfect crab pasta dish - bouncy, moreish ribbons bound with enough brown meat to lend that earthy spritz of the sea, impossible not to love and yet another masterclass in Italian cooking.

Even truffle parmesan fries, a menu item perhaps not winning many authenticity points, were executed superbly - crunchy outside and creamy inside, staying crisp until the very bottom of the bowl, and topped with a healthy dollop of preserved black truffle and shaved parmesan. Oh, and I shouldn’t forget to mention the service, which was as attentive and pleasant as you could want from a waiter who - certainly from behind - bore a striking resemblance to Hagrid from Harry Potter. I hope they don’t mind me saying.

There’s a whole other half of the menu that we didn’t even try - Chinzano make a exciting sounding range of pizzas, with toppings like aged lamb ragu, or confit garlic and herb. And I’m sure they’re lovely - and almost certainly worth a return visit - but that’s for another time. Purely based on the primi and secondi we ordered, this buzzy little spot tucked away in a strange Victorian-industrial landscape north of the city deserves to be spoken about as one of the best Italian restaurants in the country never mind the North West - it really is that good. So you can add Chinzano to your list of must-visit restaurants today, and if you’re ever wondering whether or not a particular Italian joint you may come across is worth your custom, check to see if it’s in an old railway arch. If it is, you’re probably onto a good thing.

9/10

I completely forgot to take a photo of the bill - I must have been enjoying myself too much - but with a bottle of nice organic white it came to £76pp, very reasonable for the level of cooking on offer.

As Brits, we largely think of no-frills budget airlines as a way of jetting ourselves off to sunnier places (or more accurately this year, just as blisteringly hot but with cheaper drinks) for our holidays, but are less likely to consider that those same routes might be bring curious and enterprising traffic the other way. Spain may be far and away the most popular destination for British holidaymakers but it’s thanks to those airlines and their cavalier attitudes to geographical accuracy (”London” Southend, “Barcelona” Girona) that previously rather culinarily insular cities like Liverpool seemingly overnight found themselves host to fantastic delis like Lunya, where Iberico ham is carved to order and fridges groan with packs of sobrassada and boquerones.

And it makes sense that where good ingredients go, and hospitality-trained labour can travel, good restaurants follow. Pilgrim is the second location for this team, but they seem a lot more comfortable in pleasant, village-y Allerton Road than in the hot and ear-splittingly noisy space above Duke Street market I visited all the way back in pre-Covid times. I enjoyed the food then enormously, but just wished I didn’t have to scream to be heard above the din rising up from the food market below. This serene little spot is far more conducive to a pleasant conversation and a small plates concept.

I began with anchovies two ways (my description, not theirs) - a plate of plump boquerones drizzled in olive oil, and an anchovy martini. I can hear some of you rolling your eyes and yes, I know I have a compulsion to order the weirdest thing on any given menu but this was actually a very straightforwardly enjoyable drink with a slight tang of brine which sat very successfully next to white vermouth. Drops of olive oil on the top prettified it as well as adding a little extra grassy note, and I could recommend it to anyone. So there.

At £9 a plate the “Jamon Iberico” was of course not the full acorn-fed bellota but a kind of prosciutto-style presumably made with some variation of Iberico cross-breed. It was still perfectly enjoyable though, the soft and salty protein drizzled with olive oil and topped with crunchy breadsticks.

Octopus with butter beans was a dish so enchantingly authentic it could have been served exactly in this state in any little bar in the suburbs of Barcelona or Girona - add in a row of old men arguing about Catalan politics over giant balloons of sweet brandy and (price aside) you could have been 800 miles away (yes I know Pilgrim are inspired more by Galicia than Catalonia but that is my own reference point). Pickled red onions on top added a nice zing and crunch but the real touch of genius here were the chunks of hot guindillas studded around the place, one of those rare instances where Spanish food allows itself to be properly, eye-wateringly spicy.

Giant Atlantic prawns came with a nice hit of smoke and lots of those lovely crunchy crumbly blackened bits you get whenever you put shellfish in contact with direct heat. Top quality seafood as is an essential a part of the Spanish diet as bread and wine, and dishes like this can be a complete disaster if the main ingredient isn’t up to scratch, but fortunately these were very good even if not quite as stunning as the examples you find in Spain.

Tuna tartare was bound with a very clever grapefruit and roasted tomato sauce, hinting towards a kind of ceviche but softer and less citrussy. You also got a lot of tuna for your £15 which was nice to see in these frugal times.

Not pictured (the photo is awful and I won’t subject you to it) is roast hispi cabbage topped with shaved manchego and chive butter, which demonstrated again how good this kitchen is at live fire cooking. What I did manage to get a half-decent photo of though are the above Jersey royals, which had been crisped up, doused in salsa verde and served alongside a generous dollop of aioli. A huge portion for £7, they still disappeared thanks to the fantastic mix of textures and technique on display.

The only real mis-step of the evening were these lamb chops, which although cooked accurately to nice and moist and pink inside and with a good dark crust on the outside, were so incredibly salty they were bordering on inedible, and I have quite a high salt tolerance. Perhaps they’d been seasoned twice by mistake, or someone accidentally knocked a packet of Maldon into the chimichurri (tximitturi was on the menu, presumably the Basque spelling) but they really shouldn’t have gone out in this state. Still, they look nice don’t they.

The bill, with a nice bottle of rioja, came to £207 for 3 - so £69 per person for plenty of food and wine, not to mention a very competent round of cocktails, which seems to be about right. Service was super friendly and on the ball, and it’s a lovely room, with the large windows opened onto the pavement on this sunny day, though I can imagine it being cosy and warm in the winter as well. It’s a neighbourhood restaurant that takes itself seriously enough where it matters, but delivers everything with enough of an easy-going charm that you can’t help be charmed by the place.

So whether or not the link between low-cost Spanish flights and top-tier Liverpool restaurants can be proven convincingly, I like to think that rather than just being a method of funnelling thousands of pasty Brits to and from the Costas every summer, the ease and relative low cost of travel between the two countries has - despite Brexit’s best efforts to sabotage it - forged something a bit more meaningful between these parts of the world. May hand-carved Iberico ham and octopus and butterbean tapas be long here to stay in Liverpool, and may us all be the better for it.

8/10

Every new generation of Londoner has to go through the phase of being bewildered and bedazzled by the various lavish stalls and speciality producers at Borough Market, shell out a small fortune for a selection of wildly unrelated items they’re entirely unable to turn into a cohesive dinner, and spend a weekend or two queuing for a chorizo roll (or whatever the snack du jour is at any particular moment) before eventually declaring the Market “just for the tourists these days”. It’s a rite of passage, like getting ripped off at a Brick Lane curry house, or finally finding the correct exit at Piccadilly Circus tube.

And we can moan all we like (another truly London pastime) but there’s many of us still hold a soft spot in our hearts for the Market. Yes, at the weekends it’s wildly overpopulated, you can’t really do any proper food shopping there and if I see one more chocolate-covered strawberry I’ll want to scream, but the fact is, scattered around the place amongst the crowds and the noise are undoubtedly some of the best restaurants in the capital. Just off the top of my head there’s OMA and Agora, Padella, Camille, Elliot’s, Bancone, Rambutan, Kolae, Akara, Mei Mei, Bao, Barrafina, Parrillan - surely there’s no other 4.5 acres (thank you Google) of land in Western Europe so blessed with incredible places to eat.

And now there’s one more. Tucked above the Globe pub in a couple of bijou dining rooms oozing with character (if not elbow room) is Kismet, a “Meyhane” restaurant (think Ottoman-empire izakaya, serving raki instead of sake) run by a youthful, enthusiastic bunch of people who really seem to know what they’re doing. I’ve yet to visit Turkey, but the first thing my friend noticed as we squeezed onto our table was the little diner-style napkin dispenser, a vital part of the Turkish restaurant experience, I was assured.

Of the food, the first to arrive was atom, a strained yoghurt dish soaked in butter that couldn’t have been any better to compliment the house flatbread. Perhaps I could have done with a bit more of the advertised chilli hit - I could see the little red flakes but couldn’t really taste them - but then this is almost certainly just a personal preference thing.

Also begging to be scooped up by more of that crunchy, salty bread (why is homemade bread such a rarity in Turkish/Cypriot restaurants in London? Even some of the bigger name mangal places in Dalston I’ve seen them opening packets of precooked stuff) is a wonderful house tarama, rich and rewarding and silky smooth enough by itself but topped with a generous layer of puréed cod’s roe, which lifted it onto another level.

Oh but we were just getting started. I have yet to meet a piece of fried liver I didn’t like, so I am perhaps not the best person to objectively rate this yaprak ciğer dish, but I can’t remember eating a better bit of offal in years. The liver itself was soft and bouncy with not a hint of dryness - closer to the texture of sweetbreads than anything else. A delicate breadcrumbed coating was greaseless and crisp with a gorgeous golden colour. It was also seasoned perfectly, and combined with a fresh onion salad made it the kind of thing you’ll be talking to your friends about for days after. If you go to Kismet, get the liver and onions.

Also brilliant were the şeftali kebabi, bouncy little parcels of minced pork (I think) and lamb (definitely) held together in caul fat and grilled to gentle smoky perfection without being too charred or bitter. Lots of places in London do şeftali, and some do them very well indeed. I’ve rarely found any as accomplished as these, and the layer of soft flatbread quietly soaking up the juices from the resting meat was a wonderful little bonus.

Finally there were two sides, one our choice and one theirs. Our pick was nothing more radical than a house green salad, but the measure of any good restaurant is a seemingly effortless capacity to turn the mundane into the exceptional. So yes maybe this was just a little plate of lettuce and onions but the dressing was salty and vinegary and oily in all the right amounts and it was a genuine delight to eat.

We were persuaded, though, to also try their patates kızartması, not because we were particularly hungry or even that curious to try even this thrusting young restaurant’s take on fried potatoes, but because our waiter insisted they were his favourite dish on the menu and that were something close to a must-order. What arrived was a sad, flabby little tray of pallid potato shapes so lacking in the life and fire and finesse shown in the rest of the menu it was like they came from a different restaurant entirely. Many years ago, I attempted to make chips at home. I cooked them too long at too low a temperature, used the wrong kind of oil and the wrong type of potatoes, and they still tasted better than these things. I have no idea why they’re on the menu.

Anyway, so Kismet isn’t perfect. But I’d be tempted to write off the potatoes as the exception that proves the rule, a rare blind spot in a kitchen that’s otherwise doing everything right and then some, not least because the knowledge that the same kitchen can make those potatoes and everything else we tried is giving me a migraine. The fact is, nobody else in town can cook liver like that, or şeftali like that, and tarama and atom like that, and make stunning bread like that, and for all those reasons this little spot is a new London must-visit restaurant, equally delighting long-time foodie cynics as well as whichever tourists happen to be passing through that day.

And speaking of tourists, judging by the gaggle waiting their turn to take a photo next to the rear door of the Globe, Bridget Jones’ picture-book London still lives strong in the international collective conscience. Only in movie world could a junior assistant at a small London publishing house afford a 1-bedroom flat in Borough Market, even in the early noughties, but who cares - this is an idealised London, and Kismet is tantalisingly close to an ideal restaurant, and in this weird arrangement the two sit very happily together as ambassadors for the city. Above a Victorian pub in an old food market, magic happens, on and off the screen.

9/10

This wasn’t my invite, but we didn’t see the bill. Would have been something like £50/head though, which is incredibly reasonable.

EDIT: I’m reliably informed that the kebabs above were not şeftali but kofte, which had been swapped in that day and the menu not updated. Still very nice, anyway, and all my same compliments still apply!

Before I was able to assess the authenticity or otherwise of the food at Khao Bird, I could at least appreciate the ambient temperatures in the dining hall were at genuine Thai levels. It’s not really their fault that we visited during one of the hottest days of London’s seemingly endless heatwave, but it really is getting to the stage that if your place doesn’t have actual AC (or if it’s not turned up (down?) enough) then I’m really going to have to think twice on whether I want to spend time there, no matter how good the food is.

So it’s thanks to the food at Khao Bird being rather good indeed that I was able to - temporarily - put up with the raging temperatures and for a few moments on a Sunday afternoon enjoy an interesting variety of Northern Thai BBQ (their own description of their own food). But not before tucking into one of these bad boys, a spicy margarita made with mezcal and a pleasingly significant dose of chilli which blew open the taste buds in preparation for the food to follow.

At this point I should say that yes, I know the photos are awful - it was dark in there as well as hot, and I was only half-heartedly paying attention to my blogging responsibilities as I was meeting a friend from Liverpool for dinner and didn’t want to embarrass him too much with my Big Noisy Camera. But these (I promise) are crispy pigs ears, just the right balance of crunchy and chewy, served with an addictive nam pla and a fantastic nibble with the margarita.

I’ve been served such a huge variety of things over the years sharing the name laab that I honestly am not sure what is the core laabness that makes a laab a laab other than, more often than not, a borderline hallucinatory hit of chilli. This is steak tartare and Campari (full marks for imagination at least) and was both so good and so hot that I was forced to take tiny mouthfuls of it every 10 minutes or so, the breaks just enough for the burning to dip from acute pain to a dull throb, then back again. Crispy tofu skin on top provided a nice crunch to offset the raw beef texture and various other bits of fresh veg and spices rounded the whole thing off nicely. Not your traditional laab, then - if such a thing even exists - but well worth an order if you’re a chilli fiend.

Another Thai staple, Som Tam, used Isle of White tomatoes and local “shrub veg” (your guess is as good as mine but I like to think someone’s got their foraging on) with the usual tamarind-chilli mixture and was finished with “our family honey”, which was a very nice touch. The trick, I imagine, in running a successful Thai restaurant outside of Thailand is knowing when to substitute local ingredients and when to stick to imported Thai originals. I love the idea of creating a Thai salad with English garden vegetables and authentic imported fish sauce, especially when the result is as good as this.

Also ordered and not pictured (I did take a photo, but you really don’t want to see it believe me) was a giant steaming bowl of grilled chicken khao soi, a northern Thai curry that involved a rich coconut broth, egg noodles two ways, boiled and crisped, pickled mustard greens and chilli. Even without the chicken this would have been a fantastically enjoyable thing to slurp down, but the chicken managed to hold the crisp and char of the coals despite being dunked in the sauce, and thanks to an aggressive marinade the flesh was salty and firm right to he bone - not a hint of dryness. Impressive stuff, and well worth £23 considering the amount of work that had clearly gone into it.

With a couple of pots of jasmine rice and - I have a vague memory of this - a little dish of miso broccoli, the bill came to just over £50pp which is pretty much exactly what you should be spending on interesting, intelligently constructed food of this kind in London. If I’m going to be absolutely brutal I’d say Kiln is still my favourite Soho Thai spot but these days that’s altogether a more serious and spendy affair. Khao Bird is fun, accessible and - by the standards of 2026 - good value, and easily makes my recommendation list as an unpretentious little spot that takes itself just seriously enough where it matters. And if they fixed their AC, it would be even better.

8/10

The St Katharine Docks are a very pleasant, picturesque and pedestrian-friendly part of London that deserves much, much better restaurants than they has hitherto been blessed with. Banquet 88’s immediate neighbours are Café Rouge, Côte and Slug & Lettuce and though I can sense some of you bristling with indignant contrary defences of this particular rogues gallery (”The Côte lunch menu is actually pretty good value” ... “The Café Rouge steak frites aren’t completely inedible” ... “I once ate at Slug & Lettuce and didn’t die”), the fact is that being so close to one of the city’s most popular attractions (the Tower is just through an underpass) means that the undiscerning tourist dollar is a considerable and ugly influence.

How odd, then - and pleasantly surprising - that Banquet 88 isn’t a lazy proto-chain or timid tourist-friendly slop merchant but a vibrantly authentic modern Cantonese restaurant serving a menu so full of courageous and exciting dishes that it should have any Chinese food-lover (that’s lovers of Chinese food, not food lovers who are Chinese, although I’m sure both are welcome) wanting to order from every corner of it.

So obviously, given the menu dares you to go as full Chinese Mode as you can, we tried not to disappoint. This is hand-pulled chicken with jellyfish, a dish that carefully balanced both the obvious contrasting textures - the bounce and chew of the jellyfish with the firmer strips of chicken - and lovely light flavours, with both proteins benefiting from a subtle sesame-vinegar dressing. With strips of crunchy cucumber and spring onion layered on top, this was an immensely satisfying and enjoyable salad (...type thing), very appropriate given the flag-cracking weather outside.

Hot and sour sesame aubergine came so fresh out of the fryer that we could barely go near them for about 15 minutes after they landed on the table, but once the searing hot sugar had cooled down a bit they were great, little gooey sticks all sharp and sweet with an addictive crunch and chew.

Banquet 88 are apparently known for their cheung fun, so we could hardly ignore that section of the menu. This is prawn with crispy red rice skin, which cleverly combined the sweetness and bite of fresh prawn with a layer of crunchy fried doughnut, all wrapped in a traffic-light red noodle wrapper that, we were assured, was not artificial but naturally coloured from the red rice used to make it. The chilli dip was great too.

More dim sum (Banquet 88 are pitching themselves as a kind of updated Yauatcha, with the whole menu available all day) came in the form of these pretty crab dumplings, containing plenty of fresh crab and having a nice just-firm-enough bite. Excellent of course - by this stage of the evening, excellent was becoming the norm.

Cantonese roast pigeon needed a very different skill set to the dim sum but was equally accomplished. The neat little portions each had a crisp, delicate skin next to expertly seasoned meat and was all distressingly easy to wolf down in record time. Perhaps if I’m going to be picky I would have liked some kind of dipping sauce for this, but there was still some chilli sauce and crispy chilli oil left over from the dim sum so that worked well enough.

In some restaurants you’re lucky to get your seafood served in the right species of shell - there’s been a worrying trend recently to present dressed crab inside scallop shells which is just... all kinds of wrong) but not many places serve fresh scallops not only in their shells but still attached to the very shell they lived in. So not only were these creatures served plump and fresh and dressed in a lovely garlic-vinegar sauce with glass noodles but you had the added joy of prying the meat from the shell, which lifted off in a single satisfying chunk. This is literally the first time I’ve ever had scallops served this way, and I’m very much hoping it won’t be the last.

We did allow ourselves a couple of fan-favourite Cantonese dishes. Half a roast duck was extremely good - perhaps not as life-changing as the multi-course version served at Shikumen in Shepherd’s Bush (currently, worryingly closed, though I hope just temporarily) but still mostly everything you could wish for, with another one of those delicately crunchy skins and good soft meat.

Even beef ho fun - something approaching a Cantonese staple - was the very best it could be, with big slices of smoky chargrilled beef, slightly pink inside, enveloped by giant lengths of soft noodles.

Finally from the savouries, a plate of pea shoots was a revelation. On the plate it looked like spinach or bok choy, attractive but familiar. But the taste was pure, summery, sugary pea, with a topping of crab roe to season and enliven it. I’m sure the kitchens at Banquet 88 can work wonders with whatever seasonal vegetables they can get their hands on, but this particular dish will live long in my memory of this dinner, one not short of highlights.

So far so brilliant then, and I’m tempted to ignore the sweet courses and leave on a high note, but it’s probably worth wondering why I’ve never had a great time with desserts in Chinese restaurants. Two different dishes were brought out - a selection of mochi (I know, they’re Japanese), and a mango pomelo sago pudding thing, and as expected I didn’t much like either of them. The mochi, like any other mochi I’ve ever tried, were the texture of raw bread dough with all the personality of wallpaper paste, and the mango...thing had a decent mango flavour but a slightly off-putting too-firm texture. I’ve been lucky enough to eat at some very smart and high-end Chinese restaurants and I’ve never really understood why so often the wheels seem to come off after the savoury courses are done. But then maybe it’s just me.

Either way, let’s not dwell on the desserts (I certainly didn’t). Banquet 88 had done more than enough to put it right near the top of my favourite Chinese restaurants in London before the mochi arrived and looking back over my photos a few days after I just want to go back and order all the other things I didn’t get a chance to sample the first time - abalone maybe, or baked eel, or sake cherry foie gras. And although I didn’t see a bill, and though it is possible to load up on some pretty premium ingredients (caviar features in certain corners, I noticed) a quick and dirty sum of the items we chose comes to a food bill of about £170 for 3 people - and we had leftovers. You will certainly pay more for a lot less in other parts of town.

It is, then, and after all, possible to run a restaurant with style and heart in the heart of Touristland, and although I’m not holding my breath for a world-class Southern Thai specialist to open on Leicester Square or for Westfield Stratford to get a Bob Bob Ricard, the point is that maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised when somewhere with integrity opens so close to so many places without. And we should be very, very thankful that they have because it’s places like Banquet 88 that make London one of the most rewarding and exciting places in which to eat on planet earth. OK so maybe I’m biased. But I’m not necessarily wrong.

8/10

I was invited to Banquet 88 and didn’t see a bill.

I’m acutely aware that a review of a (hitherto) obscure restaurant in a small town in Spain isn’t going to be one of my most read posts of the year. Back in the days when I was doing 6 or 7 posts a month, slipping the odd leftfield location in now and again just made things a bit more interesting for me - perhaps if I was lucky would provide some kind of inspiration for one or two readers, but it would soon be followed-up by somewhere a bit more Central London and I wouldn’t lose too many of you along the way. More recently though, with my new routine of one or two posts a month, these “extra” reviews carry a bit more weight, and run the risk of shedding even more of my dwindling readership.

So in deciding to write about Can Koya, a relatively new Japanese restaurant in the Catalonian seaside town of L’Escala, I’ve made the judgement that despite its decidedly non-London location, its hardly ground-breaking approach to Japanese cuisine and the fact that the vast majority of the people reading this are extremely unlikely to ever cross its doors, it’s so utterly brilliant that it deserves whatever tiny scraps of publicity I can throw its way.

Believe me, I was as shocked as anyone it turned out so good, although perhaps I shouldn’t have been. There is a fairly long tradition of serious Japanese food in Spain - Barcelona has a number of very well-regarded sushi joints run by skilled ex-pats, and if the only other barrier to top Japanese food is the availability of top-quality seafood then, well, Spain’s got that covered and then some. These are Guillardeau no.2 oysters, served naturally and presented perfectly, plump and fresh but zingingly lean - not a hint of that unpleasant creaminess that can occasionally appear in the summer months. I quite fancied some lemon to go with the second one but they brought out a homemade yuzu sauce which was exceptional - amazing to think this dressing wasn’t even on the menu and they’d magicked it up on request.

Also exceptional is Can Koya’s tempura game. There’s very little place to hide with tempura - the batter has to be light and greaseless enough to create a crunch but substantial enough to coat all the ingredients (in this case a medley of early summer vegetables) thoroughly. I’ve only been to Japan once but I don’t remember anywhere doing a better version of vegetable tempura there or anywhere else - this really was the best of Japanese technique applied to top Spanish produce, to stunning effect.

One of the constantly astonishing things about eating out in Spain is how often top-tier ingredients are served at prices that would barely be a cover charge in the UK. This tray of sashimi moriawase consisted of 4 chunks of toro (fatty tuna), 4 of akami (lean tuna) and a neat little pile of salmon, and is yours (well, was mine) for €24. I probably should have ordered another.

And on that same theme, this is a langoustine maki roll, boasting huge chunks of soft, sweet langoustine inside fluffy, body-temperature rice - a complete sushi masterclass. As with everything else before (and everything to come), there was that perfect marriage between serious Japanese sushi technique and the finest available Spanish (or in this case, probably Scottish) produce. Again, I could have happily polished off another portion of this, and probably another after that.

Yakitori scallops were off-menu, €4 each and an absolute delight. Like any Japanese restaurant worth its salt, the kitchen at Can Koya is nimble enough to work in any extra bits and pieces of top seafood come in that day, and these were absolutely belting, presented unashamedly and confidently straight-up, with no dressing or flummery (although we did still have the ponzu dip from the sashimi to use).

Finally, bonito tuna tataki, probably the most unexpected and quirky dish of the evening but just as impressive as anything else in its own way. Some attractively frilled and gently seared chunks of tuna came arranged next to a kind of ajoblanco sauce and a little clump of glazed vegetables. This was Japanese-Spanish fusion food done literally, but to great effect - an intelligent, seasonal dish marrying local and Japanese aesthetics. Very clever stuff.

With a bottle of cava to wash it all down the bill came to just under €55/head (about £47) - an insanely reasonable amount of money for even a middling Japanese restaurant, never mind one so thoughtful and accomplished as this. As soon as it was all over, I made plans to return, and did, only to find it closed. Another thing I should have known is to never trust Google Maps opening hours in Spain. But I’ll try again, because restaurants like this, and value like this, deserves to be enjoyed as often as possible.

So you may find yourself in L’Escala looking for a Japanese bite to eat, and you may not. But a wider point about eating out in Spain stands - that I doubt there is anywhere else in Europe where the quality of ingredients is matched with such incredible value - and this applies to all levels of dining from the most modest tapas joint to the multi-Michelin-starred gastro-temples (of which, you may have heard, there are also quite a few). At the risk of sounding like a spokesperson for the Spanish tourist board (eating out in Spain tends to do that to you), you have to be extremely unlucky (or be in an airport terminal) to eat badly in this part of the world. I may never leave.

9/10

At first, you can’t quite believe what you’re seeing. Right in the middle of a cluster of modern high-rises, behind a large neon-lit casino and steps away from a giant ugly motorway junction, is a beautiful little brick-built pub that seemingly has no business being there. How it’s managed to survive presumably several attempts to raze it over the years I don’t know, but it stands there proudly now, like the New York tenement block from Batteries Not Included, tastefully restored and full of happy customers. Even if I didn’t quite need to book my table there 6 months in advance, well, I’m glad I did.

Inside, there are two cozy rooms, one it seems mainly for drinks (the beer and cider list is excellent) and one serving as a little restaurant. It would be well worth a visit to this gorgeous space just for a pint and a packet of crisps - and like any good gastropub, they have absolutely no problem with you doing just that - but the Laddie also serve a food menu so full of excitement and invention it deserves to be spoken about alongside some of the very best pubs in the country.

We started with oysters, 8 of them so we got to try two of each of the suggested serving methods between us. My favourite - as is often the case - was plain lemon juice but the house hot sauce, a remarkably punchy fermented affair, also drew some appreciative noises. The oysters, as you might hope from a city with some of the best fishmongers in the country, were perfectly opened, lean and fresh. That above is one of the few photos I took that evening that’s in focus, too, so apologies for the others that follow below.

A half pint of prawns were perhaps if I’m going to be brutal very slightly overcooked and underseasoned but still perfectly edible. The Marie Rose sauce was great though, and I love the fact that serious gastropubs are still doing pints of prawns because they’re as much a part of proper English pub tradition as steak and ale pie or fish and chips.

Paneer kebab had a lovely delicate touch of the coals, with nice blackened bits on the grilled veg and paneer that was crunchy on the outside and fluffy and soft inside.

Scallops, each served with a good, dark crust all sweet and salty, would have been worth an order served straight up, but here they came in a fantastic vinegary smoked bacon broth which had everything you needed to bring out the best in the scallops.

I didn’t get a chance to try these stuffed Jersey royals - they look nice though don’t they. I’m only really putting the picture up out of completeness and because it’s almost in focus, which is more than you can say for the rest of the dishes.

Asparagus demonstrated another technically impressive way with a charcoal grill, were seasoned perfectly, and came with a very decent Bearnaise, packed full of fresh tarragon.

So far so lovely, and the Laddie would be the top of my list of Leeds recommendations if we’d stopped there, but it was with the larger dishes towards the bottom of the menu that the kitchen really started showing what it was capable of.

Firstly there was this giant pork meatball with wild garlic butter, an intensely flavoured yet remarkably light and easy to eat dish which was so packed with umami I think they may have put some parmesan cheese in the mince as well as on top. But either way, it was a brilliant thing and one of the highlights in a meal not short of highlights.

And this giant pork schnitzel, with a bubbly, golden-brown crust and draped in fried eggs and anchovies, which everyone agreed was something else they’d definitely order again. Schnitzels always come with the risk of being too greasy (or maybe I’ve just been unlucky) but this had just the right balance of greaseless, crunchy coating and thick, tender pork and was an absolute delight.

Also a delight was the house sliced ham “from the fire”, which as well as being extremely good in its own right came with a bloody mustard menu, a new experience for this jaded blogger. And also not pictured was a brilliant rabbit hot pot, seasoned well and full of flavour and a wonderful texture - not easy to achieve with rabbit stew.

I’m sorry, then, the photos tailed off towards the end, and if you have a look at the final menu for 8 people you’ll see yet more dishes I’ve not mentioned, but you’ll have to take my word that everything was at least good, and occasionally superb - even the house bread (sorry, “dinner roll”) was sweet and soft and salty in that brioche-y style. And it would be criminal not to mention the service too, who made you feel like you were invited to dinner in their own houses - it’s a style of service, warm and friendly but also staggeringly efficient, that really lifts the whole experience of eating there onto another level.

So yes, I had an absolute blast at the Highland Laddie and urge you to book a table as soon as you possibly can. Unfortunately, due to its tiny size, its growing reputation in Leeds and elsewhere, and the fact it won the Good Food Awards number 1 best pub in Britain not to long ago (way to spoil our fun, guys), that’s easier said than done, but if you do squeeze in you’ll be rewarded with one of the most enjoyable and singular menus in the whole country. This pretty old interwar (I think... internet is inconclusive) pub, having already survived 100+ years of upheaval and change, looks towards the future full of confidence and brimming with talent. A jewel of a place.

9/10

I have often come across menus that read better than they deliver - full of interesting ingredients and clever techniques on paper but not living up to the promise when the actual food starts appearing. This makes sense from a certain point of view - it’s all very well writing the word ‘bouillabaisse’ on a menu but quite another having the knowledge and skill to serve it.

Much more unusual is to find a menu that under-promises and over-delivers. I’m not saying the menu at Willy’s is unadventurous but it is quite familiar - certainly if you’re as much of a restaurant spod as me. Black pudding Scotch egg, sausage and mash, trout with seaweed butter, these are all things you are very likely to have seen before, at a local bistro perhaps or popular rural gastropub, staples of British food that have stood the test of time. But if they’re popular, it’s because when they’re done well, they work. The trick is doing them well.

Fortunately Willy’s does everything very well, beginning with a cocktail called Penicillin involving whisky, ginger, honey and lemon juice, and tasting very like the concoction my nan used to give me when I had a sore throat as a kid. Minus the whisky (presumably).

Beef tartare was lovely - a good balance of beefy fat, sharp capers and peppery horseradish. Homemade crisps on top (I think perhaps fried in tallow) added crunch, and underneath it all was a fantastically beefy slab of dripping-fried sourdough. Again, it’s very likely you will have seen beef tartare before but the extra attention to detail here - particularly with the big hit of beef flavour from the various fat elements - really lifted it into something quite special. I’ve had worse tartars that cost 3 times the price.

Charred courgette was also very nicely done - careful grilling achieving a nice dark crunch without the inside being too soggy. The effect was almost meaty (I’m sure they won’t mind me saying), complimented with toasted pumpkin seeds (you get the impression the kitchen here are always thinking about texture) and little pools of pesto.

You will have seen chicken, mushroom and tarragon put together before, but very rarely as successfully as this. The chicken itself was the star - a huge supreme sliced into thick, moist slices, each topped with a delicate, salty cracker of skin. The mushroom and tarragon were bound by a super-silky sauce, powerfully flavoured and nicely seasoned, the perfect accompaniment to the chicken. Honestly, it was just great. My plate was completely wiped clean.

Cauliflower displayed yet more intelligent grilling, some earthy braised lentils and - my favourite element - celeriac remoulade that came chopped into neat little mustardy cubes rather than the usual spaghetti.

And finally from the savoury courses, a side of purple sprouting broccoli sporting yet another good bit of salty charring, and a nice hit of miso in the dressing. Vegetarians (and even vegans) would do very well here.

Incredibly, a humble sticky toffee pudding for dessert was pretty much the best thing we ate that day - rich and treacly, with just the right sugar/salt balance and a sponge that had been delicately toasted on the edges, it was pretty much a perfect example of its kind. I didn’t detect much (or any, in fact) of the advertised ginger in the ice cream, but I only really wanted vanilla anyway so that worked out rather well. I love a home made, silky-smooth ice cream. This was a great dessert.

I didn’t see a bill that day as this was an invite (thank you everyone involved in organising) but a quick adding up of the menu items comes to just under £50pp before service, which is pretty reasonable for 2026. It’s a lovely bright room to sit in too, boldly designed in the 50s American diner style, and the staff didn’t put a foot wrong although they did know I was reviewing so take that with a pinch of salt maybe. How lucky Margate is to have option of this exciting new venue to eat at, alongside what I believe is a fast-expanding breadth and depth of other bars and restaurants. The place really feels like a town on the up.

After lunch, we got snowed on but nobody’s ever going to go to the British seaside in March for the weather. The gales and snow only seem to add to the place’s charm, and give you all the more reason to huddle inside a nice old pub (there’s plenty of them) and wait for it to all blow over. Which we very much did, and had a thoroughly lovely day of it. Willy’s then - just the latest reason to visit Margate. But a very, very good reason.

8/10

I got invited to Willy’s and didn’t see a bill.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather on a mini-break to Somerset, in that it only rained some of the time, not all of the time. I am a huge advocate of tourism in rural UK, and have yet to find a part of the country I didn’t get on with at all (and I’ve been to Blackpool), but the fact is it really really helps if you get a bit of sun. Pootling around the back lanes of Batcombe in the morning sun is a joy - slightly less fun is battling your way home through driving rain in soaked jeans under a £7 Boots umbrella that really isn’t up to the task.

To offset the threat of inclement weather spoiling our attempts to holiday, then, we find it helps to have a nice gastropub dinner to look forward to. The Three Horseshoes is owned and run by Margot Henderson, of Rochelle Canteen fame (a place I enjoyed very much), and this village pub in a quaint 18th century building was the hook from which we’d hung our four day trip. If nothing else, even if the skies thundered and gales blew, we’d be able to escape the storm for a few precious hours of a Tuesday night and have a nice hearty dinner.

Events kicked off brightly enough, with a martini. It’s probably too much to expect a local pub to have space to keep frozen glasses, but they’d made up for it with a superbly cold drink, and how many local pubs do you know that can make a martini anyway? Was only £10 too - take that, London.

Food-wise, things began more shakily. My own starter of mussels was pretty disastrous - unseasoned, almost entirely flavourless things in a thin, characterless “sauce” which tasted of little more than sweet vegetable stock, it must have taken real skill to turn fresh (I assume) mussels into something so insipid. The one saving grace was a slab of toasted sourdough underneath which was - bizarrely - lovely, although when we asked for a separate portion of the same bread they said they didn’t have any. Odd.

Other starters were good, though. Fish soup had a robust flavour and the rouille/mayo loosened it all up nicely. This came with giant chunks of more excellent fried sourdough they didn’t have, adding plenty of crunch.

Early season asparagus were also excellent, served slightly warm under a blanket of genuinely great sauce gribiche, chunks of pickles and egg and herbs bound with a tart mustardy sauce and topped with crunchy breadcrumbs (that they didn’t have). It’s baffling that a kitchen capable of the fish soup and these lovely asparagus would think those mussels were worthy of sending out, but maybe they were a genuine mistake.

My main course was lamb and laverbread sausage, and a very fine thing it was too - lean and salty and packed full of flavour, even if this was just a case of sensible sourcing (presumably from a local butcher) rather than technical skill. However, the lamb jus that surrounded it was also superb, silky smooth and a perfect balance of umami, salt and fat. The creamed leeks - despite the addition of wild garlic - were a little bit boring but maybe there would have been too much going on if these had been as powerfully seasoned as the sausage and sauce. Overall there was still plenty here to enjoy.

Wild garlic also featured in the brill en papillote, a nice little traditional French affair which means the fish and all the veg steam together like a kind of buttery stew. The fish itself was lovely - meaty and bright white, lifted by a good amount of the wild garlic which we had seen growing all over Batcombe earlier in the day. And full marks to the Three Horseshoes kitchen for flexibility when it came to a dairy-free member of our table, who got the same fish simply grilled with a side of kale - a concession they were under no obligation to make but which was really appreciated.

But best of all - and I’m not being facetious here at all - was a portion of chips cooked in dripping, which had a brilliant deep flavour and stayed crunchy and crisp right until the very last one.

Desserts were also notable - particularly a rhubarb “pavlova” which despite looking like someone had dropped it from a height had the most amazing flavour, richly creamy and spiked with vanilla. Cider sorbet was decent - perhaps the texture was a bit rough but that could just be personal preference, it still didn’t last long. Washed down with a glass of Somerset cider brandy, it made for a very enjoyable end of the evening and the calvados did a good job of fortifying us for the journey home - only a 10 minute walk to our Airbnb on the other side of the village but in conditions best described as “difficult”. I must remember to buy a better umbrella.

But the Three Horseshoes was, despite the weather - or perhaps because of it, worth the effort. With plenty to drink and eat the bill came to just over £75 per head, pretty reasonable for 2026 and certainly less than you can pay elsewhere for a similar sort of thing. They’re not reinventing the wheel here in Batcombe, they’re just serving a solid, accessible selection of seasonal gastropub dishes that (mussels aside) generally deliver on style and flavour, and if I wouldn’t make a special journey all the way out to rural Somerset to eat here, if I was local and looking for somewhere to shelter on a cold and wet March evening, it would be my first choice. And, admittedly, my only choice. But not a bad choice at all.

7/10

I am never really in my comfort zone talking about regional Chinese cuisine. I have next to no knowledge about the skills or practices involved in making it, the different use of ingredients or techniques that distinguish one region from the next, and I am the last person you should ask if any particular dish is cooked “correctly”.

All that said, having never cooked in a professional kitchen or worked front of house anywhere in my life there’s no good reason I should be pontificating on any other style of food, either. All I can tell you is that I know what I like, and I like Fiery Flavors (yes they spell it the American way, don’t blame me) very much.

The first dish we ate isn’t pictured, because it was already half-finished by the time it arrived on our table and it would be unfair to record that indefinitely on the blog. Let me explain - arriving hungry and cold this cold Friday night in March the very kind (and observant) group on the next table noticed how intensely we were staring at their half-finished plate of chicken with crispy rice cake and offered the remainder to us. It was gorgeous - fiercely hot, packed with numbing Sichuan peppercorns and full of flavour, a lovely bit of crunch from the rice cake added up to a brilliantly rewarding dish. It was a great start.

Wood ear fungus was equally brilliant - again bursting with flavour, with a lovely balance of vinegar and oil, texture came in the form of little bits of peanuts but also, cleverly, chopped coriander stalks which added colour and crunch to what could have otherwise been a bit of a monochrome experience. But the star of the show was of course the fungus, a lovely ingredient treated well.

Next was a dish described as ‘Sliced beef and ox tongue in chilli oil’ on the menu, and was indeed every bit as good as it sounds despite involving not tongue, but tripe. Now that’s absolutely fine by me of course (if I see offal, I order it), but I do wonder how flexible some other customers might have been to having their chosen variety of offal substituted without consultation. Anyway as I say, it was still a fantastic dish, with all of those wonderful Hunanese flavours appearing again.

Roast duck was perhaps the only dish that wasn’t firing on all cylinders but then I’m not sure roast duck is a Hunanese thing - maybe their heart just wasn’t in it. Looking a bit mangled (compare for example with the beautifully presented, and very similarly priced, bird at Shikumen) and with slightly dry flesh, the skin was nice and crispy and seasoned correctly but overall I wouldn’t bother with it again.

Fortunately, from here on Fiery Flavors was nothing but superb. A whole brown crab came dressed in a ginger and spring onion sauce and was deliriously messy fun right until the last knuckled had been picked empty. Underneath was a portion of slippery udon noodles which soaked up the crab sauce and became a notable side in their own right. Also, and I appreciate I wasn’t paying on this occasion, the menu has this listed for under £25, which is insane value for a whole crab anywhere never mind one cooked this well.

Finally, a Hunanese speciality of steamed fish heads with chopped chilli - powerfully spicy, perfectly cooked with an interesting gelatinous texture that brought to mind that Basque dish pil-pil. Despite being more stuffed than a large char siu bao by this point we were very reluctant to stop eating until every last bit of cheek and collar had been found and consumed. Alas, we weren’t completely successful but we didreallywell (our servers kindly told us).

Ah yes - a word on the service. Our waitress took absolutely no prisoners when correcting our cackhanded and unbalanced ordering and we absolutely loved her for it. When we tried to order the wrong sauce with the crab, she corrected us. When we asked if we needed any rice, she said ‘no, have noodles with the crab’. It was like a crash course in ordering Hunanese food, and believe me, I absolutely needed it. If you’re anything like me and might be put off regional Chinese food for fear of ordering the wrong thing, just make sure you get a front of house experience like this - it made the whole evening even more of a joy. Perhaps she should have talked us out of ordering the duck, but nobody’s perfect.

After going through the menu bit by bit, and not counting those gifted bits of chilli chicken, I think our food bill would have come to £44.10 per person without service, which I’m sure you’ll agree for a meal involving whole brown crab and giant bighead carp (I think that’s what they said it was) is a hell of a bargain in London in 2026. And yes I know this was an invite so as ever, take any mention of service with a pinch of salt, but that aspect really made the evening.

We have, I’m told, an influx of discerning Chinese students into London over the last few years to thank for the relatively recent explosion in brilliant regional Chinese restaurants. It’s a cliche that if a Chinese restaurant is full of Chinese people than it’s very likely to be good, and though this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, it invariably is. Fiery Flavors is already popular with expats and others alike, because it’s reasonably priced, exciting and - I presume - deeply authentic. As I said before, on that last point, I couldn’t tell you for sure. But I know what I like.

9/10

I was invited to Fiery Flavours and didn’t see a bill. But it would have come to about £44.10 + service without drinks.

First of all, apologies - to Dover Street Counter and readers of this blog alike - for the atrocious state of the photos in this post. What’s strange is that I don’t remember the lighting in the room being particularly subdued - each generously spaced table had a decent spotlight on it, and I could read the menu clearly enough, but for whatever reason they’ve all turned out looking like they were served at the bottom of the sea. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like regular readers will expect world-class food photography, but they deserve better than this. Even in the one photo taken under more normal lighting conditions, of the front window signage, I’ve managed to capture an overflowing bin in the reflection.

So maybe the lighting might be more camera-friendly in the main long bar area, but I was actually pretty glad we ended up on our own table and not sat cheek-to-jowl with fellow punters. Sometimes I like eating at a bar but it has to come with the correct amount of personal space - if I feel in danger of being poked in the ribs when the person next to me cuts up their steak, that’s not fun. Far better to have a bit of space to stretch out and relax to enjoy my ice-cold martini - no nicer way of starting a Saturday lunchtime - and a bowl of nicely seasoned homemade potato chips with a refreshing sour cream spritzed with lime juice.

Disco fries - chips with mayo and chilli and a few other toppings - veered dangerously close to the kind of thing you can order in your local ‘Spoons, but were just about lifted above this level by virtue of the chips themselves being of elegant shape and perfectly crisp and greaseless.

Summer rolls - a token Vietnamese dish on an otherwise largely Italian-American menu - could in lesser hands have been a bit of a disaster, but they actually turned out very nicely. The peanut sauce was thick and salty and satisfying and the rolls themselves came with a fantastic crunch of supremely fresh coriander. Obviously they cost half the price (and are just as good) at my local Vietnamese place but this is Mayfair not Lavender Hill.

Snacks out of the way we got stuck into our mains, in my case a huge French Dip sandwich. A delicate crunchy baguette loaded with strips of nicely rare roast beef, topped with rich ragu and bound - a very clever move - with funky Taleggio cheese, it was a very satisfying Italian-American fusion affair, a real treat to eat. The accompanying gravy “dip” was perhaps a little thin and underpowered, but still just about worked - fortunately the sandwich itself was around to do most of the heavy-lifting taste-wise. And at £19, in Mayfair, for all that beef and cheese, it was something of a bargain.

I didn’t try the famous Dover Street Counter cheeseburger but was told it was “very good” - it certainly looked the part, with its nice low profile for easy eating, and I could easily detect the aroma of properly charred beef.

A side of un-Discofied fries - which I did steal some of - showed that fries this good don’t need messing about with; they stayed crunchy right to the bottom of the cup. Broccoli had been aggressively grilled so had a good amount of crunchy charred bits, but was otherwise fairly unremarkable. Maybe I’m just not a huge fan of broccoli but I can see why it needed to be on the menu to counteract all the cheese and meat elsewhere.

Desserts, despite being fortified by a glass of Vecchia Romagna, ended up being a bit disappointing. I’ve often noticed a tendency for kitchens to focus all their energies on the savoury courses and run out of interest and imagination when it comes to pudding. It occasionally also happens the other way round, when a place has a great pastry section and the mains are a bit lifeless, but this is more unusual. The Dover Street Counter apple pie may have been a cheeky tribute to the McDonald’s version but needs to be a lot nicer - and prettier - to justify being five times the price, and the chocolate choux - incredible for something containing chocolate, cream and pastry - somehow conspired to be bland and boring. Cheesecake was pretty decent though, so there is that.

It’s easy to see why Dover Street Counter is popular - it pulls off the same trick that Bob Bob Ricard are so good at, serving friendly, familiar comfort food done (mostly) well, in glamorous Mayfair surroundings and doesn’t charge the earth for the privilege. This, of course, is to be admired. And despite my grumbling about desserts and a slightly distracted service (wine glasses left empty for long periods with the bottle squirrelled away somewhere out of sight) I can probably recommend the place, even with the caveat that, of course, Bob Bob Ricard do it better. And although we all left happy enough (and £79pp lighter, not completely unreasonably), I think if I wanted this kind of thing again I’d most likely end up there. I think they have better lighting, too.

7/10

Sablé occupies the handsome 1930s public house that, most recently at least, was home to Neil Rankin’s Smokehouse. I spent many happy times in Smokehouse back in the day but such are the fickle whims and fashions of London food that, in 2026, low-n-slow American BBQ seems strangely dated. I don’t know why this is - they’re still very keen on it in America, as far as I can tell.

Anyway the site now offers traditional French bistro food, which as all the restaurant spods out there will tell you, and as popularised by Bouchon Racine and Josephine Bouchon, is what we should all be eating these days - that American BBQ rubbish is so 2018. And despite very clearly being London on the outside, inside they’ve done their best to soften the hardest edges of the pub decor although this largely consists of setting the lighting so low it’s occasionally hard to tell where on earth you are at all. So yes, my photos are rubbish. Sorry.

Things all started brightly enough. A French martini (not really French at all, invented in NYC in the 80s) was nicely presented and though quite heavy on the pineapple was still a very easy drink. Judging by the people crowding around the bar area, in fact, Sablé are quite happy for you to just pop in for a drink without committing to a full meal, something I always appreciate in a place. I was somewhat distraught to learn that thirsty hikers that have been used to popping into uber-gastropub the Sportsman in Kent for a livener before heading on to Whitstable have recently started being told they must have booked a sit-down meal, and can no longer perch on the bar with a pint and a packet of crisps. Which seems as stupid as it is sad.

Back in Islington though, starters launched with this magnificent baked soufflé, confidently risen and powerfully cheesy. Thinking about it now I don’t think I’ve ever had a genuinely disappointing cheese soufflé, which either means they’re quite easy to cook (which is possible) or that I have a very low bar for anything involving baked cheese (which is far more likely).

Steak tartare was ordered not so much for the main ingredient as for the accompanying pommes allumettes, because for whatever reason matchstick fries are still a bit of a rarity in London. And it’s just as well that the allumettes were as good as they were - greaseless, crunchy, seasoned correctly and with a lovely potato flavour - because the steak itself was quite astringent, the mustard (I assume) dressing rather overpowering the supposedly aged beef. But it was still just about worth paying £13 for those fries.

It was about this point, though, that things at Sablé started to dip off a bit, at least from my point of view. It’s not particularly Sablés fault that I had watched a perfect Bouillabaisse being cooked on Culinary Class Wars the week before, and it’s unrealistic of me to expect a version made in North London to live up to the standards of an internationally famous cooking show. But even if I’m not an expert in what Bouillabaisse should taste like, thanks to French Papa I know at least what it should look like, and it certainly ain’t this weird pile of textureless mystery fish and potato draped in a thick, pallid sauce. It was just weird.

In fairness, some of the other mains did turn out slightly better. Boeuf bourguignon was probably the best of the rest, with chunks of nice moist beef soaked in a thick, salty, savoury sauce. And given that a good boeuf bourguignon is presumably at least as difficult to cook as a bouillabaisse, we need to give them credit for that.

But halibut, though better than the bouillabaisse, was still not great and suffered from more underseasoning, especially in the layer of white beans underneath. And a side of chips - sorry, pommes frites were bland and cardboardy, genuinely pretty unpleasant. And if you’re a French bistro and can’t get chips right, what are you even for?

I didn’t try the rotisserie chicken or a few other bits and pieces of sides and snacks but to be honest, perhaps if they had looked a little more exciting I might have made more of an effort. The chicken is above, looking, well, as you might expect, but the one genuinely lovely bit of chicken I’ve eaten in the last few months cost fully £12 less per bird. Say no more.

The problem with this kind of food is that it has to be done perfectly, or it all just falls apart. People moan about the prices at the Bouchons (Racine and Josephine) but French bistro food all hinges on excellent ingredients cooked well, and if any element is off, it’s a disaster. Tarte tatin - one of my favourite desserts when done well - was all poached apple and very little crunchy caramelised pastry, and as any tatin fancier will tell you, it really should be the other way round. Madeleines were a bit dry but otherwise OK. Save your money and get them fresh out of the oven at St John, is my advice.

So with one or two exceptions, I’m afraid Bistro Sablé is Not Very Good. A bill of £100pp with booze is not unreasonable if the food had been better - and indeed would have been a genuine bargain if it had been somewhere near good - but for that weird gloopy “bouillabaisse” and cardboard fries and the clumsy, flabby tarte tatin it’s nowhere near value. The good news is that if this style of food is your thing, there are much better places to try it even if you might have to shell out a few extra quid. As for this particular site in North London, if their heart’s not in the French thing I wonder if they might consider trying their hand at American BBQ? I hear it’s all the rage over there.

5/10

This time last year, potential sites for an upcoming work lunch had been whittled down to a choice between Lita in Marylebone, or Dorian in Notting Hill. Both places, on the face of it, looked fairly similar - a crowd-pleasing list of modern bistro dishes with an emphasis on premium seafood and seasonal game, and both had received fairly unanimously positive reviews. Purely because Lita was a bit easier to get to, we ended up there, and, well, didn’t really enjoy it very much. Good food at blisteringly high prices, served (at their own pace) to a cramped dining room with tables way too small to work in a sharing dishes concept, it left us all pretty underwhelmed. A week after our visit, they received a Michelin star. The inspectors probably had a better table than we did.

Anyway, more recently came an opportunity to see if Dorian could fare any better. And after being shown to a nice big table with plenty of elbow room they were already beating the Other Place on that side of things. God knows it’s hard enough to make a living running a restaurant these days - I know this, honestly I do - but the fact is, if you try and make a few extra quid by squeezing shitty tables into your restaurant and you put people in them, they’re going to have a shitty time and not come back. See above.

Back to Dorian though and this “Dorian Martini”, ice cold and I think involving vodka and sake which worked pretty well. I’m also fully on board with this trend of floating a blob of oil on top of the drink - I think this might have been olive oil but not sure - which adds a nice aesthetic touch.

First bits of food to arrive were these snacks - “steak and sea urchin rosti”, ordered enthusiastically by those of us who have tried sea urchin before, and I have to say rather insistently ordered for those of our party who hadn’t. Sea urchin, depending on where it’s from, can run the full gamut from fresh and buttery and clean to funky and fishy and briny, and these were sort of right in the middle of that scale, so a perfect example for the uninitiated. In this case, the smoky chargrilled beef made an excellent surf and turf combination with the uni and the potato element grounded the whole thing perfectly. There were probably a gazillion other things going on here but the point is the main ingredients were great, and so it all fell into place.

Next to arrive - even before the remainder of the snacks - was a starter of veal sweetbreads and Landes chicken, all with a superb light crisp coating and dressed in what they called “ranch dressing” but which tasted remarkably like a poshed-up version of that gloopy orange chicken sauce you get in cheap takeaways in the US. I don’t mean to make this sound like a criticism - I loved it - it’s just funny how some flavour associations work in your mind.

After two weeks in southern California I wasn’t about to order a taco for my first lunch back but this beef taco with squid was apparently “excellent”. Looks pretty as well, doesn’t it.

“Skewered rabbit, red prawn and Bordelaise” was easily one of the highlights of the meal, and (spoiler alert) everything that followed was at least very good. Carefully jointed and grilled portions of tender rabbit were skewered alongside plump, sweet prawns and finished with a little bone-in morsel of rabbit which was like nibbling on a tiny chicken wing. If I am ever in the area again, I’m going to see if I can just perch at the bar with a martini and order one of these - it’s one of those dishes that’s so inventive and cleverly made and enjoyable to eat that it lives in the memory long after the meal itself is over.

Almost as good (and that’s still a huge compliment) was this wild duck, roasted to tender pink with a nice dark, salty skin and served with a mushroom and clementine sauce. I liked everything about this dish, including (either by usual practice or because it was being shared between 4 people) the fact it was neatly divided into four and that they’d left the feet on. A bit like bone-in steaks, it may be entirely psychological but I always think game tastes better when they leave the feet on.

Venison - like all the other red meat, grilled to a good dark char - had bags of flavour (not always a given with venison) and came with a little bonus pickled sardine. A lot of the dishes at Dorian are not just rewarding to eat and nicely constructed, they often surprise with some little extra unexpected element or unusual combination - the sea urchin and steak, for example, or the “orange chicken” dressing with the sweetbreads.

We were now into the mains, and there’s nothing more Main than a giant plate of bone-in ribeye. I hardly need to do anything other than show you the picture above, but yes it tasted every bit as good as it looked - slightly yellowy, funky aged fat sat next to perfectly cooked beef and all under a thin, crisp, dark crust. The crust was almost the most notable thing about the dish - crunchy and salty and slightly bitter, very much in the Peter Luger’s / US style of fierce direct heat and strong textures rather than the increasingly more trendy genteel French butter-basted and pan-roasted. Now I have a lot of time for both approaches, and I imagine that the bitter charcoal hit from this steak wouldn’t be to everyone’s tastes, but I absolutely loved it. And the rest of the table did, too.

Iberico pork neck with langoustines was the second standout highlight dish of the lunch, and - probably not coincidentally - was another surf and turf arrangement. The pork melted in the mouth like only the very best Iberico can do, and was drenched in a reduced jus so good that the plate was scraped clean. But as well as the giant lango tails with the pork, the side of curried carrots (not pictured, sorry) came with pieces of unbelievably lovely extracted claw meat, so that everyone got to try every bit of the animal. Technically perfect (the lango tails were moist and smoky and popped out of their shells in one satisfying chunk), surprising and generous of flavour, it was another example of the best of this kitchen’s abilities. We couldn’t stop talking about how good it was, although a bottle of excellent Côtes du Rhône (in remarkably light and delicate glasses) probably helped with that too.

We were having so much fun by this point we never wanted to leave, so obviously attention soon turned to desserts. So after a round of dessert-y drinks (above is a Hazelnut Old Fashioned, a fabulous thing indeed) we have chocolate souffle-tart hybrid thing with Guinness ice cream, a rather esoteric take on a rhum baba which substituted the usual alcohol-soaked sponge for small chunks of rum-flavoured biscuit, a doughnut with peanut butter and quince and through a process of elimination I think that last one is a salted milk ice cream and blue corn nachos. It certainly wasn’t either the pistachio ice cream and caviar (£39) or the vanilla ice cream with white truffle (£39) - we may have been on expenses but we still valued our jobs.

I have struggled with something ever since our glorious lunch at Dorian came to an end and we spilled out onto the cold Notting Hill streets last week. Objectively, Dorian and Lita are doing very similar things. Neither are cheap, both have a Michelin star (whatever you might think about the significance of that - it seems to mainly indicate the prices they charge these days) and the menu of seasonal premium British ingredients treated in exciting and intelligent ways looks, on paper at least, like it could have been written by the same team. So why did I feel so unwelcome and cramped at harried at Lita and like we could have spent another 6 hours at Dorian and the staff wouldn’t have blinked an eye?

It’s all to do with the room and the service, and I suppose those are both two sides of the same issue. At this level, and at these prices, you do not want to feel like the management are trying to squeeze you for every last penny and that your custom is just a means to an end. We managed to spend even more per head at Dorian (£207.50) than Lita (£170.78) but despite this, Dorian was just infinitely better value simply down to the experience we had. Every dish from the kitchen spoke of a group of people enjoying what they do and wanting nothing more than to spread that joy to others, but crucially at Dorian that also extended to the atmosphere and service in the room, and that made all the difference in the world. Get saving, then, is my advice. Because Dorian is worth every penny.

9/10

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If it sometimes feels like Liverpool is short on quota of restaurants of sufficient quality befitting a city of its size (something that, fortunately, is increasingly improving), then it can never be said that there are a shortage of beautiful buildings to potentially host them in. The School for the Blind on Hardman Street is a stunning spot - an elegantly proportioned, early Victorian honeyed stone building borne of the golden age of Industrial Age philanthropy. It’s an absolutely beautiful thing, and if nothing else it would be worth visiting Barnacle just to thank them for taking on custody of this place and not having it turn into another awful chain bar or hair salon.

And once inside, first impressions were good. Staff were friendly and (initially) efficient, bringing us a nice cold martini (not a frozen glass but you can’t have everything) and another very pleasant long drink involving gin and basil (”Barnacle Bill”). A third cocktail advised “Allow 11 minutes” but was worth the wait, a rum and coconut concoction called Lost at Sea which came all frothed up with egg white like a big cold soufflé.

In the meantime, we were served genuinely lovely pickled oysters with buttermilk and dill. There was a time when I wouldn’t entertain anything happening to oysters apart from being opened and served raw, but it turns out that when a good restaurant poaches - or batters and fries, or pickles - the things they can be just as enjoyable in a different way. The pickling process here was very subtle, just enough to take that very ocean-y, briny edge off and replace it with something smoother and cleaner.

Miso Scotch egg had a good loose texture, nice crisp coating and the yolks were timed perfectly, which are pretty much the only things you need to get right in a good Scotch egg.

The only vaguely disappointing snack were the “cheesy chips”, a slightly clumsy pile of skin-on potato wedges and melted cheddar, with the odd sliver of crisp Jerusalem artichoke. Not inedible, just a bit uninteresting and the kind of thing you might expect to find on the menu of one of the aforementioned awful chains. You know the ones, I’m sure.

Snacks and cocktails despatched, we were onto the starters. New Liverpool chowder was a rich, comforting mixture of thick dairy, smoked haddock, clams, potato and sea herbs which was a real highlight. Crisp fried potato skins, Parkers Arms-style, provided crunch and it looked the part with its drizzle of dill oil, but the broth itself was the real star here - everything you could possibly want from a chowder. Everyone who tried it loved it.

Fried chicken tenders topped with Avruga “caviar” was perhaps a slightly less ambitious dish but just as enjoyable in its own way, with greaseless fingers of crisp batter containing lovely white chicken meat, topped with creme fraiche and a generous dollop of the Avruga. It’s very easy to make chicken tenders bland and cloying, but these were very good.

Then, we waited for the mains. And waited. And waited. And after about 45 minutes, they arrived. My own venison was good - the meat itself would have benefitted from a bit more of a crust (or in fact any crust at all, the fillets had the consistency of gammon although they tasted nice) but the accompanying sauces were top-notch, both the glossy ‘chocolate peppercorn sauce’ and the little blobs of parsnip (I think) puree. Fried shallots on top added the crunch that the venison lacked, and kale did its usual job of soaking up the rest of the sauce. Yes, it wasn’t perfect, but I still enjoyed this dish - more went right than wrong.

Cod was a little bland despite some potentially good strong flavours - a shame as with a heavier hand with the salt it could have been really impressive. The fish itself was good quality though, and all the accompaniments were cooked properly, it just all needed a bit more attention to seasoning to really shine.

Ironically, flat iron steak had the opposite problem to the cod - it was cooked and seasoned properly and had a good flavour, but was tough and stringy and quite difficult to eat. Still, could be worse - and the chips were very nice.

For desserts, we were relocated to the noisy, crowded bar because, we were bluntly informed, “we need your table back”. Don’t spend 45 minutes bringing out the main courses, then, is my advice, because it was hardly our fault everything took so long. They didn’t even seem that apologetic about it, just needed us out of the way. So I’m afraid our desserts (objectively pretty nice, a rum and banana sticky toffee pudding, and a Guinness and chocolate cake topped with blue cheese and mascarpone) suffered in the context of wanting to get out of that bar, where the music was so loud normal conversation was impossible. And did they take anything off the bill for our trouble? Did they buggery.

So there’s plenty to enjoy about Barnacle, and lots of things to admire. The food itself, for example, is well worth the prices they’re asking for it, and with a closer attention to service detail the place has the potential to be another mid-budget crowdpleaser in the realm of Wreckfish or Belzan. But I’m pretty sure neither Wreckfish or Belzan would make you feel like an inconvenience for a mistake of their making - an unforgivable misstep for a restaurant with ambitions like Barnacle. And I’m not going to break the habit of a lifetime and score the food and service and ambiance separately, because none of these elements exist in a vacuum - a restaurant is a product of all things working side by side. Can I recommend Barnacle? Right now, just about. Maybe. A bit. But there’s certainly room for improvement.

6/10

In an ideal world this would be a post about the ‘proper’ upstairs restaurant at the Hart, a serious (though not by all accounts stuffy) dining room serving seasonal British food in the heart of Marylebone village. Unfortunately, due to a combination of my own lack of organisation and the wild popularity of the Hart (despite it only being open a couple of months), the ‘proper’ dining room was full, and so on this particular Saturday lunchtime we settled for a series of the Hart bar ‘snacks’ served to our cozy, Christmassy corner table downstairs.

I say ‘snacks’ in inverted commas because the Hart team (also behind the brilliant Pelican in Notting Hill) do not do anything so straightforward as bar snacks as you might know them elsewhere. At first glance they may look like familiar stuff - pork scratchings, cheese straws, pork pie - but they’re all made in-house in the same kitchen that’s churning out the full A La Carte upstairs, and are level above what you might expect for the pretty reasonable prices they’re charging.

These are the cheese straws for example - warm (probably not baked to order but at least nicely reheated) and crispy and gooey and topped with shaved gruyere (I think) - three giant pieces for £6.

Radishes were crisp and full of life and although I perhaps would have preferred the usual salt dip than the mayo-mustard (actually, ideally both), they were still extremely easy to enjoy. I wonder if one day we’ll ever see the giant tennis ball-sized radishes in this country that I fell in love with in Seville a couple of years back? I’m keeping my eyes open.

The pork pie did seem like quite good value on paper (well, chalkboard) until you realise you’re only served half of one. But it was a very good pie, with just enough salty, savoury jelly to season without being too much, and came with a dollop each of powerful English mustard and chutney.

The Hart make their own pork scratchings too (of course) and these were distressingly addictive - just the right amount of crunch without being tooth-shattering, enough soft fat without being sickly, and again seasoned perfectly. These disappeared almost as far as anything else on the table.

Sardines on toast came in the form of a kind of smooth whipped paté, evenly spread on excellent toasted sourdough. A fairly straightforward thing I suppose, but fish on toast in its many forms is one of my favourite things in the entire world (see also L’Escala anchovies on tomato-garlic bread) so I devoured this enthusiastically.

Next, chicken liver, a wonderfully cheffy silky-smooth version which spread like butter and tasted many times more rich and indulgent than its price point (£11) suggested. Toast was super thin and crunchy and melba-like and it also came with some very nice pickled pear (I think it was) chutney. No reusing of house chutneys in different dishes at the Hart, thank you very much.

And then finally the main event - something the Americans might call a loose meat sandwich but which the Hart call a ‘mince roll’. A giant mound of gooey, salty, beefy rubble spilled out of and soaked through a toasted brioche bun, making the eating of it a rather messy but ultimately hugely rewarding process. When Quality Chop started doing their mince on toast back in the day I had optimistically assumed it would be the start of a new mince revolution, but I think it still feels to most people like too low-rent an addition to a modern British menu. Well, I love it, and I love the Hart mince rolls.

This wasn’t an invite, but I was very kindly treated to this lunch and didn’t see a bill. But with a couple of pints each (the beer list is good - we went for Deya Steady Rolling Man) and a mince roll each (I was hardly about to share, now, was I) I imagine the total would have come to around £140, so about £47 each - perfectly reasonable for a good couple of hours entertainment on a Saturday lunchtime. And the upstairs menu seems equally good value - starters £17 and under, no mains over £28 (not even the steak) - it’s no wonder the place is popular.

The cliché always used to be that there were no good gastropubs in London and that you generally had to travel out into the countryside for this kind of food without paying a fortune. Of course, it was never quite that black and white - the Drapers Arms has been a little slice of the countryside in Islington for many years, ditto the Red Lion and Sun, and more recently the Baring (Islington), the Audley and the Barley Mow (both Mayfair) have added themselves to the kind of places you can drop in for a pint of something interesting and a carefully crafted menu of modern British snacks without having to remortgage your house. And so welcome to Marylebone, then, the Hart - may London’s gastropub tradition long keep evolving and maturing.

8/10

The tradition of exciting, regional SE Asian food appearing above or behind otherwise unassuming pubs in London is alive and well. The first time I encountered such a thing was all the way back in 2011 at the Heron in Paddington, where you could demolish fiercely authentic laab ped and tom yum soup while downstairs oblivious locals sipped on pints of Stella and ate crisps. More recently, Khun Pakin Thai set up shop in the Endurance in Hammersmith, serving happy ex-pats and Thai diaspora (and the occasional, stupidly overconfident white Londoner) food so full of fire and flavour it could make you see the future.

And now here’s PSV (for the life of me I can’t figure out what the letters stand for - if anyone knows please do share), a Laotian café tucked above the Crown and Cushion pub on Lower Marsh in Waterloo. Now I’ve never been to Laos, so I can’t comment definitively on the authenticity or otherwise of PSV, but certainly the impression I get from this charming little minimalist room, through the friendly and attentive service, to the blindingly brilliant food they serve, is in its way just as authentically Laotian as the weird, dark room downstairs sparsely populated with Americans drinking bad Guinness is an authentic south bank tourist pub.

Sticking to the ‘Laos’ section of the menu, we ordered a few things that sounded interesting (which was most of it, but, as is my weakness, I steered towards anything involving offal) and knocked back Singha beers - the only alcohol on the upstairs menu - while we waited. I did notice a few other people bringing up drinks from downstairs, but I’m not sure if that was officially sanctioned BYO behaviour or they just got lost. Either way, beer seems far more appropriate a match with this kind of food than cheap Pinot Grigio.

First to arrive was the duck laab, and instantly we were smitten. This generous (as you’d hope for £23.50) pile of minced duck, gizzards and liver, shot through with garlic, chilli, lime and fish sauce was as perfect an introduction to the place as you could have hoped - the kind of thing you could really imagine being served on the streets of Vientiane (probably). It’s a miracle just how much flavour they managed to get out of these otherwise pretty humble ingredients - each mouthful was a joy.

And from here on, they could do no wrong. This is tup varn- sliced pig’s liver (look, it was my birthday so I may have had an inflated influence over the amount of offal ordered) mixed with ground roasted rice, lime juice, fish sauce and a crunchy mix of fresh herbs and onion. It came with steamed rice, and the laab came with sticky rice - my advice is don’t order extra rice, you won’t need it.

These are sai oua, spicy pork sausages, and my god they’re good. I’d be predisposed to enjoy these just by virtue of the fact they’d gone to the effort of making them, from scratch, in their own kitchens but a delicate casing burst with a delightful snap to give forth herby, soft, rich sausage meat that could clearly only have come from a skilled, loving hand. A spicy tomato dip complimented them nicely.

Next, naem kao, a “famous” (their words, but who are we to argue) Lao rice salad containing ham, pork skin, egg, the ubiquitous lime juice and fish sauce, and - interestingly - paprika. Served inside a bowl of iceberg lettuce, topped with fresh herbs and chillies, it was exactly the kind of salad we wanted to compliment the liver and sausage elsewhere - ie. one that contained yet more pig - and, like everything else, it was demolished in record time.

The bill for 3 people, with 2 beers each and including the 10% service (which is all they asked for), came to just under £40 a head, a bit of a steal really for 2025 even if at the back of your mind is the sad knowledge that a decade ago or so the bill might have come to half that. But hey, we are where we are and to be able to eat this food, this beautiful, exciting food cooked with heart and skill and care for this amount of money, it still feels like a blessing.

It was all so good, in fact, that a week later we found ourselves there again, demolishing more plates of those incredible sausages and this time adding in tum lao, green papaya salad (sweet, sour, herby and fresh), laab seen dip (a herby beef tartare mixed with liver and tripe... this could again have been my idea) - absolutely superb, and tom khem, a rich, slow-cooked pork stew with a hardboiled egg which came with the most incredibly addictive fish sauce and green chilli dip.

So yes, the tradition of exciting, authentic South East Asian food setting up shop in unassuming London pubs is alive and well. And just like the trailblazers before it mentioned above, PSV is a shining ambassador for this cuisine, an authentic slice of Loas in Lower Marsh. My only slight reservation about writing about it is that once the word gets out it about this 20-odd seater restaurant it could very quickly be impossible to get a table. But hey, that’s your problem, not theirs. They deserve all the success they can get.

9/10

Lots of potentially very well-respected global cuisines have an unenviable, constant uphill battle against the enshittification of their brand by High Street UK. If your only exposure to Mexican food is Las Iguanas, or Zizzi’s for pasta, or Domino’s for pizza, or Nando’s for... whatever-the-hell Nando’s are trying to do, then you can be excused (though perhaps not completely forgiven) for thinking the cuisines in question don’t have much going for them. I’m not completely blameless on this front, either - until I went to the US and Mexico I wasn’t that interested in Mexican food. Now I’m utterly obsessed with it.

The point is, it’s worth reminding yourself that Zizzi’s is only a pasta restaurant in the same way that a Pot Noodle is a plate of linguine alle vongole and that whatever you might think about Wasabi or Itsu (and they are nowhere near the worst of the high street chains, in fact they’re not even the worst high street Japanese (*cough* Wagamama *cough*)), Japanese food, and sushi in particular, has the potential to be utterly magical. And with that in mind, let me introduce you to Kokin.

In the bright, beautiful and comfortable space that used to be Allegra (of which RIP of course, but chef Patrick Powell is now a tOne Club Row where I believe he’s doing even better) now sits an ambitious sushi+ restaurant. “Sushi+” is a phrase I’ve just invented now, meaning somewhere that does mainly sushi, but also a few other bits and pieces. There’s probably already a word for restaurants like this, but I’m too lazy to look it up.

These kinds of places can often overwhelm with far too many menu options, but Kokin by and large keeps things simple. There’s a page or two of tempting small dishes, some tempura and grilled options, and then a good healthy selection of sashimi and nigiri involving plenty enough rare and hard-to-get ingredients (conger eel, sea urchin, otoro) to get any sushi enthusiast’s pulse racing. We started with this utterly beautiful assorted starter platter of oyster with “apple-smoked celeriac puree” and something called “nabansu jelly”, which I couldn’t quite figure out but seemed vaguely citrussy, crunchy cubes of fried tofu, mackerel rolls, a gorgeous bowl of rich, expertly-textured chawanmushi just the right balance between floppy and solid, and... one other thing I didn’t try and didn’t write down. It was probably good though.

Instead of the suggested chef’s selection of sashimi, we couldn’t resist going a bit leftfield so ordered otoro, sea urchin and sea bream. All were superb, as good as I’ve had anywhere, but the uni was particularly fresh and buttery and without much of that stale seashore taste (which I realise some people like).

We did, however, go with the chef’s selection of nigiri, which used correctly body-temperature rice - by nowhere means a given at even pretty fancy places, I’m sorry to say. Salmon, akami, chutoro (I think), bream, and squid were all just about as perfect as you can imagine, lightly brushed with nikiri and worth every bit of the £27 (so just over £5 a pop).

Actually, this is probably a good time to talk about value. Obviously, as a top-end Japanese restaurant in a 5-star hotel, Kokin was never going to be cheap. And as a long-time London resident depressingly used to paying way over the odds for mediocre food, perhaps my expectations for what I might get for my money here were slightly on the low side. But honestly, I have paid way, way more for far less accomplished food, and alongside the beautiful theatrical flower-arrangement presentations and the friendly and attentive service, it all added up to, if not exactly a bargain, then certainly a more than acceptable return.

Anyway back to the food. We were now onto the larger dishes and this tuna collar was utterly brilliant. Gently marinated in ponzu, expertly chargrilled to get a gentle dark crust but still keep the tuna flesh inside pink and soft, it was one of the greatest tuna dishes I think I can remember eating in my life - worth the trip to Stratford on its own. I was quite unprepared for how good this was, and I think if I ever went back to Kokin - and I very much hope I do - I’d probably order one just for myself. Sadly, I had to share this beauty.

Next, miso black cod which I note isn’t on the current website menu which at least shows a pleasing willingness to chop and change things depending on what’s good and available. This was also superb - perhaps not quite as life-changing as the tuna but still extremely enjoyable, with a bright white flesh and delicate ponzu (I think, again) dressing.

Then a new experience for me -Amadai Matsukasa Yaki, an elaborate and difficult (by all accounts, hence why you so rarely see it here) process involving carefully ladling hot oil over a tilefish, which puffs up the scales and turns it into a lovely collection of soft seafood textures. This seems to have been served with a selection of delicately tempura’d vegetables which didn’t appear on the menu so, as I say, I get the impression the offering at Kokin is pretty fluid - as all the best places are.

And that was all we ordered in round one, and would have easily been enough to have us skipping home our separate ways with a smile on our faces, but we were having so much fun we didn’t want our lunch to end, so we ordered this pretty little fan of “olive wagyu” short rib. Now I have seen “olive wagyu” before on menus, for many, many times more than we paid for this plate, so either there are grades of olive wagyu I am not aware of, or somehow they’ve got hold of a job lot of the stuff at a discount. Or they stole it. Either way, it was beautiful, melt-in-the-mouth stuff, well worth £36.

And then finally, a selection of desserts presented in a kind of shelving wheel. There was some kind of pickled pear I think, and a green matcha cake, but I don’t think you’d really come here for the desserts. Their strengths, and they are many, lie elsewhere.

The bill, for 3 people, came to £143 each. This is not cheap, but again - this is some of the best Japanese food I’ve had in London, and if you have a quick scan of the prices in other places doing uni and amadai and otoro, I’m pretty sure you’ll find what Kokin are charging is more than reasonable. Also, that figure includes two bottles of £48 fizz, so if you went a bit more careful on the booze front you’d spend even less.

But you shouldn’t just go to Kokin because it’s one of the best value high-end Japanese restaurants in London. You should go to Kokin - and you really should go to Kokin - because it’s one of the best Japanese restaurants in London at all, in one short(ish) lunchtime reminding me and a couple of friends just how good this kind of stuff is when done well, by people who understand the brief and are singularly equipped with skills to deliver it. The room, the service, the spectacular views over east London from the 7th floor, that’s all a lovely bonus. But even if it was served in a dark basement for twice the price, Kokin would still get my vote. That’s how bloody good it is.

9/10

It’s often very difficult to stand out from the crowd in Restaurant London, especially when - as in Firestarter’s case at least - you appear to be serving the same kind of live-fire, internationally-ambiguous, ingredient-led menu that began to pop up all over the place after Acme Fire Cult showed there was a market for it. If this sounds cynical, it’s not meant to be - everyone needs to make a living, and deciding to serve the kind of food you know people want is just basic common sense.

What separates the wild-farmed wheat from the chaff, though, is whether or not your live-fire, internationally-ambiguous, ingredient-led food is attempting not just to ape the success of somewhere else but to genuinely impress in their own right. Sure, superficially the menu at Firestarter seems very familiar, certainly to this particular jaded food blogger who has seen this kind of thing at pubs and markets and food courts all around the city. But as soon as the crab doughnuts arrived, soft, sweet buns containing a generous amount of white and brown crab meat spiked with chilli, I was reminded that putting crab doughnuts on your menu is one thing; quite another is making them as confidently as this. And they were great.

Lamb haunch could hardly have been cooked better - crusted from the grill, seasoned perfectly and with just enough of a chew that spoke of a top-quality product, the flavour was incredible - dense and gamey and framed so well by the live fire treatment. Mint chimichurri was generously applied and very nice but the star here was the meat itself, an otherwise cheapish cut of lamb presented at its absolute best.

Sea bream, boned (mainly - we found a couple but it wasn’t a problem) and butterflied, had a dreamy buttery, crispy skin and a meaty, bright white flesh. I think I would have preferred the accompanying dressings to have been in a little pile on the side rather than scattered on top, as without them the beautiful chargrilled flesh of the bream would have really looked at its best. Also, somewhere - presumably as part of the sambal cabe ijo (an Indonesian chutney, apparently) were some incredibly bitter chunks of sour lemon, which seemed a bit out of place. Still, as I say, this was all about the fish, and the fish was everything.

Smash burgers are everywhere these days, and although not quite up there with the best of them (step forward, Whole Beast) this was still hugely enjoyable. May the burger gods strike me down for saying so, but I found the use of gloopy melted cheddar an actual improvement on the usual processed slice, perhaps because it was so hot off the grill it hadn’t had time to cool down and go chalky.

Finally from the savouries, a side of “barbecued baby gem tahini Caesar”. If you think that sounds like a lot going on at once, well, you’re not wrong - but it actually worked rather well, the tahini going well (as it often does) with the crisp, smoky grilled veg. This side was just as much about the range of crunchy, crackly textures as it was about the umami-rich salad, and we polished it off quite happily.

So far so good, but Firestarter had one final trick up its sleeve in the form of “Wagyu Bone Marrow Lemon Thyme Mousse”. Now I don’t know if you’re the kind of person that can see Wagyu Bone Marrow Lemon Thyme Mousse on a menu and not order it, but I am certainly not one of those people, and jumped at the chance to order perhaps the one thing on the Firestarter menu you wouldn’t see anywhere else.

It did not disappoint. If you’d have told me before last week that a lemon-thyme mousse flavoured with bone marrow would be one of my favourite desserts of 2025 then... well, actually I probably would have believed you because I love crazy fusion-offal experiments like this, but it still came as a delightful surprise just how well it worked. At first, you get a very nicely done lemon-thyme mousse, slightly salty and with a pleasant dense texture. Then as it warms up in your mouth the beef appears, not overwhelming or disgusting but a kind of gentle, farmy, earthy memory of a flavour that turns the whole experience up a couple of notches. Very clever stuff, including an almost tobacco-ey smokey pickled pear side, although I wouldn’t describe two small half-bones of mousse as being “for 2 sharing” - I think I could have had 4 of these little buggers to myself.

As I said, I was worried when first looking at the Firestarter menu that it wouldn’t end up doing enough to stand out with the kind of food that’s almost become a shorthand for 2022-2025 London. But the devil is in the detail, and Firestarter really know how to do this stuff. The ‘standards’ (such as they are) like the grilled steaks and the smashburgers are way better than they need to be and well worth the (actually pretty decent) price of admission. But anywhere marrying together bone marrow and lemon mousse needs all the encouragement they can get - this imaginative, surprisingly, wildly successful dessert is one that I will remember for a long time to come. And if I go back - and I probably will, as it’s a part of town I find myself in quite a bit - I hope to find something even more noteworthy.

8/10

I was invited to Firestarter and didn’t see a bill, but the above menu would have cost about £50pp including a bottle of wine. Which I reckon is a bit of a steal.

It’s important to point out about Janda Diner that it’s a very different restaurant at lunchtime than at dinner, and if that you only go for the short small-plates selection in the middle of the day you’re not really getting the full experience. I admit I have only been to Janda Diner once, and it was for lunch, so there’s much more about the place that deserves attention than I can report on. However, Janda impressed in so many different ways at once that I feel duty bound to write about it anyway, as I’m convinced that a return to try the bigger evening menu would only cause me to be even more embarrassingly effusive.

It’s a smallish, bright (at least in the middle of the day it is) and attractively minimalist spot - that’s the first thing you notice about the place. The second thing you notice are the prices - nothing over £7, and an extremely reasonable wine list involving a bottle of sparkling for £35 which we obviously ordered immediately. This is the kind of value that’s so rare in London in 2025 you may reasonably have assumed it had disappeared completely, but here we are anyway browsing a menu that looks like it had been priced back in 2012.

Of course low prices are not the same as value, and none of it would have mattered at all if the food was disappointing but without fail, everything we ate was astonishingly good. First to arrive was this colourful pile of all sorts of vibrantly fresh fruit and veg, involving jackfruit, kholrabi, apple and carrots boosted with tamarind, chilli and lime. It tasted like the bright tropical sun on a plate, and lifted the mood in much the same way.

Next we had these cute little skewers of ayam (chicken - one of the few bits of vocab I remember from a time working in Indonesia), beautifully grilled to tender inside and with delicate flecks of char outside. Spritzed with lime they were simple, attractive and supremely easy to enjoy.

Masak Lemak scallops came with a surprisingly generous amount of seafood for £7, the char grill presumably responsible for the gentle touch of smoke, and topped with a superbly rich and complex turmeric curry. The amount of effort that had gone into everything despite the tiny amount they’re asking for it is quite something.

Sea bream ceviche was, just like everything else, beautiful to look at and a joy to eat. The fish was bouncy and fresh, full of flavour and not overwhelmed by the delicate sour tamarind dressing. Chargrilled pineapple on top added a lovely extra sweet and smoky note too.

You probably don’t need to know anything more about the mackerel than is obvious in the picture above - absolutely expertly cooked to preserve a buttery, crisp skin, the neat fillets of fish came in a clear consommé which had a remarkably powerful sour and savoury flavour. A few slices of okra and herbs added some extra colour and crunch. It cost £7.

We finished with two neat little mouthfuls of Nasi Lemak Bungkus - a fried patty of rice topped with a sambal of cucumber, egg, anchovies and with peanuts for extra texture. For some reason this didn’t turn up on the bill, which I’ve only just noticed, so thank you to Janda Diner if that was intentional and apologies if it wasn’t.

But clearly, an extra £3 per person still wouldn’t have stopped Janda from being an absolute steal. At twice the price, this food would still be worth travelling across town for - an intelligent, vibrant take on modern Malaysian street food that makes you want to jump on a plane to Kuala Lumpur. But at £34 per head - including, remember, that bottle of fizz - it becomes something approaching essential, the kind of place you’ll end up banging on about to every person you meet for weeks after. And as anyone who’s met me in the last few weeks will agree, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

So the only obvious thing to do next is go back for the longer (and, admittedly slightly pricier but I’m sure still top value) dinner menu and discover yet more of the joys of modern Malaysian food. I haven’t been as excited about a small plates restaurant in South London since I stumbled across Chishuru all those years ago. And we all know what happened to them next. So get yourself to Janda as soon as you can, before the rest of the world cottons on. Because right now, this place is a gem.

10/10

I spent most of last month in Spain (see previous post) and although I’m happy enough to be back in cold, wet London town (honest), as the evenings really closed in I was in dire need of a reminder of sunnier times and brighter places. And after scrolling through my holiday photo stream just made me more depressed, I thought I might have more success lifting my spirits with Mediterranean food.

Elephant is a restaurant/pub in a handsome old Victorian building on Lower Clapton Road which, Google Street View tells me, has swapped hands an alarming number of times in the last few years. It is now, though, thanks to part Italian owners, serving a short and attractive menu of snacketti (that’s my word, not theirs), pizzas and secondi, alongside a list of classic cocktails.

So, after a spicy Margarita (Mexico is sunny too) to lift the mood we nibbled on some of those giant bright-green Italian olives and some nice hot house flatbread (it would make sense if it was pizza dough) which came with an interesting homemade butter flavoured with some kind of winter veg. Clever stuff.

These are ox cheek croquettes with anchovy mayo, and were fantastic things indeed, all soft and gooey and beefy inside and with just the right amount of crunchy breadcrumb coating. Ox cheek croquettes in London I’ve found range from superlative (Hawksmoor Bar in Spitalfields in about 2010 that came with a thick, glossy beef jus, never been bettered) to diabolical (a restaurant in Pimlico I’ve long since forgotten the name of where they tasted like dog food and looked like what would happen not long after said dog had finished with them).

Seabass crudo had perhaps an ingredient or two extra than required but the fish was good and it was certainly a colourful if, er, rather rustic presentation.

The one secondi we went for was a giant fillet of excellent cod in breadcrumbs, mainly because we liked the sound of the olive oil mash it came with. Now, obviously there are too many pea shoots - there were some pea shoots and there should ideally, at all times, be none - but they were easily removed and we were left with a very enjoyable dish indeed, the cod flaking beautifully apart.

There was a tendency to put too many things on their house Elephant pizza too - weirdly, and I can’t believe this is me saying this, but it could have done without the anchovy which battled rather hard with the other ingredients. But the tomato sauce was good and the dough was excellent, all fluffy and crisp.

Perhaps my odd slight disappointment comes from one of the chefs here being ex-Manteca, and though I probably should have not expected those kinds of fireworks, there wasn’t a great deal at Elephant that brought to mind the OG (as I believe the kids these days are saying) on Curtain Road. But the atmosphere was still convivial, the staff friendly and efficient, and if I was a local I’m sure I’d have it on the list for an unpretentious evening out. And that’s often more than enough.

7/10

I was invited to Elephant and didn’t see a bill, but I think it would have come to about £70/head.