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

My company are looking for quick service restaurant managers/owners/decision-makers to interview about their jobs. We pay £150 for your time. Sign up here!

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.

Compartir, a restaurant in the seaside village of Cadaqués, has lots going for it. The most obvious thing it has going for it is Cadaqués, a tourist town but not troublingly so, with its own unique identity - bohemian, somewhat eccentric, traditionally popular with artists and writers - and its own architectural style - grey slate walls, irregular oblong cobblestones and whitewashed narrow alleyways decked with bright purple bougainvillea.

The shady courtyard of Compartir makes the most of this unique style and is a lovely place to sit and eat, even if, unlike the majority of the most popular restaurants in town, there’s no sight of the sea. Instead your view is of a tasteful selection of Mediterranean plants and, of course, fellow diners - a well-heeled-looking lot - on pleasingly well-spaced tables.

First thing to arrive on the table was a little house aperitif of orange juice and Campari. It tasted a little subdued - any fresh juice from any number of coffee shops in the area would have had a stronger hit of orange - but was a nice enough gesture given it was free. Alongside were a little row of pillow-shaped crackers dusted with tomato powder, and again they didn’t taste of much considering the effort that had clearly gone into them - the cracker would have been like cardboard on its own, and there wasn’t enough tomato powder - or it wasn’t strongly flavoured enough - to offset the bland cracker.

Fortunately Compartir found its feet with the first course proper, a tuna “cannelloni” (tuna tartare rolled up into a neat tube) surrounded by a colourful and cleverly patterned sauce of olives, capers, various herbs and who knows what else, topped with trout roe. This was genuinely inventive and genuinely lovely, the tuna never overwhelmed by the other flavours on the plate and all the ingredients clearly of very high quality, treated well. This is apparently a Compartir signature dish, and you can really see why - it was a real highlight.

Crab and avocado was very nearly right. Plenty of fresh crab meat (plus a good amount of brown, always nice to see) and exquisitely presented, with dots of what I assume was a very light mayonnaise dancing around a generous dollop of roe. But there was something slightly off-putting about the texture of the avocado - it had been blitzed to within an inch of its life to a strange, characterless, cold avocado-flavoured cream which rather than complimenting the crab just ended up relying on it for seasoning and texture. Also - and I’m quite prepared to admit this is my own personal hill to die on - if you use a particular animal’s form to serve a dish, whether it’s a scallop shell or as in this case a ceramic sea urchin or anything else, it really should contain some element of that animal in the dish itself. And I don’t think there was any sea urchin in this. Or if there was, we couldn’t taste it.

Then we were right back on track with these grilled Roses red prawns. There’s always a risk when you shell out (’scuse the pun) a lot of money (by Spanish standards - in London they’d be three times this price) on top ingredients that any mistakes in the kitchen could render your investment void. These, though, had been treated very well - timed to just under with regards to some of the larger animals but always so that the meat pulled out of the shell in a satisfying single piece, they were beautifully sweet and smoky from the grill, a brushing of chicken jus the perfect extra touch. Well worth the €39.

Then next, roasted scallops with potato and spinach. Plump little slices of sweet scallops alternated with soft potato, topped with spinach, pine nuts and lemon zest (such is the Catalan way) and all of it soaked in a lovely glossy, meaty jus, it was another intelligent, beautifully presented course that showcased just how good this kitchen can be. It would have been the perfect end to the meal.

Because we really, really should have stopped there. In my defence though, “Breaded fried rabbit ribs and artichoke with apple Aioli” sounds like it might be nice, doesn’t it? In my mind I was imagining a painstakingly French-trimmed rack of rabbit ribs, lovingly rolled in herb breadcrumbs, roasted and served sliced into little cute rabbity lollypops. What arrived was essentially fried rabbit bones, with so little meat on them to make the effort of attempting to find some under the opaque breadcrumb coating a distressing chore, none of it seasoned properly and the whole affair feeling like some kind of elaborate practical joke played on gullible foreigners. We pointed out the complete inedibility of this dish to a waitress.

“Ah yes that’s the speciality of the house, we’re famous for it.” she replied. Yes, you should be, I thought, but not in a good way.

“But we can’t eat any of it. How do we know what’s just breaded bone and what’s meat? How do we eat them?”

“You just eat them.” She replied. Then perhaps realising this was less than helpful, added brightly, “You eat the bones. They’re crunchy!”.

Now, I am prepared to believe that somewhere, somehow there is a breaded fried rabbit dish, perhaps even involving bones, that may be worth eating. But to suggest that we should ignore our own dental - and mental - health and attempt to chow down on whole rabbit bones, marrow splintering and cracking in our injured mouths like an urban fox working its way through a discarded box of high street fried chicken, is one of the most absurd things I’ve been asked to consider in all my years eating in restaurants. And I’m in my late 40s. Of course, we sent it back. It still appeared on the bill.

We probably should have kicked up more of a fuss about being charged for rabbit bones we didn’t eat or want, but by this point we just wanted to get the hell out of there and convince ourselves that we weren’t going completely mad. “Did she really suggest we were supposed to eat whole animal bones?”, we kept asking ourselves for the rest of the trip. “Does anyone else eat them? Do they throw in free dental reconstruction work as well?”. We just ended up with more and more questions. I’m not sure any of them will ever be satisfactorily answered.

So, scoring the place is a little bit tricky. When it was good, Compartir was very, very good. And when it was bad, it was life-threatening. So in the end I suppose I’ll have to go for the midpoint between 10 and 1 and hope that if you ever decide to go yourself, you end up only ordering dishes that don’t threaten to put you in hospital. Maybe check with your waitress first, and if anything sounds like it might be a bittoogum-splitting, steer clear. As for me, well, I’ve done it now and don’t feel the need to go back, not with so many other lovely seafood restaurants in that part of the world for a lot less than €60pp. If you need me, I’ll be at the orthodontist.

5/10

The comparisons with my last post won't be immediately obvious, but within the context of their own chosen cuisines Josephine Bouchon and Dalla are doing rather similar things. Both have a very strong and educated sense of what it means to cook French or Italian food. Both do so with skill and flair, showcasing said cuisine at its very best. And - crucially - both leave you wondering why so few other places seem to be able to do this kind of thing so bloody well.

Very like the Chelsea place, as soon as you step inside Dalla you want to stay there. True, tables can be a little bit close together (this is also true of Josephine... sorry I'll stop talking about that restaurant now) but it's a bright, buzzy, attractive little spot that seems absolutely machine-tooled for its job as a neighbourhood restaurant. A tiny open kitchen in the corner fizzes with activity (and seems home to about twice as many chefs as looks comfortable) and the welcome from front of house couldn't be more, well, welcoming.

All of which would mean nothing if the food wasn't any good, but here's the thing - Dalla serves some of the best Italian food I've ever had in London, or in Italy. Dishes which look exciting enough on paper arrive as the absolute very best versions of themselves, and often with a little extra unexpected twist that pushes them to even further greatness. These are Cornish sardines, which I would have been happy enough with just simply grilled whole, but at Dalla they're meticulously deboned and served warm fresh off the grill with a lovely sharp garlic vinaigrette.

Steak tartare avoided many of the pitfalls of lesser versions by being properly seasoned and containing nice big chunks of soft lardo. But the unexpected twist in this dish was the addition of toasted walnuts - and very good walnuts too, not the horrid bitter ones you get in British supermarkets - providing an extra texture and buttery nuttiness. It all added up to one of the better raw beef dishes I've enjoyed in years.

Next up, a silky-smooth slice of excellent sheep's milk ricotta alongside a deeply-flavoured caponata. It still seems strange, as a meat-eater, describing a vegan dish (I mean the caponata, not the cheese of course) as deeply-flavoured but as is often said, the best vegan dishes are vegan because they're supposed to be made like that, and aren't just vegetarian or meat or fish dishes with the dairy or protein taken out (or - worse - replaced with ultra-processed vegan alternatives). I am now a committed caponata fan.

I was torn on the next dish - not because it wasn't brilliant, because it was - but because I always have a problem with divided loyalties comparing the Italian style of anchovies on toast with the Catalan style with tomato and olive oil of holidays of my youth. But I suppose there's room for both in the world, and needless to say these were fantastically enjoyable, the thick layer of dairy matching the salty cured fish and neither element overpowering the other. But the twist towards greatness in this dish came in the form of a sprinkling of lemon zest, adding a fragrant, citrussy sweetness on the finish. Very clever stuff.

It should come as no surprise, then, given everything that had come before, that Dalla can also do world-class pasta. Tagliatelle with venison ragù was about as good as this dish gets (I imagine), the firm, fresh pasta topped with a deeply satisfying, gamey sauce studded with big satisfying chunks of the good stuff. It's one of the more baffling mysteries of Italian food in London that even in 2025 so few places can do a decent pasta dish (good pizza is everywhere, by comparison), but then I suppose that's all the more reason to celebrate when somewhere like Dalla comes along.

But if the ragù was excellent, this bowl of passatelli with lentils was close to life-changing. Lentils make a superb ingredient in a pasta dish, their vaguely soily, fatty texture binding together the pasta and the other ingredients to make hugely a satisfying bite. But the touch of genius here was the addition of red mullet broth, a powerfully-flavoured fish that can often, in the wrong hands, be a bit too fishy, but as a seafood stock used to infuse pasta and lentils made for heady, salty, seafood perfection. I've honestly never eaten anything quite like it.

Wikipedia tells me that saltimbocca is a dish of sage-and-prosciutto-wrapped veal, although thanks to London's seemingly endless capacity to never do what it's told I've had pigeon, guinea fowl and chicken versions of the dish in the past but never veal. Anyway I now have lemon sole saltimbocca to add to the list, and can confirm it works incredibly well, the dense, meaty flesh of the (again, meticulously deboned) sole seasoned and complexified by the ham and sage. Maybe one day I'll try the veal. I bet it won't be as good.

We never wanted lunch to end, and so ordered three out of the four sweets on offer. Apple tart was warm and soft and moist, with generous chunks of sweet poached apple and a nice sharp dollop of crème fraîche (or whatever the Italian equivalent is, sorry Italians) on the side.

Tiramisu I didn't try - I can't do caffeine - but I mean it looks alright doesn't it?

But pannacotta - so often a lazy pub dessert afterthought - was genuinely great, so ethereally light it practically disappeared in the mouth leaving a heady note of vanilla-flecked dairy and lovely sharp-sweet saba (a syrupy liquid made from grape must). I thought pannacotta was boring - it just turned out I'd never had it before.

If I was finding it hard to criticize anything about Dalla, then that wasn't about to change with the arrival of the bill. With plenty of wine, more than enough food - all of which was unimprovable - and including service that never put a foot wrong, the cost per person was £72. I'm so used to being shocked at the price of eating out in London in a bad way that the pleasant surprise of being nearly £30 under my contactless limit was a rare and precious thing indeed.

So it's no surprise that tables at Dalla are as rare as Italian speciality-breed hen's teeth. It takes a lot to stand out in a city that eats as well so regularly as London and yet this unassuming little bistro in a bleak, graffiti-strewn stretch of Hackney already feels like the future - an intelligent, flatteringly accessible take on modern Italian food that has deference to tradition and yet the confidence to stamp their own personality on dishes that are never less than great, and often extraordinary. It is, in short and in all probability, one of the best restaurants in town. What else do you need to know? Just go.

10/10

Last week, and for most of the week, there was a tube strike. A more lazy, and let's face it, less greedy me would have probably cancelled any dinner plans until things were back to normal, but reservations at Josephine Bouchon are hard enough to come by at the best of times and I didn't want to let an old friend down that I hadn't seen in years. So, I came up with a plan. I was going to walk the route of the 19 bus all the way from the office in Holborn to the King's Road, and if I ever saw an opportunity to get on a bus I'd take it.

Londoners will know where this story is going. Of course, every bus stop had dozens of people waiting for a tiny handful of spaces on the few buses that did creep around central London at a glacial pace, and I soon realised the chances of getting on any of them was nil. I saw near fist-fights between commuters attempting to skip the queues and jump on the back doors as people got off, I saw drivers screaming at people to keep the entry area clear so they could close the doors and get moving, and I nearly got knocked over by a bus myself as I hopped on and off the pavement on Shaftesbury Avenue trying to avoid the heaving crowds. All of which accompanied by a chorus of constant honks and yells from the occupants of the non bus-lanes that don't have a great deal of patience even when things are going well.

But once I'd cleared Hyde Park corner and I'd decided to finally completely abandon any hope of getting on a bus, I was able to pick a route through the more serene streets of SW London and it all became rather lovely. The stately old Georgian squares of Belgravia, leafy and autumnal, gave way to the grand Victorian townhouses of Sloane Street, and then the beautiful streets around the back of Fulham Road and before I knew it I was sat at a rather cosy table in Josephine Bouchon nibbling on home made pork scratchings and lovely buttered baguette and I knew the journey would be absolutely worth it.

The menu is unapologetically, unmistakeably, ludicrously French, and all the better for it. French onion soup was a great big bubbling pile of melted cheese and caramelised onions, shot through with glossy, thick beef stock, and is about as good a version as you can get anywhere - including France. I made a complete fool of myself attempting to control the long strings of melted Gruyère as they landed variously on the table, my clothes and my face, and it was so blisteringly hot it took a good 20 minutes before I could comfortably polish it off, but I wouldn't have changed any of it for the world.

Mains were equally French, and equally brilliant. A single veal sweetbread arrived topped with morels soaked in veal jus, before being doused in one of those thick, creamy mushroom sauces that takes about 3 days to make. I couldn't decide which was better (and still can't), the giant sweetbread with a fantastic contrast between the slightly crisp bite of the outside and soft, rich interior, or that incredible sauce with such a depth of flavour and so much going on - in a good, not confused way - that it seemed to morph into something ever more exciting with every taste.

I'm afraid I don't have pictures of the other starter (salade Lyonnaise) or main (côte de veau) and didn't ask for a taste because there's only so bloggery I wanted to act in front of someone I'd not seen for a while, but they looked superb. So there's every chance they were - particularly the veal which was huge and bronzed and nicely pink inside.

With the mains we had ordered dauphinois potatoes, and though they were beautifully done I'm not 100% sure they were worth £18 - the picture makes them look more substantial than they were because this was an awfully shallow dish with only about 2 or 3 layers of potato to it. Still, as I said it tasted great and we had no regrets.

The "problem", such as it is, with French food when it's done this well is that you want to order everything but are soon defeated by the richness of the sauces and the intensity of the ingredients. I had every intention of trying the rum baba or the lemon tart when I first scanned through the menu but by the time the last mouthful of creamy dauphinois potato had disappeared, and the above wonderful thing had been gifted from the kitchen (lamb shoulder, glossy and gamey and on a bed of perfect glazed veg) I'm afraid I had to admit defeat. The bill came to just over £100 per head with plenty of house wine, which probably is a bit unfair on the average because we had ordered two of the most expensive mains. They do a 3 course menu for £30 (at lunch and dinner) so it's possible to not go completely mad.

But the thing is, restaurants like this - and the best of French regional cuisine in general - are at their best when you do order to excess, when you gorge yourself on sweetbreads and lobster and lapin à la moutarde and truffle and desserts and Armagnac and then roll bleary-eyed into a cab wondering if you'll see the morning. Like its sister-restaurant-in-attitude Bouchon Racine, or Otto's in Holborn, sure you can have a portion of smoked salmon with soda bread and a glass of water then go home, but that's not really what they're for.

So if I'm duty bound to take a point off for the prices, I still want to recommend as many people as possible (apart from vegetarians or those with a dairy allergy, that is - this is French food after all) head to Josephine Bouchon. There are very few restaurants even in France doing this kind of thing at this level, and for Londoners to have it on their doorstep should be a source of extreme pride. This little slice of Lyon in SW10 is everything I needed it to be.

9/10

My dining companion was spotted and we were gifted that lamb dish, but otherwise we paid full price. Sorry about the terrible photos - in all the madness of the tube strike I forgot my Big Camera.

It's very often the case about the very top London hotels that despite the amount of money they have at their disposal, and the pick of whatever celebrity or otherwise feted chefs they can choose from, the restaurants end up being rather mediocre. Partly this is due to the unique demands placed on a hotel restaurant, who have to cater for all kinds of requirements at all times of the day, and often various wildly different cuisines (burgers, curries, pasta) and inevitably end up doing none of them well.

If you have room (and money) though, you can divide up your food offering amongst various different restaurants in the same hotel, and stand a much better chance of getting things right. In the brand-new Rosewood Chancery on Grosvenor Square there are fully six dining options (or at least will be - some are not going yet), ranging from super-spendy Japanese (Masa from NYC which once held the dubious title of New York's most expensive restaurant) down to GSQ (no I don't know what the letters stand for) a much more informal deli selling pastries and sandwiches.

And somewhere in-between sits Serra, a vaguely Modern Greek-themed bistro with attached bar in a room that one of our party that evening recognised as being the place where you used to spend hours waiting for your visa interviews (it's the old US embassy building), albeit slightly more gussied up these days. Actually, I'm being disingenuous - it's a truly stunning space that's a delight to spend time in, more than enough to banish any lingering memories of visa applications.

We began (after a decent gin Martini of course) with house breads - a sesame "koulouri" and a buttermilk pita. Both were either straight out of the oven or cleverly reheated as they were warm and fluffy and salty in all the right places. I've never been to Greece, but if these are indicative of the kind of bread they're eating over there, I need to make plans.

Taramasalata was also superb - supremely smooth and light, full of flavour and presented neatly. It's become a cliché over the years that Greek food doesn't travel - that you eat very well in Greece itself but that Greek restaurants outside of the country tend to be a bit ropey - but places like here and Peckham Bazaar are enough evidence that it can be done if you approach it in the right way.

This is beef loin with preserved tomato, studded with little blobs of 'grape must mustard'. Grape must (Wikipedia tells me) is an early stage of winemaking, and how they go about making mustard out of it is beyond me, but the effect was good, lifting what would be otherwise rather bland beef into something more interesting.

Much better were scallops with peas and marigold, the sweet seafood (and a pretty generous portion for your £22) boosted by fresh herbs and really good fresh garden peas. This was one of the highlights of the dinner, a genuinely surprising and innovative preparation that was quite unlike anything I'd ever tried before. Not rocket science of course, but quirky and clever and a departure from your usual raw scallop dishes.

Raw tuna (we tried ordering the sardines and the langoustines first but both were unavailable - don't put them on the menu, then, is my advice) was another top bit of seafood work, studded with lovely toasted hazelnuts, bottarga and - my favourite element - caper leaves. Like the scallops dish it took a familiar raw ingredient and added just enough intelligence and style to twist it into something new without losing what makes raw tuna so much fun to eat in the first place.

Middlewhite pork "souvlaki" was a neat little arrangement of beautifully tender chargrilled pork, not overly fatty but with just enough to create crunch and ooze, dressed delicately with fennel seed, mustard and lemon as well as some colourful pickles. Technically impressive, of course, but crucially succeeding on the strength of the main ingredient - this was very good pork.

And it was a slightly less than impressive main ingredient - the beef, again - that somewhat let down this grilled sirloin. As with the pork, the protein had been expertly grilled with a lovely pink colour and dark, dry crust, but just didn't really taste of much. The mixture underneath, in fact - aubergine peperonata - was the most notable thing about the dish, but you wouldn't really spend £40 just for that.

We had a couple of sides I think but for some reason I've only ended up with a photo of the "fried potato", actually a Quality Chop House style confit/mandolined affair. They had a very good texture but I'm not sure 5 bitesize pieces for £8 is very close to anything approaching value. Yes, that's me moaning about prices in a brand new 5* hotel in Mayfair. Sue me (don't, I can't afford it).

There was another main of wild prawn tartare pasta, which I didn't try because raw seafood on warm pasta makes me feel a bit queasy, but it looked like good pasta and I believe it went down pretty well.

The only dessert I tried was the Sicilian lemon sorbet, which they offered to convert to a sgroppino with a shot of vodka so obviously I did. It was very nice actually - the lemon flavour boosted by grated lemon rind on top.

I didn't get invited to Serra but I didn't see the bill as someone else was very kindly paying, so I can't tell you exactly what the damage was, but this is, after all, a brand new 5* hotel in Mayfair so you're not going to get away with a bargain. That said, service was on the ball the prices were generally not too crazy and we had a good time so I suppose it could be worse.

And when the food was good, it was very good, and sometimes it really is worth paying extra to sit in spectacular surroundings, and get cosseted by sparkling service. So if the prices bring the overall score down a bit, bear in mind that this is still way better than meals I've had in some other equally prestigious - and often far more spendy - places, and I can still recommend Serra, for trying to bring something genuinely new to top-end hotel dining.

7/10

This was actually my second visit to Belzan. The first, according to my iPhone photo history, was on 8th May 2020, but was a little bit tricky to review as the building was operating as an improvised deli, with boxes of fruit and veg arranged amongst the booths and benches that would normally be hosting paying customers. Like so many restaurants during the first national Covid lockdown Belzan had pivoted to, well, just about anything they could think of to get them through the End Times and so this friendly neighbourhood restaurant became your friendly neighbourhood greengrocers and wine merchants. I can't honestly remember what I came away with - definitely a box of veg, possibly a bottle or two of natural wine, and I'm sure it was all lovely - but I think I'm confident in saying it's a period of time both they and myself are happy to forget.

Fast forward to 2025, and Belzan is happily back at doing what it's best at - namely charming the pants off lucky Wavertree locals and curious out-of-towners alike. It is utterly impossible not to fall in love with the place, which is close to the platonic ideal of an unpretentious local bistro as it's possible to imagine. Staff all act like they've landed their dream job - which of course they probably have - the menu is full of things that you'd want to eat, and it's all pulled off with such easy grace that you wonder why there can't be a Belzan on every street corner in the country.

I started with a "Peter Piper", a kind of dirty vodka martini involving guindillas (Spanish chilli) pickle juice. Like the best dirty martinis it sailed very, very close to being completely wrong while at the same time just about pulling it off - the pickle juice blasted your senses but the vodka and vermouth just about managed to ground the flavours in something approaching normality. That weekend, in a moment of hideously misplaced confidence, I attempted to make one myself using burger pickle juice and gin. It didn't work.

The bread course at Belzan - sourdough cooked by "Leila", a local who offered their services during that same first lockdown and has been a supplier since - comes with a choice cauliflower butter, a lovely concoction full of satisfying, earthy vegetal flavours, and oil and vinegar, the vegan option but which they'll happily provide alongside the cauliflower butter if requested. You can tell a lot about a place from their bread offering - the attention to detail here was very evident.

Also from the "snacks" was this giant grilled scallop gratin, a lovely plump bit of sweet, meaty seafood (with roe attached I was delighted to discover) draped in bubbling grilled cheese. I don't know why Coquilles Saint-Jacques have gone out of fashion - perhaps they just belong to a period of French cooking that's a little bit looked down on these days - but scallops and cheese definitely need to be a thing again. This was gorgeous.

Courgettes came soft and grilled, with bits of blackened skin adding some very nice detail, and topped with a strong, salty pine nut gremolata. Underneath was a hummus made from butterbean, bright white and silky smooth and the perfect foil for the other vegetables. This is one of those dishes seemingly so simple and rewarding it might inspire you to have a go on the BBQ at home, which one day I indeed may do, albeit perhaps with not quite so much of a cavalier attitude as that with which I approached the pickle martini.

Grilled hispi cabbage was only slightly less successful than the courgettes, possibly because the Lancashire cheese was asking to do a bit more of the seasoning heavy lifting than it was equipped to deal with. A bit more salt on the cabbage and in the romesco and this would have been better, and perhaps it could all have been a bit warmer, but it was still a fun thing to eat, with the little crispy bits of charred cabbage adding more of those interesting textures.

Poached trout came as a giant, well-seasoned and perfectly timed slab of fresh fish and was a joy from start to finish. Underneath a Vichyssoise sauce was full of satisfying earthy flavours and was studded both with runner beans and mussels, the latter being sweet-pickled somehow. Very clever stuff.

And finally from the savoury courses, a huge pile of grilled lamb chops, each blushed perfect pink and so deliriously tender you could have cut them with a spoon. They came on an interesting bed of labneh and grilled nectarines, a vaguely Middle-Eastern range of flavours that worked incredibly well, but the crowning glory was a thick, salty, rich lamb jus that I wanted to bottle and take home with me. If you can tell a lot about a restaurant from their bread course, you can tell even more from their ability with sauces. This lamb sauce was as close to perfect as it's possible to get.

We found room for one dessert, a strawberry choux bun so delicate and light that, when I attempted to cut it in half, flattened hilariously onto the plate, leaving us with a kind of strawberry-pastry Eton mess. It tasted fantastic anyway, you won't be surprised to learn, as did the sweet (but actually not overly sweet) Riesling I'd picked to go with it. Can't leave a place like this without trying a dessert wine - it's the rules.

The bill came to £75 each, which although not a complete bargain (I think the days of restaurant bargains have long gone, with certain notable exceptions) is still great value for the amount of skill and effort that had gone into everything we tried. And certainly, we weren't the only people to think so, with Belzan turning the tables throughout this Wednesday evening, quite a hopeful thing to see from an industry seemingly so consumed with doom and gloom.

So could there be a Belzan on every street corner? Should there be? Let's face it - the trick that places like this pull off so successfully is to make the difficult and skilful look easy and effortless, and if after 7 years they've not even opened a second spot in Liverpool never mind attempted to throw their net wider probably tells you all you need to know about the logistics of running a modern British bistro. But then that just makes what Belzan are doing all the more special - if you want great food, made with care and intelligence and served with a smile, then you will just have to come to Smithdown Road. You won't regret it.

9/10