It started with a faint twitch, or nervous restlessness. There was an almost involuntary desire to pull out the phone and snap away. Your author even managed to resist the temptation to quiz the servers about what made their dishes special. As an (unintentional) experiment, Gourmand Gunno spent two consecutive nights in restaurants without a plan to review either.
Carthusian monks were onto a good thing 900 years ago when they settled in Priorat. Located in the foothills of Catalonia, this remote region was the source of a monastery called Scala Dei. Translate the Latin to English and you get ‘stairway to heaven’, an apt metaphor for the dining delights of the area. A burgeoning boutique food and wine scene is underway in the region, as your reviewer and his comrades discovered on a recent trip.
In a world where first impressions count, many diners might naturally be put off Satyrio. Not only could the exterior do with a face lift, but to get there, visitors must navigate liminal London. Located on Aldgate High Street, Satyrio feels like it neither quite swanky City nor trendy Shoreditch. Step inside, however, and there is a lot – even if not everything – to like about this venue.
Your reviewer really wanted to like Sagardi. He has been visiting the Basque region for over 20 years, had one of his best meals of 2024 there and fell in love with Ibai when it opened in London last June. Fronted by a chef from the region and with other successful Sagardi branches around the world, there was so much to like on paper. Walk into the Shoreditch venue and you will be wowed on first impressions. We were let down though by both food and service.
Every neighbourhood should have a good Indian restaurant. Colaba ought to be West Hampstead’s. Named after a district of Mumbai, its quality of cooking would put it close Dishoom. However, our quartet left Colaba feeling severely underwhelmed by its service. Improve this and the venue could be a local star.
Do you know your hopper from your dosa; your kothu from you kari, or your chutney from your sambol? What’s the correct number of all/any of these dishes to order? And should you combine these with some ‘short eats’ or maybe a ‘rice and roast?’ By now, readers have probably got the story: Hoppers has one of the least comprehensible and potentially most unwelcoming menus in London. That said, once you do eventually get to the food, it’s pretty damn good.
Four years may have passed since my last visit to C London, but it seems little has changed: here, we are definitively in the world of moneyed Mayfair where the well-heeled and wannabee celebrities still come to dine. The food is excellent; the service somewhat less so. For mere mortals, prices remain eye-watering and undoubtedly better value (and experiences) can be found elsewhere
“Voted best restaurant in Northern Ireland” runs the caption on Ginger Bistro’s website. Similarly, when we mentioned in passing to the receptionist at our hotel that we would be dining there, we were greeted with a response along the lines of ‘wow, how did you get a table?!’ Inevitably, therefore, expectations ran high for our visit. Sadly, they were disappointed...
Southam Street sees the transformation of a formerly grotty pub at the non-fashionable end of Notting Hill into a destination venue offering cocktails, food and a members’ club. Based on a recent visit, the owners are definitely doing something right. My comrade and I liked the vibe, but were perhaps less impressed with the food. In the end, this may not matter – the angle Southam Street seems to be going for is perhaps more style than substance...
The word peasant conjures up somewhat bucolic images of the English past; labourers and farmhands toiling away in the fields and the like. It perhaps, therefore, seems a strange name with which to adorn a pub, particularly in the trendy London district of Clerkenwell. There is nothing rustic about the venue and its prices would probably turn even many modern-day peasants away. Nonetheless, the venue is cool and offers a good range of beers and competently executed dishes.
Nestled in the centre of Old Town Hastings, Isabella is a restaurant that ticks all the boxes – lovely atmosphere, great food, friendly service and wonderful value for money. Much like the vibe of the town, the charm of the restaurant is in how despite the seemingly eclectic and disorganised nature of the place, the end-result hangs together perfectly.
Part of the beauty of the London dining scene is that there is a plethora of choice. Like the citizens of this city, there is huge diversity. However, the darker side of the city’s culinary dynamism is that it is relentlessly Darwinian: if you don’t get it right, you will fail. The statistics bear this out: some 50% of central London restaurants shut within a year of opening. I fear Ikoyi may be one of them.
Bristol has seen quite a redevelopment of its dockyard area in recent years and Bertha's comprises one of a group of relatively new dining outlets located just beyond the M-Shed. Decorated in bright hues, the place sets itself up as a fun, family-friendly sort of venue. Or at least this was our view. The menu, however, suggested a severe deviation from this proposition, so much so that even the adults struggled with some of the pizza options. Message to Bertha's: keep it simple...
When it opened in 2013, Gogi offered something different amid the rather staid Little Venice dining scene. Based on how busy the restaurant was on a recent Friday night when my comrade and I visited, Gogi must clearly still be doing something right. However, we could not help feeling that food standards had slipped, the place was poor value for money and the service little more than perfunctory.
It’s a pity that the first thing any diner will think when they encounter this restaurant almost certainly relates to its name. Sure, it’s pretty silly (but surely no worse than Sexy Fish?), but that’s half the point – it gets people talking; they’re curious about the place, maybe intrigued enough to go and discover what the buzz is all about. My comrade and I were impressed during our visit, and sufficiently so that I would return.
Worcester, although picturesque with its cathedral and the majestic River Severn, does not offer a lot of fine dining options. To describe Brown’s (no relation to the chain, despite some disarming similarities) as such is perhaps over-generous. It certainly punches above its weight, and represents generally poor value for money.
For as long as I’ve lived in London, Victoria is a place from which to catch trains and little else. Most of the time, the area resembles (as it does today) a building site. In other words, not somewhere one would consider coming for lunch. Things are admittedly changing, and for the better, but it was not to one of the newer places in the district to which I recently ventured, but instead to A Wong, a superb find worth seeking out.
I first reviewed this branch of Roka not long after it opened in summer 2014. Since then, I have been back probably half-a-dozen times both for lunch and dinner, but on each occasion – and despite being willing to give the place the benefit of the doubt (again) – I have been disappointed. A recent weekday lunch did nothing to change my impression.
Located a stone’s throw away from Chinatown and next door to the ever-popular Palomar, the ambitions of Xu (pronounced ‘shu’) are evident. Given that the team behind this venture also pioneered Gymkhana, Bao and Hoppers, expectations were high, but a recent lunchtime visit undoubtedly impressed. While perhaps somewhat lacking in atmosphere, the level of the food here was superlative.
The title says it all. The restaurant has few redeeming features and serves very average Middle Eastern food at a Mayfair mark-up. Service was among the most gauche I had witnessed recently. And, the lamp fittings are so badly designed that almost every customer in the place seemed to bang their head on them.
The prefix, ‘neo’ means new. Any restaurant, therefore, which chooses to put this word in its name comes with a certain set of expectations attached. Fortuitously, Neo Bistro deserves such epithet. A recent lunch visit to the second venture from the team behind Farringdon’s Anglo was highly successful, in terms of concept, food and service.
