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.
If you have a winning formula, then why change it? Going to Ave Mario is about much more than having a meal; rather, it’s an experience. Your reviewer cannot recall the last time he visited a restaurant anywhere in London on a weekday lunchtime where many of the diners had dressed up as if for a night out…
Blink and you might miss it. In order to get to Normah’s, visitors are forced to navigate through the warrens of the insalubrious Queensway Market, an eclectic mix of clothes shops, food stores and restaurants. Tucked away in the south west corner is Normah’s. Founded in 2015 by the eponymous, Normah Abd Hamid, her restaurant in an authentic insight into Malaysian cuisine, located in London W2.
The Waterway is a marked improvement on its predecessor, a grim pub called The Paddington Stop. It benefits from wonderful canalside views (assuming you don’t look the other way at the housing estate) but its food and drink experience was quite mixed. There’s a lot of potential. but also clear room for improvement.
Do you know your egusi from your abula? This reviewer certainly didn’t and had only once previously tried anything close to Nigerian food. That was almost four years ago in an over-priced and far from authentic restaurant in St James. Fortunately, this gap in Gourmand Gunno’s culinary knowledge was recently rectified after the kind offer of a Nigerian friend to take me to his ‘local’ in the far reaches of south east London. It’s certainly worth the ten-minute train ride to Lewisham from London Bridge for a taste of what Nigeria has to offer.
The shoes of the Gay Hussar are big ones in which to step. Noble Rot’s second venture, located on the same site as this former London establishment, nonetheless do the job admirably. Homage to the Hussar is evident, from the artistic triptych of Soho life that adorns one wall on the first floor dining room through to a few original menu items that remain, albeit somewhat reinterpreted. After the success of their original Fitzrovia venture, the Noble Rot team have imposed their clear stamp in Soho.
Much (if not all) of the fun of being a restaurant reviewer is having novel experiences. It was therefore quite anomalous that Gourmand Gunno had never paid a visit to Archipelago until earlier this week. The venue has been a fixture in Fitzrovia for over twenty years and has a very clear mandate: to “explore the exotic.” From alpaca to zebra, Archipelago dishes up options that are far from mainstream, but perhaps ought to be more so.
How often do diners – especially seasoned sceptics such as your reviewer – come out of restaurants truly wowed by a novel experience? It’s interesting that SOLA shares much in common with KOL . Beyond both having short and memorable names – in the case of this venue’s, it is an abbreviated portmanteau of Soho and Los Angeles – each marries successfully high-end dining in an informal setting. Whereas KOL brings proper Mexican food to London for arguably the first time, SOLA does similar with Californian cuisine.
What could be more quintessentially English than fish and chips by the seaside? A recent work jaunt saw Gourmand Gunno make the one-hour train journey down from London to see seafood done properly in one of the oldest restaurants in Brighton. There’s far more to English’s though than just the humble battered plaice…
Does London need yet another Indian restaurant? Well, if it’s as good as Pali Hill, then yes. Indian cuisine in the central part of town is a highly crowded and competitive market and so restaurants really need to be doing something either very good, very different, or ideally both in order to make a mark. When two comrades and I dined recently at Pali Hill on a midweek evening, we came away impressed.
When Gourmand Gunno first travelled to Mexico many years ago he was told that the Mexicans believed their cuisine to be the third-best in the world. This was a clever notion: why try to claim you’re better than the French or the Italians (who apparently ranked numbers one and two)? At the same time though, you’re making a clear statement of intent about how you believe your food should be regarded. Even if this ranking is certainly open to debate, it is still fair to wonder just why there are so few restaurants serving genuine Mexican food in the world’s major cities. The good news for Londoners is that KOL seeks to address this anomaly. It delivers admirably.
Having spent some time in Mexico – including a dedicated six-week period – your reviewer can state that what Madera offers is not authentic Mexican food, but a take on it, which will more likely appeal to British and American palates. Beyond the view and the people watching opportunities, Madera ticks almost all the evident boxes of what ‘on-trend’ restaurants seek to offer – a bewilderingly complicated menu, dishes explicitly made for sharing which arrive as soon as they are ready and music that was slightly too loud for a midweek lunchtime.
With travel to Paris still problematic, what to do if you want old school French grub? Even if it has a certain charm of its own, Mayfair’s Shepherds Market will never be the Rive Gauche, but Le Boudin Blanc gives you a little taste of what being in France could be like. The restaurant is a Mayfair establishment, having been open for almost 30 years…
Walk roughly ten minutes north west from St John’s Wood station and you reach a quiet and leafy residential street that speaks of prosperity. Nestled on one side – blink and you might almost miss it – is the Clifton. When my comrade and I visited on a recent weekday lunchtime, every table was occupied, and service was perhaps correspondingly somewhat slower than we might have hoped for. Sure, a minor irritation, but the Clifton is the sort of venue where it would be easy to while away an afternoon or longer.
The dictionary says that the term ‘fallow’ means farmland that has been ploughed and harrowed but is then left for a period without being sown in order to restore its fertility and avoid surplus production. Although an ancient concept, it also has a wonderfully modern resonance, according well with all things sustainable. Fallow, one of the hottest new openings of 2020, takes this idea as its guiding principle and successfully pulls off the act of being both a right-on and very cool venue.
With outside dining being the norm for now, Skylon is worth considering. Expect a confident but far from ground-breaking demonstration of modern British cooking with a few European twists. Given we are still in the early era of returning to normality, food and wine lists have a greater than usual level of brevity. At least it makes choosing easier. To complain though is to miss the point: what we have been missing is not chef-cooked food per se, but atmosphere – this is what venues such as Skylon are selling….
