New Restaurant Review Roundup 2022
Part One: The West End
Around this time last year we went back through all the Weekend Roundups to see which restaurant openings we’d told you about and then went and found all the reviews we could of those place, to see if they were actually worth a trip or not.
That seemed to go down pretty well, so this year we’re doing it again. This Monday and next we’re going to check in on fifteen or so places that opened in 2022 to see if they live up to the hype.
The rules are: They have to be places we’ve mentioned in the newsletter; the reviews have to come from publications that actually write reviews, not just puff pieces in return for free grub; and if Giles Coren has reviewed somewhere for The Times then we totally ignore it, because Giles Coren is a loathsome prick.
Okay, off we go. This week we’re staying around the general vicinity of the West End. Next week we’ll venture further South, East and North.
Lisboeta, Fitzrovia
We’re starting with probably the most hyped and definitely most reviewed restaurant on the list: Nuno Mendes’ Lisboeta.
Lisboeta was on our ‘10 restaurants to look forward to’ list at the start of the year, in which we predicted it was “pretty much guaranteed to be excellent and completely booked up from the second the website goes online”. Let’s see if we were right.
Hannah June went for the Independent in June for a “speedy, light dinner” (“a cocktail each, two snacks, three petiscos and one dessert for £84”) where she chowed down on “ultra-tender” black pork, “ultra-melty clams” (Hannah likes the word ‘ultra’) and “beautifully buttery and crusty” Goan-spiced pork pie. Lisboeta doesn’t offer “authentic” Portugese food, June concludes, but it is “creative” cooking in a “sexy setting”.
When Grace Dent went for The Guardian in June she described it as “a breezier, more down-to-earth space” than Mendes’ other restaurants, but still “a slice of deeply personal Portugal” even though the menu has its “hits and misses” (the “wobbly, porky, milky, egg yolk custard on a bed of blood-red port caramel” is a ‘miss’ as far as Grace is concerned). Dent’s summary: “There are much worse places to order a white port and tonic and half a dozen pork pies as you watch the London food scene waltz past”.
Tom Parker Bowles went in July and was “bowled over” by Mendes’ cooking, calling it “mind-blowingly good, at every level” and Jimi Famurewa of the Standard agrees, calling it “a gently uncompromising, glorious odyssey into an untrammelled new world of Portuguese cuisine” and “inordinately sexy” (there’s that word again).
There are plenty more raves like that around but, before we leave Portugal, it’s worth pointing out William Sitwell’s (paywalled) two star review in The Telegraph. The bad news begins when Sitwell contemplates the “unfathomable” price of the prawns (£16 each), continues as he is “waterboarded in tallow” (lard features heavily it seems) and then tucks into lamb that tastes “like someone had spilt red wine all over it”. He does like the egg-and-pork custard though.
Miznon, Soho
Let’s go from a superstar Portugese chef to an Israeli pita chain.
Miznon only opened a couple of months ago (after successful launches in Paris and New York) but when the Standard visited it was “basically empty, save for staff hunched over laptops” and the “walls were chalked with confusing, repeated aphorisms” like ‘Each pita has her own unique birthmark’. But that doesn’t matter because soon there is “warm soldiers of pita bread” to be dipped in the “outrageous, snapping freshness of a sour cream, tomato and green chilli dip” and “silken, life-changing hummus” (we’re not sure how hummus can be ‘life-changing’ but we’ll take Jimi’s word for it).
House and Garden were also a little dubious about the aphorisms, along with the shepherd’s pie and English breakfast pita fillings, not to mention the use of Comic Sans for the menu. But they too were won over by the food, particularly the ‘fish and chips in a pita’ that were “enormous, sumptuous and creamy” and accompanied by cocktails made with “Miznon-made liqueurs including gin, sage vodka, Anise-forward arak or tequila”.
Hot Dinners also comments on the Comic Sans (as well as the the “annoyingly idiosyncratic,” menu descriptions which don’t tell you much about the food), but their only real complaint about the ‘All-day English breakfast’ option (“a really good steak and egg pita”) was that it was a little too large. They also liked the ‘Folded burger’ which is (as you might imagine) a “burger folded around a slide of cheddar and then fried.”
Finally, food blogger Gabrielle Martin’s record of her visit to Miznon is worth a look, if only so you can see a photo of that Comic Sans menu in all its glory (“absolutely nothing on the menu made any sense to me, whatsoever”) as well as her declaration that all the dishes she tried were “perfectly seasoned, lovingly prepared and exploding with delicious flavours”.
Honey & Co, Blomsbury
Sticking around the Middle East… Honey & Co isn’t strictly a new restaurant, it’s more of a ‘reborn’ one.
Originally located in Fitzrovia, Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer spent ten years turning their “little room into a site of pilgrimage, attracting a cult-like following who raved about their lavish mezze spreads and transcendent feta-and-honey cheesecake” (to quote Time Out). But in February they were kicked out by their landlord and left scrambling to find a new home. In June they opened their new premises on Lambs Conduit Street (opposite Noble Rot and right next to La Fromagerie) and all the food critics were straight down there to see if they’d managed to retain the old magic.
That Time Out review we quoted earlier gives the new place four stars as well as plenty of adjectives like ‘moreish’, ‘memorable’ and ‘generous’ to describe dishes like fig and goat’s cheese, Yemeni falafel and labaneh (“a sweet-savoury silk freshened by the lightest breath of mint.”). The only complaint is that “the prices are a bit high for Middle Eastern food that, although consistently delicious, doesn't always have the boundary-pushing eclecticism of Ottolenghi or the veg-centric inventiveness of Bubala”.
When Grace Dent went down for the Guardian she discovered that the place was “a little different now, perhaps more grownup and formal, but the old loveliness is there in spades” and declared their marzipan ice-cream “one of the greatest things I’ve eaten this year”.
In their ‘test drive’ Hot Dinners summed it up as “a delight - flooded with light, filled with Sarit's homemade pottery” and the Jewish Chronicle (who have offices just round the corner - lucky sods) calls it “one of the best Middle Eastern restaurants in town” after demolishing most of the menu including the “mound of sweet/savoury creamy cheese on crunchy shards of baked knafeh pastry showered of blueberries, almonds and syrup” better known as the famous feta cheesecake.
Coming up on Wednesday 👮♂️
We interview journalist and author Tom Harper about his brand new book, Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police, which charts the Met’s fall over three decades, from the Stephen Lawrence case to the murder of Sarah Everard.
Subscribe to LiB today to make sure you don’t miss out:
Upstairs at The George, Soho
According to Tim Hayward the George pub on Great Portland Street used to be “an agreeably depressing retreat for hacks and musicians awaiting work around the corner at Broadcasting House”. But now, thanks to a major facelift courtesy of JKS it is (if you believe Tim’s FT review) a “damn near perfect” dining room with dishes that will “actually make your jaw drop… like an anaconda swallowing a capybara.”
In the Spectator Tanya Gold calls the renovated George “a parody… a Disney-style pub” thanks to its freshly laid “wild swirling pub carpet” and “beautiful, dark-green embossed wallpaper [and] pale-green velvet benches,” but she decides that “it is so finely wrought and graceful I forgive it”. Plus, the food is great and includes a knickerbocker glory that leaves her “as exhilarated as I have ever been in central London.”
It’s a similar story in Time Out where Huw Oliver awards the place four stars for the top-shelf pub grub and the “super-attentive” staff who are accommodating to “annoying things like a coeliac coming in and saying: can you do this… and this… and this… but totally sans gluten?”.
In the Telegraph William Sitwell also praises the staff who look after his elderly friend, Fingers (yep, really), calling him a cab and remaining with him until it arrives. But Sitwell the grouch is less praiseworthy when it comes to the food - mostly because he orders whelks (which he doesn’t like). He did this at Lisboeta too, questioning the presence of ‘slow-cooked lamb in red wine’ on the menu when it was hot outside… and then ordering it.
Firebird, Soho
Firebird was opened on Poland Street by St Petersburg restaurateurs Madina Kazhimova and Anna Dolgushina as an “open fire cooking restaurant and wine bar”. London has a lot of both of those things already so Firebird was going to have to be pretty great to stand out. And it looks like they’ve more than managed it.
While Liz Darke points out in her Time Out review that “the concept of using quality British produce to create sun-kissed, Southern European dishes is fairly standard stuff these days” but she admits that Firebird’s “combinations and sheer finesse” stand it apart. With dishes like “chicken liver parfait choux buns,” alongside “butter-block-sized hunks of tender, salty halloumi smothered with honey and truffle” and “plump scallops atop a mound of butter-laden mashed potato” the four star review is pretty much guaranteed.
Similarly, House and Garden lead with the fact that “there is nothing particularly new about Firebird in terms of what it offers” before going on to stress that “Luckily, Firebird does them right”. Their reviewer also goes gaga over those choux buns and that halloumi, but can’t resist the “siren call of barbecued chicken… perfectly blackened, moist chicken on a rich brown sauce with bacon jam and oyster mushrooms, served both in their pure form and as ketchup.”
Grace Dent doesn’t beat around the bush in her review, putting Firebird on her list of “2022’s important openings” thanks partly to that charred hunk of halloumi, those scallops and that choux bun dish, but also because of the “personal and homespun” feel of the place and the “charming diplomacy” of the staff.
Cavita, Marylebone
There have been a lot of Mexican eateries opening in London this year, but arguably the ‘hottest’ of them was Cavita on Wigmore Street, the new restaurant from Adriana Cavita (formerly of El Bulli).
Jimi Famurewa went for the Standard just after it had opened (he was there so quickly he found two paintbrushes left in the loos) and declared it “already absolutely stormingly good.” Famurewa breaks out all the adverbs he can muster to praise Cavita’s “combination of abuela-level domestic generosity and top-tier chef’s technique that yields flavours which, all at once, have both familiarity and a flash of vividly drawn, jolting unexpectedness.” Unsurprisingly, he ends up awarding it four stars.
Nicole Trilivas got the lucky job of visiting for Time Out’s assessment and she also feels it’s worth of four stars, although she wants to point out that this isn’t some Mexican version of El Bulli, instead the focus is more on “winning over a local crowd with a damn good time than winning over critics and scoring Michelin stars”. That doesn’t stop the menu “gorgeously showcasing Mexican flavours and ingredients within a finely rendered framework” though, and the ‘unmissable’ dish according to Trilivas is “quesabirrias – achingly tender, slow-cooked beef-shin tacos smeared in smoky adobo and cheese, and served with veal consommé for dipping.”
Tom Parker Bowles loves the place too, calling the dishes “as subtle as they are artful,” even the ‘pig’s head tamal’ and especially the ‘whole wood-grilled chicken’ which he claims is “one of the most thrilling I’ve ever tasted”. While over in the Independent, Lucy Thackray delivers another rave, calling Cavita “a place to share six or seven dishes, to truly feast like a big, noisy Mexican family” as well as “the sort of joint where you could stay late, tasting capfuls of heady agave liqour as the candles burn down and the crowd thins”.
Block, Soho
Before we go we have to go back to Soho and pay a visit to Block, the ‘land and sea’ chophouse’ that is ‘raising the steaks’ (lol) with its open grills and Himalayan salt chambers.
It only opened last month so it hasn’t been reviewed much yet, but Block did get a review from Jay Rayner in the Observer… and he hated it. Like, properly hated it.
When Rayner visits on a Sunday lunchtime the grill is unlit and the beef joint is a “tough, extremely indifferent piece of meat.” the “pork is wet and dreary and comes without crackling” and “the lamb is a wintery shade of grey.” But what really puts the nail in the coffin are the prices: “The ribeye here is 47% more expensive per 100g than at Hawksmoor, the rump is 33% more expensive and the fillet 31% more expensive.”
That’s it for this week. We’ll be back on Monday with part two, which will take us to Stoke Newington, Islington, Peckham, Brixton, Dulwich and Elephant & Castle.
5 little bits
Just Stop Oil protesters set up a roadblock on Park Lane yesterday morning and then sprayed orange paint over the nearby Aston Martin showroom. Around the same time Suella Braverman was meeting Sadiq Khan and Nadhim Zahawi “to apply for a new injunction against Just Stop Oil causing disruption on London's roads”.
Today should see the publication of Baroness Louise Casey’s “far-reaching review” into culture and standards at the Met. The report (which has taken six months to put together) is expected to say that “systemic failings” allowed too many “abhorrent” officers to remain on the frontline, and that the force needs to take a “zero-tolerance” approach to misogyny and racism.
While we’re talking about restaurants, the Observer Food Monthly awards were announced yesterday and the three London-based runners up for ‘restaurant of the year’ were Home SW15 in Putney, The Princess Royal in Notting Hill and Hot Stone in Angel.
It looks like there could be a new investigation into the 539-year-old mystery of the ‘princes in the tower’ which will use DNA analysis of the children’s bones to find out exactly how they died. The Queen had previously blocked requests for the crypts to be opened, but apparently “King Charles is said to be more receptive” to the idea.
We mentioned the Pornopolitics and other Precedents exhibition (which just opened this week in Kennington) in a recent Weekend Roundup because it’s by the Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky who is currently awaiting trial in France for leaking sex videos of Emmanuel Macron’s “right-hand man” Benjamin Griveaux. What we didn’t know then was that the exhibition is being sponsored by “the most well-known and largest British adult and webcam brand” Babestation.
