The Independent, 29 November
Tracey MacLeod visits Corrigan’s Mayfair, London W1
It's the stuff of a publicist's nightmares. Your client opens a plush new restaurant, serving poshed-up rustic food, in one of Mayfair's grandest streets. Then, weeks before the launch, a group of teenage anarchists moves into the mansion over the road, rigs up a giant black flag and tells the press they're feeding themselves by rummaging in local bins. Incredibly, this rich vein of material for satirically minded critics has remained largely untapped. Early visitors to Corrigan's Mayfair have been much too busy salivating over the food to bother too much about those neighbours from hell. He's an admired figure, is the owner, Richard Corrigan; a larger-than-life Irish chef whose progress to this exalted address owes more to tortoise than hare (only the latter appears on his new menu; saddle of, with chestnut and bread stuffing).
Corrignan’s Mayfair – review in full>>
The Daily Telegraph, 29 November
Jasper Gerard visits The Star Inn, Harome, North Yorkshire
It is the calm before the calm: a moment when the only conundrum taxing the brain is calculating how you might fritter away that tricky period between lunch and dinner. You are at the table with only a digestif for company, the last to leave. The restaurant, so recently full of chatter and clatter, now seems lulled into reverie. To the casual observer – the waiter refilling your glass while laying tables for dinner – this contentment could be mistaken for somnolence. But you are awake all right. Awake to the realisation that you don't feel this good that often: a sense of, well, it could almost be happiness, something only achieved when real life is put on temporary hold. This is how you might just feel after visiting The Star Inn, a rare pub to boast a Michelin star.
The Star Inn – review in full>>
The Sunday Times, 30 November
AA Gill visits Westfield, London W12
This is the season of fruitful fatness. You sniff the frost and order a glossy, dripping, goose-fat-fried breakfast. There is pink-cheeked, plume-breathed permission to have both the custardy pudding and the varicose cheese. This is the very best time to eat in Britain: pastry and pâté, pies and russets, and the wonderful varieties of round-mouthed, clubbable brassicas and loamily suggestive roots. And there’s game, feathered, furred and finned. I’ve been shooting quite a bit recently. Ever since the invention of smokeless powder and the four-wheel drive, hunting has been a sedentary sport. We tubby Nimrods probably burn fewer calories than bowls players.
Westfield – review in full>>
The Observer, 30 November
Jay Rayner visits The Allotment, Dover, Kent
You would have to be a miserable, thin-lipped, scumbag with a diploma in misanthropy and a good humour bypass not to like The Allotment in Dover. Obviously I am just a few credits short of that misanthropy certificate and my elective good humour bypass is, in these dank, depressed winter months, when the air smells only of stale farts and desperation, just a few days away. But even I can see that its heart is in the right place. Sure, the starters were a little less than inspired and at the end a meringue was more friable than chewy, but really I only mention these to reinforce my critical credentials. What matters is the basic proposition: a simple urban bistro, in a town short of them, serving a changing menu of solid, honest dishes. These often use ingredients fresh off either the owner's allotment or those belonging to other locals. Don't talk about food miles; use food yards.
The Allotment – review in full>>
areyoureadytoorder.com
Jan Moir visits Goodman, London W1
Dark brown restaurants are unappetising in the same way that dark brown stews are unappetising. There might be good stuff in there. It might be nutritious and tasty. But you’ve got to tread carefully through the murk to find any lurking goodies. Goodman is a new steakhouse situated in a dark, narrow street in Mayfair. It has a dark, narrow interior to match and it serves dark narrow bits of meat. A proper steakhouse will always be clubby and masculine, but have Goodman, like Boy George, suddenly gone too far down the butch route? Over lunch, I notice quite a few women looking at the menu posted outside Goodman’s front door, peering inside, then walking away. From street level, from a certain perspective, Goodman is not very inviting. So the women vanish into the November murk, taking their custom and their orders for goat’s cheese and their important thoughts about Angelina’s latest tattoo elsewhere. Perhaps it is all for the best.
Goodman – review in full>>
By Janet Harmer