Jay Rayner raves about Paul Foster, head chef at Tuddenham Mill

Paul Foster, head chef at Tuddenham Mill in Suffolk, is one of the country's best young chefs who is right on the gastronomic cutting edge, according to Jay Rayner.

The Observer's food critic says Foster, one of this year's Acorn award winners, is cooking modern, well balanced food that is very much worth travelling for.

"His ideas are controlled. His flavour combinations make sense. The smartest bits of kitchen kit are used not simply because he's got a new toy but to add something," he says. "If you want a plate of food that shouts 2011, which is the word "now" fashioned from calories, go to Tuddenham Mill."

Meanwhile the Sunday Times' AA Gill says the Gilbert Scott, the new restaurant from Marcus Wareing, "is depressing and like eating a home-economics history project".

He says: "This restoration or reconstruction of both building and menu is a mule born gelded, a sterile exercise that bears nothing, fires blanks, leads to nothing but more of the past. It's an exercise in sentimental hindsight."

Writing for the Sunday Telegraph, Zoe Williams says Nando's bears the hallmarks of a kitchen "that does nothing but chicken, that knows the bird inside out, that hasn't dried out a bit of poultry since a freak lapse of concentration in 1995".

The Guardian's John Lanchester likes the food at Martin Blunos's Crown Social in Cardiff but adds that the location doesn't match the chef's cooking, while the Independent's Tracey MacLeod is impressed with Kateh, a new Persian restaurant on one of the loveliest canal-side streets in leafy Little Venice.

In The Times, Giles Coren says that while small and pokey and located in loathsome Leicester Square, the St John hotel is precise and gorgeous a manifestation of Fergus Henderson's beautiful philosophy.

In London, the Metro's Marina O'Loughlin says the first outpost of Bill's Produce in the capital is a big, fat fake operation that's dictated by the spreadsheet, while the Evening Standard's David Sexton says Pizza East in Notting Hill, the second site of the trendy Soho House Group-owned pizza restaurant, is worth the trek.

For these reviews in full and more, see What's on the menu? Visit Guide Girl for the latest gossip from the fine-dining world.

By Kerstin Kühn

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