What’s on the menu? - A round-up of the latest restaurant reviews

The Independent, 7 February
Tracey MacLeod visits Lido, Clifton, Bristol
The sunlight dances on the infinity pool, as a swimmer completes another lazy lap. At our table high over the water, we're sipping Macabeo and mopping up chilli-spiked clam broth with a hunk of thick-crusted bread, fresh from the wood-fired oven. Our holiday destination today is suburban Bristol, where a defunct Victorian lido has been transformed into a cool, urban oasis. Tucked down a side-street in Clifton, the Grade II listed baths – saved from the developers by local campaigners – reopened in November as a members-only spa, open to casual swimmers in off-peak hours.
Lido – review in full>>

The Guardian, 7 February
Matthew Norman visits The Harwood Arms, London SW6
If the Harwood Arms were human, it would never have been conceived in the first place, for this is such a designer baby of a restaurant that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority would surely have intervened way before semen was added to ova. The seed came from the Ledbury, a sharp, Michelin-starred joint in Notting Hill glowingly reviewed here a while back, while the egg belonged to the Pot Kiln, a crackingly good pub restaurant in dementedly rural Berkshire and also the object of gushing in these parts not so long ago.
The Harwood Arms - review in full>>

The Observer, 8 February
Jay Rayner visits Whites, Beverley, East Yorkshire
While I know there is an appetite for reviews of bad restaurants, and can almost smell the blood lust rising off your appreciative emails when I publish one, there are circumstances when they are not called for. I have often been asked what impact critics' reviews have on the restaurants we write about and have argued that while we might be able to help the good ones, the bad ones fail all by themselves; that we are merely the pallbearers, there to heave out the coffin, rather than the angel of death. All that said, there are certain restaurants which do not need the clumsy mallet strike a national newspaper can deliver. Generally speaking, a tiny restaurant, run on a shoestring, should not be broken on the wheel (unless there are very special circumstances, and there have been a couple over the years). All of this is by way of a preamble to declaring that if Whites Restaurant and Patisserie in Beverley, not far from Hull, had been a car crash, I would simply have chalked it up to experience and left well enough alone.
Whites – review in full>>

The Sunday Telegraph, 8 February
Zoe Williams visits Avalon, London SW12
My friend V has a romantic temperament and was convinced that the Avalon used to be a Victorian lunatic asylum, due to its white tiles inset with lithographs of mad people. In fact, the artwork was a job lot: here a nutter, there a picture of a plant, over yonder a pugilist. It looked rather stylish, actually, a great big ex-pub, I’ll wager, with huge chandeliers in the modern 'Look, we’ve poshed it up!’ style, and a nice, airy, tiled feel. Don’t take your deaf mother there; though perhaps we can take that as read, and I’ll only mention it where that isn’t the case. The menu talks a terrific game, and I fancied pretty much everything on it, especially the starters. It took about 15 minutes to settle on the winter vegetables with a deep-fried duck egg, then I changed my mind at the last minute, quite frantically, as if I were deciding whether or not to nuke Cuba. Instead, I had the chorizo and goat’s cheese salad (£6).
Avalon – review in full>>

By Janet Harmer

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