Dinner by Heston Blumenthal continues to impress

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal continues to impress the food critics, with both the Sunday Times' AA Gill and the Independent's Tracey Macleod giving it top marks.

Housed in the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge, Dinner offers a contemporary menu of dishes inspired by historic British food.

Gill says that Blumenthal offers "an exemplary menu of perfect balance and brilliance". "The preparation and the concept manage to be a very British contrariness, both comforting and surprising, inventive but familiar. This food is unthreatening but commands attention and there isn't a mouthful that doesn't insist on the next mouthful," he says.

Meanwhile MacLeod says Dinner is the missing link between the labour-intensive complexity of contemporary haute cuisine, and the produce-led simplicity of modern British pioneers like Fergus Henderson and Mark Hix.

Writing in the Guardian, John Lanchester says Non Solo Vino, Chesterfield, is a pioneering wine shop that doubles up as a restaurant - and a really good Italian restaurant at that.

In time for Valentine's Day and with romance in mind, Zoe Williams heads to date central and finds herself utterly seduced by the food at Hakkasan Mayfair.

Finally, after drinking too much to remember eating at Hawksmoor Seven Dials, Giles Coren goes back and discovers he loves the food.

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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