The Observer
16 January
Jay Rayner lets his instincts rule at the Hartley Bar and Dining Rooms, London

The dish was listed as "braised pig's head, honey roast pork belly, scallops, champ and cabbage". It was the floozy of dishes, its skirt hitched far higher over the knee than is strictly necessary, and I am a man of base instincts. The presence of that dish on the menu at the Hartley, a gastropub just south of London's Tower Bridge, was reassuring. Its commitment to serious meats is evidence that gastropubs can still be what they originally were: eccentric ventures of character, set up by people with a commitment to good food served outside the restaurant setting. No, it's not exactly pub food, but it has a solid, big-fisted feel which suits the solid, big-fisted surroundings. (Meal for two with wine and service £65)


The Daily Telegraph
15 January
Heston Blumenthal's Hind's Head in Bray, Berkshire, leaves Belinda Richardson asking whether it's the start of a retro-food fad

The menu is short and simple, with a choice of about six dishes per course. All of them are fairly old-fashioned and not one of them is vegetarian. I decide to kick off with the potted shrimps... which are more Thousand Island dressing in colour than Morecambe Bay brown and taste ever so slightly of Shipham's Paste. Any shortfalls with the starter are made up a million times over by the mains. The Lancashire hotpot is the finest example of it I've ever eaten. Not so with the trifle, though. The traditional sponge cake supposedly soaked in sherry or white wine doesn't taste as if it has even sat in the same room as a bottle of alcohol. But we eat it all, and the treacle tart has us singing for seconds. Is this the start of a retro-food fad? One small step back in time could mean many steps forward for mankind.
(Sunday lunch for two, excluding drinks and coffee, £50)


The Sunday Times
16 January
AA Gill wishes he'd gone to Waitrose instead after a trip to Osteria dell'Arancio on the King's Road in London

An osteria is the simplest form of Italian eatery, really just a kitchen with a table, and if it were simply brilliant and beautifully made, then Osteria dell'Arancio would be okay. But you could cobble together 80% of this from Waitrose without taking your coat off, and what arrived was decidedly meagre. The mixed charcuterie was ordinary and ungenerous. The spaghetti would have been fine if you had made it for your kid's tea, but in a restaurant was a bit sweet and swamped in a too-insistent tomatoey sauce. (One out of five stars. Prices, £8-£14)


The Guardian
15 January
Victor Lewis-Smith is less than amused with the fare at Morangie House in Tain, Ross-shire

The hotel boasts two restaurants - the Garden ("providing an informal and relaxed setting for lunch or dinner") and Cousteau's ("serving local produce, particularly seafood") and to be honest, I'm not exactly sure which one I ate in. Not that it really mattered, because just as the interior design is a homage to a Scottish past that never really existed, so the panoply of menus thrust in to my hands all seemed determined to re-create a long-gone gastronomic era that should never have existed.

For the first time since I began writing about restaurants (decades), I actually saw on a menu the words "duck … l'orange", a misguided dish from the post-war era that I refuse to eat not only for aesthetic reasons, but on moral grounds. If only the menu had also listed brown Windsor soup, then I'd have known that this was an elaborate hoax, and that Jeremy Beadle would soon be appearing to tell me, "Don't worry - it's all been a joke."