The Daily Telegraph, 4 August
Jasper Gerard visits The River Café, London W6

Helena Bonham Carter would not be seduced: this is a restaurant without a view. The Thames is in flood, yet from London's River Café you can't see the "river". But then, what would it add? The Arno it ain't. Across the alleged "river" is a block of what look like Prescottian starter flats, no doubt marketed by estate agents as penthouses. This is what diners gaze upon, along with Volkswagen Polos in the car park and a charmless patch of grass skimpier than Victoria Beckham's skirt. As for "café", at £95 a head this is a decidedly superior caff - and the food is as fabulous as the prices. Close your eyes to savour ravioli stuffed with zucchini flowers and this could be a languorous luncheon by a Ligurian lagoon.

The Times, 4 August
Giles Coren visits Wild Honey, London W1

And so my quest for a bad restaurant goes on – somewhere I can properly crap on, sending you into the weekend glowing with relief that you are not a restaurateur. It’s been months now since I last did a stinker. It’s unheard of. But I just seem to keep striking gold. This week, I suppose you will say, I have not tried anything like hard enough. For I went to Wild Honey, new offshoot of Arbutus, the Frith Street place I raved about last year, where Anthony Demetre weaves his slow-cook magic and straddles better than anyone else the boundary between new techniques and old recipes. But what I was hoping for, you see, was a classic example of “overstretch”, leading to a massive disappointment by comparison with Arbutus. And if not that, then at the very least to discover that one can have too much of a good thing. And also I do go to Arbutus a hell of a lot, and the menu doesn’t change all that much, so there was a chance I would find the menu all a bit familiar and tedious.
Wild Honey – The Times review in full >>

The Independent, 5 August
Terry Durack visits Bincho Yakitori, London SE1

It has been a long time between barbecues. Since 28 April, to be precise. It's hard to believe that back then I was cooking two or three barbecues a week. Then summer set in, with its attendant rain, squalls and floods. Now my inner Australian misses the smoky, blokey atmosphere of a good barbie, and craves the thrill of the grill. So naturally I head for the new Bincho Yakitori in the Oxo Tower. It may be Japanese, but it's full of cold beer and men in aprons chucking prawns on the barbie, so it's close enough. Recently opened by Dominic Ford (who also runs Tamesa @ Oxo on the same floor, and The Butcher and Grill in Battersea), Ronnie Truss and chef David Miney (pictured, left), Bincho is based on the izakaya concept, the closest thing Japan has to a pub. It even looks and feels a bit pubby, with its warm, woody floors, tables and columns. Windowside tables get dress-circle views of the Thames at its most polished platinum, while others face a line-up of six smoky grills on the opposite wall, where Tokyo master chef Hidenori Ohata oversees the delicate art of yakitori and kushiyaki.
Bincho Yakitori - The Independent review in full >>
 
The Observer, 5 August
Jay Rayner visits Donna Margherita, London SW11

Recently I received an e-mail from Dan Leppard, who is to baking what Lewis Hamilton is to Formula One. What Leppard doesn't know about the miraculous interplay of live yeast and flour isn't worth knowing. He was the first pastry chef at Fergus Henderson's St John and has written some of this country's most important texts on bread-making. (He also happens to be a talented photographer, as anybody who has a copy of Giorgio Locatelli's magisterial Made in Italy will know; Leppard shot the debauched food porn that illustrates its pages. This must surely contravene some protectionist EU policy, forbidding people from being too talented in too many disparate professions.) Leppard was getting in touch to tell me that he had recently been directed to what he had been told was a source of near-perfect pizzas. 'I've been there, too,' he said. 'And I have to agree.' This was remarkable news, not least because the restaurant in question, Donna Margherita, was not some grand, flouncy gastro palace, but a humble trattoria on a scuffed and smudged stretch of Lavender Hill in south London.
Donna Margherita - The Guardian review in full >>

Are You Ready To Order?
Jan Moir visits The Larder Restaurant, London EC1

If you live in Clerkenwell, surely the last thing you need is another restaurant. However - you lucky things - there is a new restaurant in your neighbourhood, and a very, very good one it is, too. Already I am jealous, although not jealous enough to move anywhere within a two mile radius of Smithfield market just down the road, and its most terrifying employee, Janet Meat Porter. The Larder is one of those aircraft hangar, chrome and wood, semi-industrial London restaurants that look a bit risky from the outside. Should you dare venture in? And if you do, will it be all lukewarm coffee with an inch of skin, leather panini spread with woolly tomatoes and a lot of bad attitude? Or will it be a menu full of kidneys and 20 different ways with foie gras, most of them involving foams in one shape or another? Relax, for I can assure you that the Larder is neither a coffee shop with ideas above its station, nor a restaurant with an obscure, organ-based fetish. It is however, a very good place to be.
The Larder Restaurant – Are You Ready to Order? review in full >>