Bloomberg, 7 December
Richard Vines at Viet Grill

Vietnamese cooking is one of those cuisines yet to have much impact in London, where streets are lined with Indian and Thai restaurants catering to the British love of spicy dishes. If you have only a passing acquaintance with Vietnamese food, it's tempting to think of it as a hybrid of Chinese and Thai, only lacking the chili kick of the latter. If it were a person, it would be post-rehab Amy Winehouse, reliable and never offensive.
Viet Grill - Read the review in full here >>

Time Out, 5 December
Jenni Muir at Le Café Anglais

Gushing praise from the Evening Standard. Showcased in the Financial Times. Rowley Leigh's Le Café Anglais has immediately become the hot place in town, and as hard to book as the Ivy/Caprice-type stalwarts it seeks to emulate - unless you want to come for midday, midweek lunch. It's like 1990s Quaglino's fever all over again, only less exciting.The décor makes Conran's most restrained efforts look flashy too. If the point was to make Le Café Anglais look as though it had always sat on the second floor of dreary Whiteleys shopping centre, then they've nearly got it right.

The mysterious motivation for just why Kate Middleton withdrew from canoeing across the Channel earlier this year finally becomes clear. Forget leaky tubs paddled by buxom gals, forget even the magnificent and finally up-to-speed Eurostar. La Bouchée proves that to reach France you need only brave the West London traffic. With its wooden floors, huge oil paintings and several blackboards, it was like stepping into one of those little cafés you can still find on the Left Bank.
La Bouchée - read the review in full here >>

Metro, 5 December
Marina O’Loughlin at Haozhan

I went to newish Chinatown outfit Haozhan a few weeks ago and thought it was, well, OK. Then the praise started arriving. It seems to have garnered more column inches than it has any right to, most of them peppered with quite extraordinary levels of praise. They're proudly plastered on the restaurant's windows – well, they would be. Had all these dudes been to the same restaurant I had?
Haozhan - read the review in full here >>

By Kerstin Kühn
 

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