Evening Standard, 25 June
Rachel Cooke says the food and the décor at Twotwentytwo, The Landmark, 222 Marylebone Road, London NW1, lack imagination
This is bog-standard hotel fare: chicken liver parfait and prawn cocktail to start, fish cakes and burgers as main courses. Now, we all love the classics, but only if they are done well. My starter of beef carpaccio (£8) was too cold — it had clearly been whipped straight out of the fridge — and the eight slices were spookily similar in size. Only guessing, but I bet Mr Chef didn’t hand-slice this lot. For a main course, I ordered a “classic” Caesar salad (£11.50). In this instance, the word classic was intended to denote a lack of grilled chicken, or prawns, but to me, it was one huge provocation.
Twotwentytwo - review in full >>
Metro, 1 July
Marina O’Loughlin enjoys some excellent Spanish food at Caleya Ibérica, 195 Great Portland Street, London W1, but is disappointed the restaurant does not live up to its original
Everything I eat is among the best Spanish food to be found in London: creamy croquetas studded with Ibérico de Bellota, a fabada that should make the one I had recently in a top-rated Spanish restaurant blanch with shame. The rice with the chicken, a decent, gamey bird, is sticky and shiny with excellent stock and fragrant with booze, draped with silky, peeled piquillo peppers, its core a perfect chalky bite. But none of it is as glorious as the original versions, and that's not just rose-tinted recollection. The chicken comes on like Tweetie Pie compared with the Asturian Foghorn Leghorn; the rice is a degree or so underpowered; the famous rice pudding is soupier and gloopier.
Caleya Ibérica – review in full >>
Time Out, 2 July
Guy Dimond says although the kitchen is still finding its feet, he is impressed by the Sicilian food on offer at Caponata, 3-4 Delancey Street, London NW1
While breadcrumb-stuffed squid was a mere few morsels of tentacle and body lost in a pool of tomato sauce, another starter was large enough to pass for a main course. These large arancini were excellent: three balls of saffron risotto deep-fried to give a crisp, orange-like skin, the centres filled with molten mozzarella, ham, or beef ragout. Sicilian pastries are well represented, though the particular ones we tried were slightly overbaked. A cannolo (which looks a bit like a brandy snap) is filled with sweetened soft cheese; a ‘beignet’ looked at first like a tiny éclair, until you bite through the chocolate sauce to the biscuits beneath. And the Caponata version of cassata was more like a tiny slice of baked cheesecake, an unusual variant of this dish that I’d previously eaten in Catania in the east of Sicily.
Caponata – review in full >>