What's on the Menu? – A round-up of the latest restaurant reviews

Bloomberg, 16 January
Richard Vines visits Bocca di Lupo, 12 Archer Street, London W1, & Terroirs, 5 William IV Street, London WC2

A restaurant serving delicious and reasonably priced Italian food, with a wine list that is both exciting and ungreedy, should be a winning formula whatever the economy is doing. Right now, it looks like a stroke of genius. Bocca di Lupo, or Mouth of the Wolf, in London's Soho is buzzing. The tables are crammed in, as you might expect. It's better still to book at the counter, tapas-bar style, and watch chef Jacob Kennedy and his team create regional dishes such as bone marrow, Barolo and radicchio risotto (from Piedmont) or tuna carpaccio with oranges, capers and pine nuts (from Tuscany).
Bocca di Lupo & Terroirs >>

Metro, 20 January
Marina O'Loughlin visits Avista, Millennium Hotel, Grosvenor Swuare, London W1

Michele Granziera, formerly second in command at lushly upmarket Zafferano in Knightsbridge, is a talented chef. And, as is the way with talented guys in today's London, he's ended up taking the corporate dollar, settling in yet another of the capital's luxury hotels, The Millennium in Grosvenor Square. Well, who could afford to do it any other way? There have been a lot of high-profile openings recently with an Italian flavour, perfect for these crunchy times: you get the glitz without the super-stratospheric prices attached to the Francophone joints.
Avista - review in full >>

Evening Standard, 21 January
Rowan Moore visits The Bombay Brasserie, Courtfield Close, Courtfield Road, London SW7

It's the early Eighties. The Jewel in the Crown, a TV series about the dying years of the Raj, is grabbing the ratings. In the cinema Gandhi and David Lean's A Passage to India play. India changes from backpackers' paradise to dream destination for the more adventurous Sloane Ranger. The subcontinent is in fashion, and part of its charm to the British, relieved of colonial guilt by the still-young Thatcher government, is that they can permit themselves nostalgia for the days of empire. Indians are mostly too polite to make them change their minds. In South Kensington the Bombay Brasserie is launched, a deliberate departure from the normal curry house and its formulaic hierarchies of hot-ness, korma, bhuna, Madras, vindaloo. The menu is considered, changing, delicate, surprising. The décor is cane and palms and ceiling fans evoke a place where you might help the sun over the horizon with a chota peg or two. Flock wallpaper is out.
The Bombay Braserie - review in full >>

Time Out, 22 January
Charmaine Mok visits Fish & Grill, 48-50 South End, Croydon

Fish & Grill - review in full >>

By Janet Harmer

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