What's on the Menu? – A round-up of the latest restaurant reviews
The Independent, 1 May
Tracey Macleod says that while there's nothing dazzling about the food at Gordon Ramsay's latest incarnation of Pétrus, London SW1, it is an ideal venue for a special occasion
The Sunday Times, 2 May
AA Gill visits seafood eaterie Halibut in Buckingham and finds a restaurant offering great food and exceptional value
Halibut is a small shop front, with a takeaway fish-and-chip business downstairs and a dining room upstairs. The wallpaper is the same as at Olivomare in Belgravia. The menu is short and has a flourish of international sophistication. Fish soup, oysters, Arbroath smokies with cream and parmesan, prawn and squid ceviche, are all offered for starters. I had the gbegiri soup from Nigeria, made with beans and dried fish and finished with beautiful red palm oil and smoked paprika. The palm-oil nut was taken by slaves to Brazil, where it is now the totemic ingredient in the great stews of Bahia state; a rich, thick, unctuous oil that has also been refined to be the murderous, cholesterol-heavy heart of fast food. But here, at home in Buckingham, it was wonderful. The soup, farinaceous and wide-mouthed, nicely monoglot, with the heat of chillies. (Rating: food 3/5, atmosphere 4/5)
Halibut - review in full >>
The Observer, 2 May
Jay Rayner finds an invigorating setting and excellent food at Bristol Lido, which he says will soon be making waves across the city
Sometimes when I sit down at a table I know that a restaurant is right - from the mood of the diners, from the cheeriness of the waiters, from the writing of the menu. Especially the menu, and the one at Bristol's Lido is a corker. Partly it is down to the words "wood roast", which - like "cotton-sheeted" and "sun-kissed" - come sodden with promise. It is hard to imagine the ingredient which would not benefit from wood roasting. Here, on a menu which takes much of its inspiration from southern Europe, and many of its ingredients from its own kitchen garden, wood roasting is reserved for quail and venison, fish and potatoes, and that marvellous bread. Flavours are big and the essentials carefully managed. They make very fine pasta, for example, of the soft, silky, egg-yellow type, used here in ravioli of venison. (Meal for two, including wine and service, £80)
Bristol Lido - review in full >>
The Times, 1 May
Giles Coren is impressed by Fig, London N1, where Danish chef Christoffer Hruskova has taken molecular gastronomy and made it cosy and local
And then, "POW!", the menu: "veal sweetbread & milk skin - salsify and onions"; "pickled vegetable salad & onion broth - wild herbs and smoked bone marrow"; "Dorset black bream - cabbage in textures & watercress"; Cumbrian Herdwick lamb rump - sweetbread, artichoke and lavender oil"… Heston who? This is molecular gastronomy gone cosy and local. If chef Christoffer Hruskova, a Dane, had tried to serve this stuff in 1997 - when Blumenthal himself was still banging out steak and chips - he would have been taken out and burnt for a witch. Some of it works really, really well. I'd never had smoked bone marrow before, and while it didn't necessarily sit all that well on coils of shaved pickled beetroot, carrot and courgette, ramped up as if on stilts above a pale pinkish, sweet-sour, vegetable consommé, it was extraordinary stuff.
Fig - review in full >>
By Kerstin KÁ¼hn
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