The Times
Jay Rayner struck gastronomic gold at a venture firmly in the traditional “functional genre” of Chinese restaurants, with a relatively short selection of dim sum that are served beyond the traditional lunchtime, via ‘afternoon tea’ when “pan-fried cuttlefish cake and soupy xiao long bao are a far better option than marzipan-heavy Battenberg”, and into the evening.
Beyond dim sum, the roasted meats were a highlight: “crispy pork belly is properly rendered so the skin has a shattering crunch”, and Cantonese roast duck was especially good. Only salt and pepper pork chop slightly missed the mark, being “a little too polite and well-mannered for its own good”.
Best of all was “an extraordinary dish of fat, black morel mushrooms, halved and then seemingly gene-spliced with minced pork, plump with garlic and ginger, so that the stuffing clings to their underside. They are then stir-fried with the crispest of new season asparagus.” Jay will be back: “Quality shouts its name when you stumble upon it.”
Jay Rayner - 2026-07-26The Times
Giles Coren headed to newish waterside restaurants at the western and eastern extremes of London, starting off at the former in a “gorgeous old mid-Victorian clocktower” overlooking the Thames at Richmond (in what he archly calls “deepest Surrey”) from the team behind Gold in Notting Hill.
The vista here was “breathtaking, like being in the Cap d’Antibes”, he said, while the food defied his adage that the quality of the cooking in a restaurant “tends to be inversely proportional to the quality of the view”. His main from the Mediterranean menu was chargrilled squid with lemon, chilli and rocket – “a River Café dish that is not quite there yet but was perfectly okay. And with the difference that, unlike at the RC, you can actually see the river while you’re eating it.”
Banquet 88 is an “extremely ‘Hong Kong dim sum canteen’” by the marina at St Kathrine Docks, and here Giles found cooking that “doesn’t quite measure up to the hype”. “It was fine,” he conceded, before listing numerous shortcomings, such as dumpling casings thicker than ideal; crispy red rice cheung fung “like pink condoms full of Jiff-bag filler”; crystal scallop dumplings that fell apart on contact with chopsticks; big chunks of calamari “blandly beer-battered and piled up like onions rings”; and “chewy, oversweet” char sui iberico pork that was also “weirdly slimy”. Dear oh dear.
Giles Coren - 2026-09-13
