The Sunday Times
Camilla Long fancied a change from Italian restaurants so searched out the sort of “hidden foodie place that people talk about” – in this case, the UK’s sole Appalachian restaurant. Not a good move. Appalachian cuisine – if it exists at all – is, she assured us, “mostly weeds and roadkill… basically anything you’ve lashed out of the trees or scratched out of the thin frontier soil”.
The ingredients she tasted were a little less outré than suggested – butter-brined chicken, pork neck, sausage, duck hearts – but she reckoned every dish was either badly over- or under-seasoned. Then she widened her assault, starting with the open kitchen in which she could see “every single ingredient being ghoulishly fiddled with, frotted and fingered” by staff who “look as if they’ve just crawled out of a tent somewhere near the M25”. Her fellow diners were just as bad: foodies all, each one either a “tattooed lunk in a lumberjack shirt or a perfect long-nailed child Asian grasping a phone”.
Nor did Camilla like the “strange and hasty” décor of “the first place I’ve been where the loos are nicer than the restaurant, which is cramped, cold and without personality”. Clearly she won’t be back.
Camilla Long - 2026-06-28The Times
Fresh from a critical mauling by Camilla Long in the Sunday Times last week, Appalachia bounced back with two rapturous reviews this week, Jay Rayner kicking off by hailing it as a restaurant that makes “a delicious kind of sense” of the disparate culinary traditions of the United States, “which it plunders with a careless, goofy joy”.
Jay was full of praise for chef Ali Borer's spiced smoked sausage with a pokey blue cheese slaw, his two-inch-thick smoked pork chop with bitter collard greens, and his star dish – a seafood omelette “like a special from some San Francisco diner, bowing deeply towards Japan. That one dish is a reason for coming to Appalachia.”
The place put new life into the “London American restaurant” tradition that Jay traces from the Great American Disaster burger bar in Fulham (1970), via Joe Allen in Covent Garden (1977), to the more recent Christopher’s, Big Easy and Sunday in Brooklyn. “Now there’s Appalachia. Happy birthday, America. Your politics might be messy, but your food really can be great. Again.”
Jay Rayner - 2026-07-05The Guardian
Grace Dent was even more enthusiastic than Jay Rayner, hailing Appalachia as "one of the absolutely hottest, most interesting spots in town" – a place where the butter-brined half chicken with miso grits and black pepper gravy "reminded me of nothing so much as Sunday dinner on performance steroids".
The converted pub premises were not particularly comfortable and had the feeling of making do – which seemed appropriate for a kitchen that "strives to waste nothing, possibly in the great Appalachian tradition of being cut off from anything so much as resembling a Tesco Metro".
Chef Ali Borer, Grace said, "is cooking the best Appalachian food in the UK, not least because he’s cooking almost the only fried green tomato salad on this side of the Atlantic. I can’t pretend his place isn’t weird, but the weirdness is delicious."
Grace Dent - 2026-07-05
