Restaurant reviews
There’s a type of restaurant. It takes a classic local cuisine, recreates it in a bijou corner of London in a comfortable dining room that looks like the chocolate-box version of the old local restaurants where the cuisine originated, perfects the classic dishes, then doubles the pricetag and tops it with a winelist hefty with …
Porthgain is a tiny harbour village tucked into a little rocky cove on the north Pembrokeshire coast. It feels like the middle of nowhere on a wet weekday evening in March (Pembrokeshire is like the forgotten version of Cornwall) and so it’s odd to walk into through the battered little door of The Shed down …
Brown’s Hotel is a lovely place, a cosy inn nestled in the estuary village of Laugharne on the coast of Carmarthenshire. Like the village, the pub is closely associated with Dylan Thomas, indeed it was basically his local. And I think the man liked a beer. They’ve modernised since then, with handsome wood furniture and …
Annwn might be a bit of a marmite restaurant: some will love it, others will leave bemused. For the record, we loved it, but that’s because it ticks all our culinary buttons. Chef Matt Powell cares deeply about place and provenance, loves using obscure and unfamiliar local and foraged ingredients, isn’t scared of strong flavours, …
Barang is a Cambodian restaurant residency upstairs at the Globe in Borough Market, although apparently they’re hoping to be opening permanently – probably in Soho – later in 2026. There’s not a lot of Cambodian eateries in the UK, even though it shares a lot of ingredients, techniques and dishes with the surrounding SE Asian …
