Category: Fine dining

White linen, silver service, but not in Mr Michelin's book

Review: Ynyshir, mid Wales

Simple onion broth

Ynyshir absolutely blew me away. Which is amazing, because until I tried to find a promising place for a meal out in mid Wales I had never even heard of it; one of the scant handful of Welsh restaurants to have quietly won itself a Michelin star. It’s not only me. At the time of …

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Review: The Wilderness, Birmingham

Skull. Nice

The Wilderness is an edgy little restaurant occupying a space in Birmingham Open Media, itself an odd little art & media space down a grungy back street behind New Street Station. So: location convenient but not very pretty. It’s a tiny space and you dine on small round cafe tables, which is a bit squashy …

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Review: Midsummer House, Cambridge

Sweet scallop

Daniel Clifford’s Michelin 2-star dining room in Cambridge has been on our hit-list for aaaaaages. It’s one of the stealthiest restaurants in the country. You walk across Midsummer Common and then stand there in faint bewilderment. There’s a pub. There’s a small detached Victorian house alongside. And there’s nothing else this side of the river. …

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Review: Hedone, Chiswick

Magic crab at Hedone

Other restaurants have no trouble putting up a sample menu on their website, even if it almost certainly won’t be what you eat on the night. It just gives you an idea of the kind of thing you might find. The clue is in the word “sample”. That’s too forthcoming for Hedone. They don’t even …

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Review: &samhoud places, Amsterdam

Gilded egg - metaphor?

Some people just want to watch the world burn. Why else would you start the name of your restaurant with a piece of punctuation? There’s a word for that, and it begins with “pre-” and ends in “-tentious”. I was actually amazed that websites like Google Maps and Trip Advisor were quite happy with the …

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