Moaning about Bookings. Plaudits for Roe & Camille. Plus Critics & More.

Jimi enjoys great Caribbean in Brockley. Grace celebrates Basque greatness at Ibai. Hayler loves Cornus. Tom discovers Portuguese home cooking.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to September. I can’t believe the summer is over and that we are on the downhill run to autumn and (whisper it) Christmas. I hope some of you are still enjoying sunshine and warm temperatures somewhere. I’d love to hear about a great place you ate or drank over the summer. Hit reply and let me know.

I had two fantastic lunches last week. One at Henri in Covent Garden and the other at Marceline in Canary Wharf. Full reviews to follow in the next couple of weeks.

This week’s feature is a Chat Over Lunch with Charlotte Ivers, the restaurant critics for the Sunday Times. (The first in the series, with Nick Lander, is here.) I’m really excited to share it with you. I’m still testing publication days, so it will be out on Thursday.

Okay. Enough housekeeping. Let’s get to this week’s update:

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Tyrannical Bookings?

Margaret Mitchell suggests in the Spectator that restaurants and diners have gone overboard on bookings. With the best places filling up weeks in advance, Mitchell laments the seeming demise of the walk-in. I disagree. At a time when the hospitality industry is under more cost pressure than ever before and having a hard time finding good people, anything that aids their planning and cost management is good for restaurant and diner in the long run. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

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Roe & Camille Make Michelin

Michelin now adds restaurants to its eponymous Guide throughout the year. The August list of additions for the UK and Ireland includes two places that I have previously reviewed and added to my own guide: Roe and Camille.

Here is the Michelin write-up of Roe, which I find odd, as it paints Roe as an east-end pasty spot rather than fine dining. For me, that’s dead wrong. And here is their take on Camille.

Michelin-worthy beef at Camille.

End of Tasting Menus, part II: Dumb & Dumber

Tanya Gold weighs in on the item I featured last week. She asserts that tasting menus have already gone out of fashion (wrong) and makes a link between tasting menus and chef suicides. I don’t know why Gold winds me up so much, or why I continue reading her stuff. She did overt anti-American back in May, and has let loose with some weird and wild stuff periodically ever since. And yet somehow, I keep clicking. Still, this is one of her dumbest takes yet. I flag it only so that you might studiously ignore it.

Critics Wrap-Up

✍🏻 indicates a review that you should read for the writing.
🍽️ indicates a place that sounds excellent and is probably worth a try.

• Jimi Famurewa (Standard) reviews Mauby, a Caribbean joint in Brockley. “It is unique, charming and, in its own minor key way, quietly game-changing.”

• 🍽️ Grace Dent (Guardian) joins the parade to Ibai, the super-hot Basque steakhouse in Farringdon. Except, as Grace reports, “You could, in fact, eat here without so much as touching a steak, or even meat, because it has a complex, fully formed menu of Basque and French ideas, featuring octopus, turbot, king crab and red prawns, or carabineros.” … “Don’t write Ibai off as a steakhouse for city boys; it’s much, much more than that. This hulking Basque pleasure palace signals that opulence and living it large are very much still ‘in’.”

  

  Steak is a highlight, but not the only one. (Photo by Ibai via Instagram,)

• Tom Parker Bowles (Mail on Sunday) heads to Notting Hill to check out Sporting Club de London, “a cross between Portuguese community centre, canteen and impromptu dancehall.”

• Andy Hayler (independent reviewer) is the latest to visit Cornus and loves it. “Cornus offers a very appealing menu, skilled cooking of gorgeous ingredients and charming service – what more do you want from a restaurant?”

• Catherine Hanly (Hot Dinners) returns to Lyle’s in Shoreditch. “The regularly changing menu also means that fans can pop in on a weekly basis, should they want, and know that they won't be having the same dish twice.”

• 🍽️ Jules Pearson (LOTI) tries Pizzaro, the brand new tapas bar from José Pizzaro in Bermondsey. “It’s open from 8am for breakfast and, rather unusually, this breakfast menu is still available at dinner. This means, YES, you can get the egg and bacon sandwich with pineapple ketchup at 10pm if you wish. Other incredible treats available all day and night include various tasty tortillas; a whole devilled eggs menu with toppings like sobrasada or smoked eel; and best of all, a beef sandwich with Ermesenda cheese and green pepper.”

• Jules also reviews Half Cut, the Islington wine bar.

• Amanda David (Chatting Food) reviews 40 Dean Street in Soho, and suggests that it’s the perfect place “to take a break from the bustle of Soho in this welcoming little gem of a restaurant.”

• Charlotte Ivers (Sunday Times) was in North Yorkshire. Jay Rayner (Observer) goes to Stoke-on-Trent for dumplings. Tim Hayward (FT) was in Aldeburghe. William Sitwell (Telegraph) was in Tenbury Wells. Marina O’Loughlin (independent critic) was in France. Giles Coren (Times) reviews a sausage roll place in a motorway services.

Thanks so much for reading. I hope you have a great week. Please subscribe if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you here later this week for my interview with Sunday Times restaurant critic Charlotte Ivers.