The Sun Inn, Felmersham

If it's true that some of the country's most exciting and dynamic country gastropubs are the product of their surroundings - the lush farmlands and rivers of Bowland that supply the Parker's Arms, for example, the or the orchards, woodlands and fields of wild game that provide the Royal Oak Whatcote with their astonishing seasonal variety - then the downside of this reliance on super-locality is that the places themselves can be quite hard to get to. Often many miles from the nearest rail station, connected only by two-a-day rural bus routes - if at all - it's a real job for the average city-dweller (and, by extension, non car-owner) to be persuaded that anywhere is worth a £100+ train journey and a £50+ cab, even if, as in the case of both places mentioned above, it really, really is worth the effort.

So the Sun Inn, Felmersham is a much easier sell. Bedford is 40m from St Pancras on a train journey (at the weekend at least) that cost £13.30 return. From Bedford, the 12-minute cab ride costs £17 (they have Uber as well which is probably even cheaper) and you will be greeted in their cozy, log-fired bar - should you wish - with a pint of Westbrooks Laguna pale ale (4.6%ABV) which costs £4.90 a pint. You really don't have to travel far out of the city to rediscover what true value really means. And I haven't even mentioned the price of the evening meal yet.

Before that, though, a little mention of the rooms above the pub. The particular suite we stayed in, "Dawn", is one of the most impressively luxurious spaces I've had the pleasure to overnight in since l'Enclume. Occupying a number of levels of a converted barn, downstairs is a kitchenette and living room with sofa bed, and round the corner a giant bathroom with walk-in shower bigger than my entire kitchen. Up some spot-lit stairs and a wonderfully quirky hand-crafted banister is a giant loft bedroom with a copper claw-foot bath at the foot of a second flight of stairs. Attention to detail is everywhere, from the way the spotlights come on to guide your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, to the lovely bright white soft towels to the USB-C sockets next to all the beds. But the most impressive achievement is that staircase - my photos can't do it justice, but the way the skirting board matches the contours of the 17th century stone walls is an absolute joy, a woodworking masterclass.

Anyway I expect you'll be wanting to know about dinner. First up was house bread and butter, served warm in little napkin swaddling. To go with this and in fact everything else that followed we'd chosen a bottle of an organic Penedes cava for £33, which if it sounds good value (and it was) it's worth pointing out there were 2 bottles of fizz cheaper available. Whites started at £28 and reds at £33 - the commitment to quality at value really does extend to every bit of the operation here.

Starter was confit duck from their own farm (and lovely stuff it was too, not too fatty and not at all dry, with a nice soft bite and bursting with flavour) with butter beans. On top, breadcrumbs provided texture and a healthy handful of winter herbs brought all the flavours together. An easily enjoyable, rustic starter which felt right at home in this ancient, candle-lit pub.

Next, leeks with brown shrimp, which was, like the duck, seasoned perfectly (not always a given - confit duck can easily be overpoweringly salty), boldly flavoured and full of a nice range of textures. The monks beard was nice and crunchy, and the beurre blanc soaked into the leeks in the way that it always should. Fortunately we still had some bread left over by this point to soak up the leftover sauce - it would have been a real shame not to.

Main was Hereford beef, again from their own farm, served as a giant chunk of slow-cooked brisket with layers of melting fat and soft cow. In all honesty the accompanying noodles and satay sauce didn't sit quite right with the theme of the evening - I don't usually mind the odd Asian influence here and there but the satay was rather sweet and the noodles soft and a bit redundant - but as the main event was the beef, and the beef was great, then they just about got away with it. Chargrilled PSB could have done with a couple more minutes as well, but the fact I polished my plate off despite being pretty full by this point probably tells you everything you need to know.

For some reason - blame the organic cava - I have no picture of the next course but I remember it vividly because it was brilliant. A cute little miniature apple pie, all glossy and sweet and full of nice rich apple, was served alongside a scoop of soy sauce ice cream, which I am pleased to report is an experiment which passed with flying colours. Apparently the kitchen had been testing different flavours and someone suggested soy almost as a joke, and yet it turned out to be great. It helped, too, of course, that they'd used one of those fancy ice cream machines so the texture was smooth as silk.

Cheeses - a stilton, a local soft rind, Golden Cross goats and a Brillat-Savarin were all perfect temperature and - in the case of the Brillat - soft to the point of liquid, but not necessarily in a bad way. And if we are to take them at their word that this is a normal portion size (and I have no reason not to), £10 for all this cheese is - again - real value.

And speaking of value, two final points. Firstly, the five-course tasting menu, made intelligently with local ingredients and with generosity of flavour and spirit, is £55. That's just over £10 a course, and I don't care how cynical you are about restaurant pricing, but that's a bargain. Also, they cutely say "We absolutely will not add 12.5% to your bill" on the menu which is either a principled stand against service charges or a coded way of suggesting you add it on yourself if you can afford it, but either way pretty commendable.

Which all adds up to a day and a night at the Sun Inn being an absolute, God-given joy. I'm a sucker for ancient, low-beamed pubs at the best of times, and I would have had the time of my life in Felmersham if I'd just had a burger and chips in the bar (they do this too - I bet it's great), but sit it alongside a nicely proportioned dining room serving one of the last great tasting menu bargains in the country, and give the option of those astonishing rooms to sleep it off in after, and you have all the ingredients for a proper hotel and dining destination. For anyone wanting a foodie weekend away on a budget, somewhere that feels timeless, rural and ancient but is barely an hour from London, this should be right at the top of your list. A very special little place indeed.

9/10

I was invited to the Sun Inn and didn't see a bill. However, the 2-bed suite we stayed in starts at £225/night, which if you say as £56.25pp is a far more attractive idea. All other prices, including transport, above. Sorry about the slightly rubbish photos, it was too dark in the dining room for my big camera!

Koyal, Surbiton

I rarely make any journey without the promise of a nice meal. This applies to short breaks, long-haul holidays and day trips alike - I have no interest in beaches, ski slopes, cruise ships or campsites, and although I'm very partial to a long walk in the countryside when the weather allows, how much better is that long walk with a gastropub lunch at the end of it? Or at the start of it. Or at any point in-between, for that matter.

Plus there is just no point, in this country at least, relying on the weather to enjoy a day out because you have a very good chance of your plans being thwarted. No, what you need is a meal to look forward to because then even if it buckets down or blows a gale you only have to grin and bear it until it's time to eat. And then, of course, if the sun does come out, it's a nice little bonus and an excuse to have a digestif in a pub garden. I think maybe I just like pubs.

Koyal is in Surbiton, and is good enough to be worth a journey from just about anywhere but is particularly attractive for anyone who lives on the South West Trains Waterloo line (waves) and can get there in about 20 minutes flat. Their sister restaurant (or rather one of their sister restaurants), Dastaan, which opened in 2017, is a little more inaccessible by virtue of existing on some strange strip of nowheresville between Epsom and Ewell but has still, through the quality of its food offering, become a destination. I'm hoping - and very much expecting - that the same eventually happens to Koyal which was a bit quiet of a Saturday lunchtime, but as my friend pointed out, only weird food-obsessives like me go for a curry on a Saturday lunchtime. More fool them, I say.

So as the rain and the cold and the wind blew outside, we started - as you always should at high-end Indians - with a selection of papadoms and chutneys. The paps were delicate and grease-free (we particularly liked their little ridged Walkers Max-shaped crisps) and the chutneys - a smooth and tangy mango, and a deeply vegetal and gently chillified coriander - were both excellent.

Full marks to Koyal for the generous size of their pani puri, and bonus points for the flavour of them which brought in a beguiling range of flavours and textures from earthy, creamy potatoes to interesting tropical notes of pineapple and kiwi to buttery chickpea. But sometimes you can be too generous - the fist-size dimensions made them impossible to eat in the usual one dainty bite, and I don't know if you've ever tried to eat half a pastry casing filled with liquid but it tends to get quite messy. Great fun though, and as I say, impeccable otherwise.

Stone bass tikka is a dish - or variant thereof - that has appeared on many a high-end Indian restaurant menu in London over recent years, and whenever it is done well (tip: it's always done well, at least in my experience) becomes an absolute must-order. Unfortunately, this kind of advice is a bit useless at a restaurant like Koyal where more or less everything could be described as a must-order, so I'll just say that these bits of fish, brilliantly and boldly spiced, grilled delicately over coals and with crisped-up, gently fatty skin attached, were utterly perfect.

Lamb chops were similarly strikingly spiced and cleverly grilled, with just enough of the heat to give crunch but soft and yielding on the bite. And again, they were pretty much unimprovable. I know that some places go for a thicker cut on the chops so they can get a pink middle, but then those places also end up charging £20+ a chop, and sometimes you want to leave a bit of room for the rest of the menu.

What arrived next was one of those dishes that shoots straight into every single pleasure point of my brain and will stay there until the day I die. If Devon Crab Butter Garlic Masala sounds good on paper, then believe me, nothing will prepare you for the reality, a bowl of white crab meat bound with butter and spices that should in a sane world be too much - too rich, too powerfully flavoured, too heavy - and yet somehow conspires to be one of the great seafood dishes. I don't know how you'd even come up with a thing like this, never mind make it work, and yet here we are. The year it takes off your life with every scoop of the dill naan is worth it. It really is that good.

I could have left by now and died happy - a literal possibility after that butter crab - but there was one more glorious thing to enjoy. Wild boar in toddy vinegar showed the ex-Gymkhana chefs could still show a bit of game a good time, chunks of lovely soft slow-cooked meat in a spiced tomato sauce. With it, a neat bowl of saffron rice which we nearly managed to finish. I mean, come on, we did well, didn't we? Credit where credit's due.

Before I show you the bill, I do want to point out that the two of us managed to polish off a bottle of rather nice Viognier each (it was that kind of Saturday - we ended up in a tiki bar in Clapham Junction not long after) and so a more realistic price per person might be something like £70pp if you just had a beer each rather than the £112pp we conspired to rack up. But it's important to recognise that the wine list at Koyal starts at £30 a bottle, a very reasonable £8 a glass and on top of that they only ask for 10% service charge. The contrast with certain recent reviews could not be more stark.

So thank you, Koyal, for one of the best meals I can remember in many years. I enjoyed it so much in fact that I have booked Dastaan Leeds next month to coincide with a work trip up north, which I thoroughly expect to be just as stupidly good. Alongside Black Salt in Cheen (reviewed here back in 2022), also from the same team, and the aforementioned spot in Epsom/Ewell, it provides yet more evidence that London is perhaps the best place in the world for Indian food outside of India - and (whisper it), according to some people in the know, including India itself... but that's a discussion for another time. For now, just enjoy what we have, and enjoy it as much as you can. We really have never had it so good.

10/10

Lita, Marylebone

The food at Lita is very nice. I'm saying that up front because I worry that the list of things I didn't like about the place threatens to overwhelm the main message which should be that, despite everything, the food is very nice. And maybe if you went to Lita yourself, and you got a better table and didn't mind the prices and could put up with the general feeling that your presence was an inconvenience then you might have had a better time than we did. Maybe. I mean, I tried to enjoy myself, I really did.

The problems began almost immediately. Now, I appreciate that not every table in every restaurant can be the best - not everywhere is Bob Bob Ricard. But for somewhere charging as much as it does (and more on that later) Lita has some genuinely terrible places to sit, not least the two four-headers jammed into the middle of the room, one of which we were deposited at, where in a normal eating position the back of my chair was literally touching a stranger's on the table behind.

Next, the size of the tables themselves, which were pretty short of space just with four sets of wine glasses and side plates. Once the food started arriving - and it's all sharing plates, and "food comes out when it's ready" which I'm sure is very convenient for them - the dishes often threatened to tip over onto the floor. Staff made the most of it and we generally felt looked after but if ever a place needed to be a bit more realistic about the space they have, it's here.

Anyway, the food. Bread was decent, with a good amount of whipped butter just the right texture. Good bread in restaurants has become so common now I'm in danger of taking it for granted, so it's probably always worth pointing out when somewhere gets it right.

Whether by luck or design, a number of the dishes at Lita come divided by four, which was very handy for trying as many things as possible if there's four of you. These are Sicilian prawns, sweet and plump, served with olives and pickled onions, a combination that looked a bit odd on paper but in practice worked remarkably well.

Bluefin tuna came sliced thinly and dressed with red peppers and capers, and was another great example of Lita using pickled or 'condiment' ingredients alongside a premium main product. You really couldn't fault the attitude or the approach of the kitchen, but after these two small dishes plus bread we'd already spent the best part of £80.

I don't want this to turn into yet another rant about central London pricing - we've all been there before, many times - but even in 2025 the pricing at Lita stands out from the crowd, and not in a good way. And while you might expect to pay a premium for bluefin tuna or red prawns, smoked sardines cost about £7 a tin, even for pretty good ones, so how Lita arrived at the price of £19 for 3 fillets is a bit of a mystery. I mean, they were lovely - firm and meaty and full of flavour - but come on, guys. They're sardines not caviar.

And so the theme continued. Langoustine were cooked brilliantly - and the garlic butter sauce they left behind was soaked up beautifully by the house bread - but even the River Cafe would think twice about charging £52 for three tiny beasties with barely a teaspoonful of meat in each. Perhaps we were just unlucky on our visit and they'd been shafted by their supplier with small langos but if so, charge less for them, is my advice.

The thing is though, because the food was so good (and OK because this was a work lunch, we weren't paying), we were enjoying ourselves. Strozzapreti with duck ragu mightily impressed the Italian on our table, and there's no greater compliment than that (he's had some choice words to say about other high-profile Italian restaurants in the capital). Rich and glossy and packed full of slow-cooked goodness, this really was a fine plate of pasta.

I am always going to order cull yaw if I see it on the menu, even if, at £85, it significantly bumped up the bill. I've banged on about this stuff quite a bit in the past so I won't repeat myself - read up on the backstory here - but it's quite the most wonderful stuff, the flavour like a cross between lamb and Galician beef with big, bold chunks of funky fat. With it, a selection of grilled vegetables that soaked up one of those glossy reduced sauces that the top places do so well. One day I should teach myself to make one of those sauces, I'd save myself a fortune.

Next to the cull yaw I'm afraid the pork chop was a bit of a nonentity, but maybe there were just too many bits and pieces that came with it - a rare moment of overcomplication from the Lita kitchen. More of an issue, though, was the fact that it was listed on the menu at £29 for 300g and appeared on the bill as 'pork large' at a whacking £84. Annoyingly we didn't notice that until we'd left, so to this day I have no idea what's going on there. It was certainly not very 'large' - I think we had two finger-sized slices each and it had gone - it certainly looked like 300g on the plate.

Of the desserts I can only report on my rhum baba, which was literally perfect in every way - better, in fact, than the version served at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester and he's supposed to be famous for them. Others looked the part but we didn't share, so you'll have to draw your own conclusions. I certainly didn't hear any complaints from the table.

Not about the desserts, anyway. Or indeed the vast majority of the food, which with just one notable exception was considered, crafted and beautifully presented. But a few days after our lunch and once I'd had time to think about it all, it's hard to shake the impression that the attitude of Lita is that they were doing you a favour, allowing you to sit in that terrible table and charging you £84 for a small pork chop - not to mention a wine list that starts at £70 - rather than appreciating our custom very much. I note this morning that Michelin have decided to honour them with a star, so none of my whinging will matter to them one bit, but I'm afraid at £170 per person (they added on 15% service charge - well of course they did) I just expect a bit more luxury. Maybe I'm just getting old.

Anyway, no harm done, in the end, apart from to our company expense account. There's some real talent in the kitchen at Lita and they've certainly found an audience - perhaps they wouldn't have to use those awful central tables if the rest weren't already taken, so good for them. But in a town where another popular ingredient-forward bistro a couple of miles away in Soho can do a lunch menu for £29 that includes langoustine, ember-grilled flank steak and duck-fat chips, and a sticky-toffee pudding, plus endless free portions of the best bread in town, well you'll excuse me if I'm not rushing back to Lita. If you want me, I'll be in the Devonshire.

6/10

Holy Carrot, Notting Hill

I don't know about you, but the concept of a 'vegetarian restaurant' brings to mind a certain set of expectations, not all of them good. I suppose it's because traditionally, vegetarian food has been, at best, just 'normal' restaurant food with the meat either taken out, or replaced by meat substitutes such as Quorn or tofu or certain types of mushroom. Sometimes, admittedly, this approach does work - the Shake Shack 'Shroom burger is just their normal cheeseburger with the beef replaced with a breaded, fried portobello mushroom, but it works remarkably well. But too often you're presented with things like meat-less lasagna or a French Onion soup made without beef stock, and the main result is that you just wish you were eating the real thing.

Holy Carrot, then, is best described not as a vegetarian restaurant but an exciting, modern, international bistro that just happens to not serve any meat. And it works because all the dishes they serve are at their absolute best just the way they are, drawing from a number of different culinary styles and making use of the full range of spices, oils and techniques available to the best London kitchens, only with the main ingredient being seasonal vegetables instead of another kind of protein.

Attention to detail is everywhere, not least the drinks list which is courtesy of A Bar With Shapes For A Name, one of the most exciting cocktail bars in town and currently riding high in the World's 50 Best Bars list. This is a dill-infused martini which by virtue of the fact it's come straight out of a frozen premade bottle was icy cold, pure and clean and simply enjoyable.

House pickles are as good as you might hope to expect from chef Daniel Watkins, who at Acme (his previous gaff) had filled the place with giant jars and tubs of fermenting and pickling who-knows-what to keep his menu full of the stuff year-round. So yes they were all good, but we particularly enjoyed the green beans which had a lovely sweet touch, and daikon because, well, I always like pickled daikon.

Koji bread was a lovely fluffy bun, sort of like a risen flatbread, golden and bubbly on the outside and glossed with butter. This would have been worth an order by itself, and indeed that is an option, but really you'd be an idiot not to go for the version with "smoked mushroom chili ragu", a concoction so ludicrously moreish it probably should come with some kind of government advisory addiction warning. I'm not the first person to swoon over this dish, and I certainly won't be the last, but do believe the hype - it justifies the journey to Notting Hill by itself.

Stracciatella came under a pile of endives and other bitter leaves, dressed in the Thai dipping sauce Nahm Jim. Perfectly nice, but I think we were mourning the loss of the mushroom ragu at this point, so it had a lot to live up to.

Coal roast leeks, though, bowled us over all over again. Leeks have a marvellous way of holding the flavour of charcoal smoke, and enhanced with judicious use of green leek(?) oil and a kind of almond hummus, they were a great demonstration of everything that makes Watkins' cooking so exciting. Not to mention beautiful, teased as they were into a neat geometric block and dotted with yellow blobs of aji chilli.

Celeriac schnitzel was a greaseless puck of breadcrumbed, fried celeriac which had a nice earthy flavour and robust texture. On top, more excellent pickles and micro herbs, as tasty as they were colourful, and underneath their version of a katsu sauce, packed full of curry flavour and a perfect foil for the celeriac.

Finally from the savoury courses, a giant skewer of oyster mushrooms, with lovely crispy bits from the grill and soft and meaty (I'm sure they won't mind too much me saying) inside. The mole sauce underneath was rich and glossy and complex, a beautiful match with the grilled shrooms, and the provided (though not pictured, sorry) almond tacos were soft and buttery and held firm even when soaked in gorgeous mole sauce.

Dessert consisted of a pear, simply poached perhaps in syrup or some kind of dessert wine, and a bowl of frilly soft-serve ice cream. I can also see a bowl groaning with 3 scoops of ice cream in my picture, but can't for the life of me remember where this came in the equation. I'm pretty sure I'm on safe ground telling you they were very nice, though.

This wasn't my invite - I was freeloading on my friend's table this time - but another benefit of a largely plant-based menu is that, to be brutal, veg doesn't cost that much. So even if we had been paying, all this lovely stuff would have come to about £70pp by my quick rough estimation, and is even cheaper at lunchtime. Certainly, residents of Notting Hill will be used to paying a lot more for a lot less, as the portions at Holy Carrot are nothing if not generous. We left not only deeply impressed, but absolutely stuffed.

So all-in-all, there's not many reasons not to love Holy Carrot. Don't think of it as a vegetarian restaurant, if that's likely to put you off - think of it instead as a great neighbourhood restaurant that puts interesting, seasonal vegetables center stage and uses a bewildering variety of techniques to make the very best of them. It's not "good for meat-free", it's just plain old good. And that should make everyone happy.

8/10

We were invited to Holy Carrot and didn't see a bill.

Tarim Uyghur, Bloomsbury

Quite often all you need to know about a restaurant is the smell that greets you as you walk through the door. The smoke and fat of a busy ocakbaşı, The burned onions and masala spices that cling to your clothes after an evening at Tayyabs, the intoxicating mix of funky aged steak and charred lobster shell that fill the upper dining rooms of the Devonshire, these are all indicators enough that you're in for a good time even before you see a menu.

The inside of Tarim Uyghur restaurant on Theobald's Road sent me right back to trips Silk Road in its heyday, when the charcoal grills were sufficiently close to the tables in that tiny space that the smell of scorched lamb fat filled your nostrils and lungs. And this is about a great a compliment as I can give to somewhere specialising in the same kind of regional Chinese food. It smells amazing, the kind of smell that gets you immediately vowing to order whichever the menu items are responsible for it (hint: it's the lamb skewers) and let anything else be a side order.

So let's start with those skewers, which are, needless to say, an absolute must-order. Expertly grilled with touches of salty crunch on the extremities but beautifully tender inside, they come resting on fluffy flatbread to soak up any escaping juices, and two little mounds of spice (don't ask me what they were) for dipping. At £3.95 each they weren't quite the same budget as Silk Road v1, but in terms of form and flavour they were right up there.

Spicy chicken was indeed commendably spicy, consisting of ugly-cute chunks of soft potato and bone-in chicken (I hope I don't create some kind of international incident by noting that Chinese 'butchery' seems to consist of hacking at a carcass with a machete with your eyes closed) soaked in a deep, rich, heavily five-spiced and chillified sauce. Add to this ribbons of thick, home made belt noodles which had a lovely bouncy, tacky texture, and you have an absolute classic northern Chinese dish.

Manti (advertised with a 20min wait but which speeds by if you're distracted by fresh lamb skewers and belt chicken) were also fabulous things, soft but robust and packed full of minced meat ("usually lamb" the menu rather noncommittedly states) and with an addictive vinegar-chilli dip.

But quite unexpectedly given the otherwise quite meaty focus of the menu (I'm not sure I'd bring a vegetarian here), Tarim have quite a way with salads, too. This is lampung, in which giant sticks of wobbly beancurd are topped with pickled carrots, beansprouts and chilli, all soaked in a very wonderful vinegar-soy dressing. I can honestly say I've never had anything like this before, and anywhere that can surprise a jaded diner like me with a new type of salad deserves all the praise it can get.

The bill, for two people, came to just over £42, which although not rock-bottom basement pricing still seems fair given the quality of the food and the area of town (about 5 min walk from Holborn tube). I have noticed the pricing at a lot of Chinese places in Holborn/Bloomsbury creeping up over the past few years - nobody is exempt from food inflation after all - so this is just perhaps the New Normal that we all have to get used to. Instead of spending £12 on your hot lunch, it's now more like £20. Still not bad, though.

So not just because it's 5 minutes' walk from the office, I'm certainly going back to Tarim, to try the chicken wings, the Gosh Nan (fried stuffed flatbread) and perhaps most intriguingly the Uyghur Polo, a rice dish which looks like it comes with some kind of offal. And you know how I love my offal. A charming and exciting ambassador for Xinjiang food, think of Tarim Uyghur as the Silk Road of Central London, a comparison I hope they take as the huge compliment that it's intended to be. Why should Camberwell get all the fun, anyway?

8/10