Impala, Soho

If you know what to look for, you can work out the restaurant lineage of Impala just from a quick scan of the menu. Firstly, and most importantly, you want to try every last item - a feat frustratingly unavailable unless you're eating with at least ten of your friends. Between four of us last week, I think we managed to try about half of what was on offer, and looking back on the menu now some of the things we had to leave unordered still make me quite sad.

But it's the attention to ingredient detail that's another giveaway - strictly seasonal foraged things like greengage and wild herbs, intelligently placed offal such as sweetbreads and caul fat, and - the big flashing neon light as far as I'm concerned - the presence of Matt Chatfield's cull yaw, an extraordinary product which means only one thing: this is a Super 8 restaurant.

Together with Brat, Smoking Goat, Kiln and Mountain, places that are regularly spoken about as some of the best in London, a Super 8 restaurant is a stamp of quality like almost no other, and as close to a guarantee that you're going to have a good time that exists in town. And so yes, inevitably, Impala is brilliant - blindingly, uncompromisingly brilliant - a showcase of style and technique that thrills from the very first moment to the very last.

We began with martinis, because if any way you can, you should. These arrived alongside two types of bread - fluffy aish baladi which was warm and crackly and lovely and absolutely would have been the best bread I'd eaten all week if it wasn't for the other type, honey and olive oil, which was closer to fine French pastry than anything so humble as a house bread. Dipped in the grassy olive oil and some kind of salty chilli chutney it was absolutely superb - the kind of thing it would be way too easy to fill up on before the rest of the food arrived. It took a great deal of self-control not to.

I couldn't visit a Super 8 restaurant without ordering some cull yaw, in the form of these delicate little pastries a bit like samosas. The mutton flavour was rich and powerful, and a light dusting of icing sugar, which I was worried might be a bit weird, seemed to enhance the overall effect somehow - very clever stuff. That little dollop of sauce by the way is pickled walnut, which was very lovely too.

Borek had a supremely light and delicate pastry with all lovely little crisps and folds, and a fantastic spinach/feta filling. You get the impression that everything that makes it onto the menu at Impala is considered equally worthy as everything else - there's no "token" veggie dish, there are just dishes that happen to be veggie.

Ftira looked as good as it tasted, and it tasted amazing. Yet another masterclass in baking (the bread was warm and soft inside with a beautiful crust) was filled with a delightful avocado mixture and surrounded with a wreath of super fresh, and nicely dressed, herbs and edible flowers. I'm sure Impala wouldn't do anything as trite as design a dish for Instagram deliberately, but they may well have done it accidentally just by virtue of having an artist's eye for presentation.

Each new dish to appear maintained the same stunning standard. Sweetbreads are always a direct route to my heart but these were - or rather "this was", a giant single specimen - absolutely breathtaking. The sauce was deeply flavoured, glossy and perfectly balanced, the shredded onion salad crunchy and full of flavour but of course the real star was the offal itself, tasting of wood smoke and marmite and absolutely unimprovable. In any other restaurant I'd describe them as a "must-order" but must-orders are a bit useless when everything else is just as good.

Mackerel was a dainty little fillet, with moist, meaty flesh and a delicate crisp skin. It came with two separate - and excellent - sauces, one earthy walnut puree and one shockingly good taramasalata which, again, anywhere else would be one of the highlights of the meal. That Impala can make a tarama this good and have it appear as one of two sauces in a dish and nowhere else on the menu just shows how much talent this place has in the kitchen.

Birds tongue pasta came soaked in an oxtail ragu that had clearly been a long time in the making given the rich, complex flavour of it. Again, anywhere else this would be a dish to recommend to anyone you met for the next few days; at Impala it's just yet another thing to knock you sideways. Pasta had a lovely bite too.

Perhaps the only dish that didn't completely overwhelm with brilliance was a roast duck, which only managed to be excellent rather than exceptional. Perhaps it was just in comparison to everything else, but although it was cooked perfectly pink and had a nicely rendered skin, the molasses sauce was a little bit one-note and one or two pieces was enough before you started looking for interest elsewhere. Also at £68 for a quarter it was not exactly value either - you can get a whole one for £133 at Park Chinois in Mayfair. Perhaps not an entirely fair comparison, but still.

Monkfish wrapped in grape leaves, smokey and perfectly seasoned, were meaty and rewarding and about as good as an example as you will find anywhere. But even more impressive than the fish itself were the accompanying vegetables, particularly a leaf of kale soaked in a completely wonderful umami-rich jus of some kind and still crunchy and crisp from the grill. All the myriad of techniques on display, from the baking to grilling to sauce-making, were absolutely nailed over and over again.

Even a tomato salad was impressive - clearly using very good tomatoes, expertly dressed and topped with more crunchy fresh herbs. Beautiful colours on it too.

And still Impala had one final trick up its sleeve - this date and pistachio custard tart which put every other similar tart in London to shame. Of course the texture of the custard and the base were both impeccable, but you'd expect that of somewhere like this. The real stroke of genius was just a touch extra of salt in the mixture, which rather than proving a distraction just boosted the flavours to stratospheric levels. We'd eaten a lot by this point, but three portions of this tart all disappeared in record time.

I may have raised my eyebrows at the cost of the duck, but the overall bill (no pun intended) won our hearts back and then some. Impala could I'm sure charge double what they do and you'd still feel like you'd got your money's worth considering the quality of everything on offer, but £120pp with plenty of cocktails and wine is pretty close to a bargain for London in 2026. If you didn't drink (and didn't order the duck) you could probably get away with around £80. Back in January a meal at Dorian soared north of £200 a head and though was extremely enjoyable it wasn't twice as good as Impala - in fact it wasn't quite as good.

So I return to my original point. It was perhaps inevitable that this, the latest Super 8 restaurant, would impress. But never underestimate just how difficult it is to put together an operation as good as this, no matter what experience and talent you have at your disposal. Plenty of places can pull together a menu of seasonal and foraged brilliance. Plenty have a warm welcome, great service, a lovely atmosphere. But there's very few indeed that can produce dish after dish of stunning invention and technical mastery that add up to one of the very best restaurant experiences anywhere in the country right now. It's not easy, being this good. They just make it look like it is.

10/10

Chinzano, Liverpool

I have come to the conclusion that all Italian restaurants set in old railway arches are brilliant. I'm basing this assertion on the fact that all Italian restaurants set in old railway arches I've ever been to have been brilliant, and I see no reason to just write it off as a coincidence. First there was Archway in Battersea, where an ex-River Cafe team serve a menu of exciting Modern Italian food. Then the third (or fourth? Or fifth? I've lost count) branch of Bancone in Borough Market serving house made pasta to a way higher standard you have any right to expect from what is now essentially a chain. And now, underneath what I think is the abandoned track that once terminated at the grand Liverpool Exchange station, is Chinzano.

The first thing you'll notice about the place is how nicely spaced the tables are. We've become so accustomed to being squeezed into antisocially cramped restaurant environments, where you're very often closer to a stranger on the next table than your own +1, that for somewhere to have proper distances between guests is a genuinely pleasant surprise. I'm not necessarily blaming restaurants trying to maximise the return on their floorspace, and presumably the rent in L3 is not quite in the same ballpark as Farringdon or Marylebone, but the fact is that Chinzano probably could have shoehorned in a half a dozen more tables into this room, and that they haven't is to their credit.

Also to their credit is the use of a frozen glass to serve a negroni. Again, not every restaurant has the luxury of the freezer space to store glassware, but it's these little details that make the difference when you're otherwise just one of a multiple dozen places in Liverpool that can mix gin, Campari and vermouth together. And very nice it was too.

And so was everything else. This is an off-menu special of grilled peach panzanella that impressed in many different ways at once. Chunks of crunchy fried bread sat beneath a robustly seasoned collection of summer vegetables, all topped off with a bulb of burrata. It would have been a very enjoyable thing as a straightforward panzanella but the grilled peaches added a lovely sweet/smoky touch and the creamy burrata was clearly top quality.

Another off-menu special was this fried courgette flower stuffed with salt cod mousse, which came alongside a dollop of fantastic aioli. I've had this dish in various places and in various forms over the years, but I can't remember a version as successful as this, packing so much flavour into the seafood element and boasting a batter so light and delicate it was close to Japanese tempura.

Next, an extraordinary take on tuna crudo which ranks as one of the best things to have been done to raw fish I've enjoyed in a long time. Chunks of fresh tuna were bathed in a fantastic tomato and nduja dressing, lifting and highlighting the seafood without overwhelming it and providing an addictive punch of chilli while slices of cool radish on top provided some crunch. This was a bold, exciting and intelligent balance of textures, colours and flavours that demonstrates a kitchen right on top of their Italian food game.

Mains were no less impressive. Pork chop had a beautiful dark crust from the grill but was supremely tender and tasty within, and the hazelnut and potato dressing had all sorts of lovely textures and roasted nut flavours going on. It was also a hugely generous portion - you got plenty for your £26.

And crab taglioni was basically the perfect crab pasta dish - bouncy, moreish ribbons bound with enough brown meat to lend that earthy spritz of the sea, impossible not to love and yet another masterclass in Italian cooking.

Even truffle parmesan fries, a menu item perhaps not winning many authenticity points, were executed superbly - crunchy outside and creamy inside, staying crisp until the very bottom of the bowl, and topped with a healthy dollop of preserved black truffle and shaved parmesan. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention the service, which was as attentive and pleasant as you could want from a waiter who - certainly from behind - bore a striking resemblance to Hagrid from Harry Potter. I hope they don't mind me saying.

There's a whole other half of the menu that we didn't even try - Chinzano make a exciting sounding range of pizzas, with toppings like aged lamb ragu, or confit garlic and herb. And I'm sure they're lovely - and almost certainly worth a return visit - but that's for another time. Purely based on the primi and secondi we ordered, this buzzy little spot tucked away in a strange Victorian-industrial landscape north of the city deserves to be spoken about as one of the best Italian restaurants in the country never mind the North West - it really is that good. So you can add Chinzano to your list of must-visit restaurants today, and if you're ever wondering whether or not a particular Italian joint you may come across is worth your custom, check to see if it's in an old railway arch. If it is, you're probably onto a good thing.

9/10

I completely forgot to take a photo of the bill - I must have been enjoying myself too much - but with a bottle of nice organic white it came to £76pp, very reasonable for the level of cooking on offer.

Pilgrim, Liverpool

As Brits, we largely think of no-frills budget airlines as a way of jetting ourselves off to sunnier places (or more accurately this year, just as blisteringly hot but with cheaper drinks) for our holidays, but are less likely to consider that those same routes might be bring curious and enterprising traffic the other way. Spain may be far and away the most popular destination for British holidaymakers but it's thanks to those airlines and their cavalier attitudes to geographical accuracy ("London" Southend, "Barcelona" Girona) that previously rather culinarily insular cities like Liverpool seemingly overnight found themselves host to fantastic delis like Lunya, where Iberico ham is carved to order and fridges groan with packs of sobrassada and boquerones.

And it makes sense that where good ingredients go, and hospitality-trained labour can travel, good restaurants follow. Pilgrim is the second location for this team, but they seem a lot more comfortable in pleasant, village-y Allerton Road than in the hot and ear-splittingly noisy space above Duke Street market I visited all the way back in pre-Covid times. I enjoyed the food then enormously, but just wished I didn't have to scream to be heard above the din rising up from the food market below. This serene little spot is far more conducive to a pleasant conversation and a small plates concept.

I began with anchovies two ways (my description, not theirs) - a plate of plump boquerones drizzled in olive oil, and an anchovy martini. I can hear some of you rolling your eyes and yes, I know I have a compulsion to order the weirdest thing on any given menu but this was actually a very straightforwardly enjoyable drink with a slight tang of brine which sat very successfully next to white vermouth. Drops of olive oil on the top prettified it as well as adding a little extra grassy note, and I could recommend it to anyone. So there.

At £9 a plate the "Jamon Iberico" was of course not the full acorn-fed bellota but a kind of prosciutto-style presumably made with some variation of Iberico cross-breed. It was still perfectly enjoyable though, the soft and salty protein drizzled with olive oil and topped with crunchy breadsticks.

Octopus with butter beans was a dish so enchantingly authentic it could have been served exactly in this state in any little bar in the suburbs of Barcelona or Girona - add in a row of old men arguing about Catalan politics over giant balloons of sweet brandy and (price aside) you could have been 800 miles away (yes I know Pilgrim are inspired more by Galicia than Catalonia but that is my own reference point). Pickled red onions on top added a nice zing and crunch but the real touch of genius here were the chunks of hot guindillas studded around the place, one of those rare instances where Spanish food allows itself to be properly, eye-wateringly spicy.

Giant Atlantic prawns came with a nice hit of smoke and lots of those lovely crunchy crumbly blackened bits you get whenever you put shellfish in contact with direct heat. Top quality seafood as is an essential a part of the Spanish diet as bread and wine, and dishes like this can be a complete disaster if the main ingredient isn't up to scratch, but fortunately these were very good even if not quite as stunning as the examples you find in Spain.

Tuna tartare was bound with a very clever grapefruit and roasted tomato sauce, hinting towards a kind of ceviche but softer and less citrussy. You also got a lot of tuna for your £15 which was nice to see in these frugal times.

Not pictured (the photo is awful and I won't subject you to it) is roast hispi cabbage topped with shaved manchego and chive butter, which demonstrated again how good this kitchen is at live fire cooking. What I did manage to get a half-decent photo of though are the above Jersey royals, which had been crisped up, doused in salsa verde and served alongside a generous dollop of aioli. A huge portion for £7, they still disappeared thanks to the fantastic mix of textures and technique on display.

The only real mis-step of the evening were these lamb chops, which although cooked accurately to nice and moist and pink inside and with a good dark crust on the outside, were so incredibly salty they were bordering on inedible, snd I have quite a high salt tolerance. Perhaps they'd been seasoned twice by mistake, or someone accidentally knocked a packet of Maldon into the chimichurri (tximitturi was on the menu, presumably the Basque spelling) but they really shouldn't have gone out in this state. Still, they look nice don't they.

The bill, with a nice bottle of rioja, came to £207 for 3 - so £69 per person for plenty of food and wine, not to mention a very competent round of cocktails, which seems to be about right. Service was super friendly and on the ball, and it's a lovely room, with the large windows opened onto the pavement on this sunny day, though I can imagine it being cosy and warm in the winter as well. It's a neighbourhood restaurant that takes itself seriously enough where it matters, but delivers everything with enough of an easygoing charm that you can't help be charmed by the place.

So whether or not the link between low-cost Spanish flights and top-tier Liverpool restaurants can be proven convincingly, I like to think that rather than just being a method of funnelling thousands of pasty Brits to and from the Costas every summer, the ease and relative low cost of travel between the two countries has - despite Brexit's best efforts to sabotage it - forged something a bit more meaningful between these parts of the world. May hand-carved Iberico ham and octopus and butterbean tapas be long here to stay in Liverpool, and may us all be the better for it.

8/10

Kismet, Borough Market

Every new generation of Londoner has to go through the phase of being bewildered and bedazzled by the various lavish stalls and speciality producers at Borough Market, shell out a small fortune for a selection of wildly unrelated items they're entirely unable to turn into a cohesive dinner, and spend a weekend or two queuing for a chorizo roll (or whatever the snack du jour is at any particular moment) before eventually declaring the Market "just for the tourists these days". It's a rite of passage, like getting ripped off at a Brick Lane curry house, or finally finding the correct exit at Piccadilly Circus tube.

And we can moan all we like (another truly London pastime) but there's many of us still hold a soft spot in our hearts for the Market. Yes, at the weekends it's wildly overpopulated, you can't really do any proper food shopping there and if I see one more chocolate-covered strawberry I'll want to scream, but the fact is, scattered around the place amongst the crowds and the noise are undoubtedly some of the best restaurants in the capital. Just off the top of my head there's OMA and Agora, Padella, Camille, Elliot's, Bancone, Rambutan, Kolae, Akara, Mei Mei, Bao, Barrafina, Parrillan - surely there's no other 4.5 acres (thank you Google) of land in Western Europe so blessed with incredible places to eat.

And now there's one more. Tucked above the Globe pub in a couple of bijou dining rooms oozing with character (if not elbow room) is Kismet, a "Meyhane" restaurant (think Ottoman-empire izakaya, serving raki instead of sake) run by a youthful, enthusiastic bunch of people who really seem to know what they're doing. I've yet to visit Turkey, but the first thing my friend noticed as we squeezed onto our table was the little diner-style napkin dispenser, a vital part of the Turkish restaurant experience, I was assured.

Of the food, the first to arrive was atom, a strained yoghurt dish soaked in butter that couldn't have been any better to compliment the house flatbread. Perhaps I could have done with a bit more of the advertised chilli hit - I could see the little red flakes but couldn't really taste them - but then this is almost certainly just a personal preference thing.

Also begging to be scooped up by more of that crunchy, salty bread (why is homemade bread such a rarity in Turkish/Cypriot restaurants in London? Even some of the bigger name mangal places in Dalston I've seen them opening packets of precooked stuff) is a wonderful house tarama, rich and rewarding and silky smooth enough by itself but topped with a generous layer of puréed cod's roe, which lifted it onto another level.

Oh but we were just getting started. I have yet to meet a piece of fried liver I didn't like, so I am perhaps not the best person to objectively rate this yaprak ciğer dish, but I can't remember eating a better bit of offal in years. The liver itself was soft and bouncy with not a hint of dryness - closer to the texture of sweetbreads than anything else. A delicate breadcrumbed coating was greaseless and crisp with a gorgeous golden colour. It was also seasoned perfectly, and combined with a fresh onion salad made it the kind of thing you'll be talking to your friends about for days after. If you go to Kismet, get the liver and onions.

Also brilliant were the şeftali kebabi, bouncy little parcels of minced pork (I think) and lamb (definitely) held together in caul fat and grilled to gentle smokey perfection without being too charred or bitter. Lots of places in London do şeftali, and some do them very well indeed. I've rarely found any as accomplished as these, and the layer of soft flatbread quietly soaking up the juices from the resting meat was a wonderful little bonus.

Finally there were two sides, one our choice and one theirs. Our pick was nothing more radical than a house green salad, but the measure of any good restaurant is a seemingly effortless capacity to turn the mundane into the exceptional. So yes maybe this was just a little plate of lettuce and onions but the dressing was salty and vinegary and oily in all the right amounts and it was a genuine delight to eat.

We were persuaded, though, to also try their patates kızartması, not because we were particularly hungry or even that curious to try even this thrusting young restaurant's take on fried potatoes, but because our waiter insisted they were his favourite dish on the menu and that were something close to a must-order. What arrived was a sad, flabby little tray of pallid potato shapes so lacking in the life and fire and finesse shown in the rest of the menu it was like they came from a different restaurant entirely. Many years ago, I attempted to make chips at home. I cooked them too long at too low a temperature, used the wrong kind of oil and the wrong type of potatoes, and they still tasted better than these things. I have no idea why they're on the menu.

Anyway, so Kismet isn't perfect. But I'd be tempted to write off the potatoes as the exception that proves the rule, a rare blind spot in a kitchen that's otherwise doing everything right and then some, not least because the knowledge that the same kitchen can make those potatoes and everything else we tried is giving me a migraine. The fact is, nobody else in town can cook liver like that, or şeftali like that, and tarama and atom like that, and make stunning bread like that, and for all those reasons this little spot is a new London must-visit restaurant, equally delighting long-time foodie cynics as well as whichever tourists happen to be passing through that day.

And speaking of tourists, judging by the gaggle waiting their turn to take a photo next to the rear door of the Globe, Bridget Jones' picture-book London still lives strong in the international collective conscience. Only in movie world could a junior assistant at a small London publishing house afford a 1-bedroom flat in Borough Market, even in the early noughties, but who cares - this is an idealised London, and Kismet is tantalisingly close to an ideal restaurant, and in this weird arrangement the two sit very happily together as ambassadors for the city. Above a Victorian pub in an old food market, magic happens, on and off the screen.

9/10

This wasn't my invite, but we didn't see the bill. Would have been something like £50/head though, which is incredibly reasonable.

EDIT: I'm reliably informed that the kebabs above were not şeftali but kofte, which had been swapped in that day and the menu not updated. Still very nice, anyway, and all my same compliments still apply!

Khao Bird, Soho

Before I was able to assess the authenticity or otherwise of the food at Khao Bird, I could at least appreciate the ambient temperatures in the dining hall were at genuine Thai levels. It's not really their fault that we visited during one of the hottest day's of London's seemingly endless heatwave, but it really is getting to the stage that if your place doesn't have actual AC (or if it's not turned up (down?) enough) then I'm really going to have to think twice on whether I want to spend time there, no matter how good the food is.

So it's thanks to the food at Khao Bird being rather good indeed that I was able to - temporarily - put up with the raging temperatures and for a few moments on a Sunday afternoon enjoy an interesting variety of Northern Thai BBQ (their own description of their own food). But not before tucking into one of these bad boys, a spicy margarita made with mezcal and a pleasingly significant dose of chilli which blew open the taste buds in preparation for the food to follow.

At this point I should say that yes, I know the photos are awful - it was dark in there as well as hot, and I was only halfheartedly paying attention to my blogging responsibilities as I was meeting a friend from Liverpool for dinner and didn't want to embarrass him too much with my Big Noisy Camera. But these (I promise) are crispy pigs ears, just the right balance of crunchy and chewy, served with an addictive nam pla and a fantastic nibble with the margarita.

I've been served such a huge variety of things over the years sharing the name laab that I honestly am not sure what is the core laabness that makes a laab a laab other than, more often than not, a borderline hallucinatory hit of chilli. This is steak tartare and Campari (full marks for imagination at least) and was both so good and so hot that I was forced to take tiny mouthfuls of it every 10 minutes or so, the breaks just enough for the burning to dip from acute pain to a dull throb, then back again. Crispy tofu skin on top provided a nice crunch to offset the raw beef texture and various other bits of fresh veg and spices rounded the whole thing off nicely. Not your traditional laab, then - if such a thing even exists - but well worth an order if you're a chilli fiend.

Another Thai staple, Som Tam, used Isle of White tomatoes and local "shrub veg" (your guess is as good as mine but I like to think someone's got their foraging on) with the usual tamarind-chilli mixture and was finished with "our family honey", which was a very nice touch. The trick, I imagine, in running a successful Thai restaurant outside of Thailand is knowing when to substitute local ingredients and when to stick to imported Thai originals. I love the idea of creating a Thai salad with English garden vegetables and authentic imported fish sauce, especially when the result is as good as this.

Also ordered and not pictured (I did take a photo, but you really don't want to see it believe me) was a giant steaming bowl of grilled chicken khao soi, a northern Thai curry that involved a rich coconut broth, egg noodles two ways, boiled and crisped, pickled mustard greens and chilli. Even without the chicken this would have been a fantastically enjoyable thing to slurp down, but the chicken managed to hold the crisp and char of the coals despite being dunked in the sauce, and thanks to an aggressive marinade the flesh was salty and firm right to he bone - not a hint of dryness. Impressive stuff, and well worth £23 considering the amount of work that had clearly gone into it.

With a couple of pots of jasmine rice and - I have a vague memory of this - a little dish of miso broccoli, the bill came to just over £50pp which is pretty much exactly what you should be spending on interesting, intelligently constructed food of this kind in London. If I'm going to be absolutely brutal I'd say Kiln is still my favourite Soho Thai spot but these days that's altogether a more serious and spendy affair. Khao Bird is fun, accessible and - by the standards of 2026 - good value, and easily makes my recommendation list as an unpretentious little spot that takes itself just seriously enough where it matters. And if they fixed their AC, it would be even better.

8/10