Dorian, Notting Hill

This time last year, potential sites for an upcoming work lunch had been whittled down to a choice between Lita in Marylebone, or Dorian in Notting Hill. Both places, on the face of it, looked fairly similar - a crowd-pleasing list of modern bistro dishes with an emphasis on premium seafood and seasonal game, and both had received fairly unanimously positive reviews. Purely because Lita was a bit easier to get to, we ended up there, and, well, didn't really enjoy it very much. Good food at blisteringly high prices, served (at their own pace) to a cramped dining room with tables way too small to work in a sharing dishes concept, it left us all pretty underwhelmed. A week after our visit, they received a Michelin star. The inspectors probably had a better table than we did.

Anyway, more recently came an opportunity to see if Dorian could fare any better. And after being shown to a nice big table with plenty of elbow room they were already beating the Other Place on that side of things. God knows it's hard enough to make a living running a restaurant these days - I know this, honestly I do - but the fact is, if you try and make a few extra quid by squeezing shitty tables into your restaurant and you put people in them, they're going to have a shitty time and not come back. See above.

Back to Dorian though and this "Dorian Martini", ice cold and I think involving vodka and sake which worked pretty well. I'm also fully on board with this trend of floating a blob of oil on top of the drink - I think this might have been olive oil but not sure - which adds a nice aesthetic touch.

First bits of food to arrive were these snacks - "steak and sea urchin rosti", ordered enthusiastically by those of us who have tried sea urchin before, and I have to say rather insistently ordered for those of our party who hadn't. Sea urchin, depending on where it's from, can run the full gamut from fresh and buttery and clean to funky and fishy and briny, and these were sort of right in the middle of that scale, so a perfect example for the uninitiated. In this case, the smoky chargrilled beef made an excellent surf and turf combination with the uni and the potato element grounded the whole thing perfectly. There were probably a gazillion other things going on here but the point is the main ingredients were great, and so it all fell into place.

Next to arrive - even before the remainder of the snacks - was a starter of veal sweetbreads and Landes chicken, all with a superb light crisp coating and dressed in what they called "ranch dressing" but which tasted remarkably like a poshed-up version of that gloopy orange chicken sauce you get in cheap takeaways in the US. I don't mean to make this sound like a criticism - I loved it - it's just funny how some flavour associations work in your mind.

After two weeks in southern California I wasn't about to order a taco for my first lunch back but this beef taco with squid was apparently "excellent". Looks pretty as well, doesn't it.

"Skewered rabbit, red prawn and Bordelaise" was easily one of the highlights of the meal, and (spoiler alert) everything that followed was at least very good. Carefully jointed and grilled portions of tender rabbit were skewered alongside plump, sweet prawns and finished with a little bone-in morsel of rabbit which was like nibbling on a tiny chicken wing. If I am ever in the area again, I'm going to see if I can just perch at the bar with a martini and order one of these - it's one of those dishes that's so inventive and cleverly made and enjoyable to eat that it lives in the memory long after the meal itself is over.

Almost as good (and that's still a huge compliment) was this wild duck, roasted to tender pink with a nice dark, salty skin and served with a mushroom and clementine sauce. I liked everything about this dish, including (either by usual practice or because it was being shared between 4 people) the fact it was neatly divided into four and that they'd left the feet on. A bit like bone-in steaks, it may be entirely psychological but I always think game tastes better when they leave the feet on.

Venison - like all the other red meat, grilled to a good dark char - had bags of flavour (not always a given with venison) and came with a little bonus pickled sardine. A lot of the dishes at Dorian are not just rewarding to eat and nicely constructed, they often surprise with some little extra unexpected element or unusual combination - the sea urchin and steak, for example, or the "orange chicken" dressing with the sweetbreads.

We were now into the mains, and there's nothing more Main than a giant plate of bone-in ribeye. I hardly need to do anything other than show you the picture above, but yes it tasted every bit as good as it looked - slightly yellowy, funky aged fat sat next to perfectly cooked beef and all under a thin, crisp, dark crust. The crust was almost the most notable thing about the dish - crunchy and salty and slightly bitter, very much in the Peter Luger's / US style of fierce direct heat and strong textures rather than the increasingly more trendy genteel French butter-basted and pan-roasted. Now I have a lot of time for both approaches, and I imagine that the bitter charcoal hit from this steak wouldn't be to everyone's tastes, but I absolutely loved it. And the rest of the table did, too.

Iberico pork neck with langoustines was the second standout highlight dish of the lunch, and - probably not coincidentally - was another surf and turf arrangement. The pork melted in the mouth like only the very best Iberico can do, and was drenched in a reduced jus so good that the plate was scraped clean. But as well as the giant lango tails with the pork, the side of curried carrots (not pictured, sorry) came with pieces of unbelievably lovely extracted claw meat, so that everyone got to try every bit of the animal. Technically perfect (the lango tails were moist and smoky and popped out of their shells in one satisfying chunk), surprising and generous of flavour, it was another example of the best of this kitchen's abilities. We couldn't stop talking about how good it was, although a bottle of excellent Côtes du Rhône (in remarkably light and delicate glasses) probably helped with that too.

We were having so much fun by this point we never wanted to leave, so obviously attention soon turned to desserts. So after a round of dessert-y drinks (above is a Hazelnut Old Fashioned, a fabulous thing indeed) we have chocolate souffle-tart hybrid thing with Guinness ice cream, a rather esoteric take on a rhum baba which substituted the usual alcohol-soaked sponge for small chunks of rum-flavoured biscuit, a doughnut with peanut butter and quince and through a process of elimination I think that last one is a salted milk ice cream and blue corn nachos. It certainly wasn't either the pistachio ice cream and caviar (£39) or the vanilla ice cream with white truffle (£39) - we may have been on expenses but we still valued our jobs.

I have struggled with something ever since our glorious lunch at Dorian came to an end and we spilled out onto the cold Notting Hill streets last week. Objectively, Dorian and Lita are doing very similar things. Neither are cheap, both have a Michelin star (whatever you might think about the significance of that - it seems to mainly indicate the prices they charge these days) and the menu of seasonal premium British ingredients treated in exciting and intelligent ways looks, on paper at least, like it could have been written by the same team. So why did I feel so unwelcome and cramped at harried at Lita and like we could have spent another 6 hours at Dorian and the staff wouldn't have blinked an eye?

It's all to do with the room and the service, and I suppose those are both two sides of the same issue. At this level, and at these prices, you do not want to feel like the management are trying to squeeze you for every last penny and that your custom is just a means to an end. We managed to spend even more per head at Dorian (£207.50) than Lita (£170.78) but despite this, Dorian was just infinitely better value simply down to the experience we had. Every dish from the kitchen spoke of a group of people enjoying what they do and wanting nothing more than to spread that joy to others, but crucially at Dorian that also extended to the atmosphere and service in the room, and that made all the difference in the world. Get saving, then, is my advice. Because Dorian is worth every penny.

9/10

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Barnacle, Liverpool

If it sometimes feels like Liverpool is short on quota of restaurants of sufficient quality befitting a city of its size (something that, fortunately, is increasingly improving), then it can never be said that there are a shortage of beautiful buildings to potentially host them in. The School for the Blind on Hardman Street is a stunning spot - an elegantly proportioned, early Victorian honeyed stone building borne of the golden age of Industrial Age philanthropy. It's an absolutely beautiful thing, and if nothing else it would be worth visiting Barnacle just to thank them for taking on custody of this place and not having it turn into another awful chain bar or hair salon.

And once inside, first impressions were good. Staff were friendly and (initially) efficient, bringing us a nice cold martini (not a frozen glass but you can't have everything) and another very pleasant long drink involving gin and basil ("Barnacle Bill"). A third cocktail advised "Allow 11 minutes" but was worth the wait, a rum and coconut concoction called Lost at Sea which came all frothed up with egg white like a big cold soufflé.

In the meantime, we were served genuinely lovely pickled oysters with buttermilk and dill. There was a time when I wouldn't entertain anything happening to oysters apart from being opened and served raw, but it turns out that when a good restaurant poaches - or batters and fries, or pickles - the things they can be just as enjoyable in a different way. The pickling process here was very subtle, just enough to take that very ocean-y, briny edge off and replace it with something smoother and cleaner.

Miso Scotch egg had a good loose texture, nice crisp coating and the yolks were timed perfectly, which are pretty much the only things you need to get right in a good scotch egg.

The only vaguely disappointing snack were the "cheesy chips", a slightly clumsy pile of skin-on potato wedges and melted cheddar, with the odd sliver of crisp Jerusalem artichoke. Not inedible, just a bit uninteresting and the kind of thing you might expect to find on the menu of one of the aforementioned awful chains. You know the ones, I'm sure.

Snacks and cocktails despatched, we were onto the starters. New Liverpool chowder was a rich, comforting mixture of thick dairy, smoked haddock, clams, potato and sea herbs which was a real highlight. Crisp fried potato skins, Parkers Arms-style, provided crunch and it looked the part with its drizzle of dill oil, but the broth itself was the real star here - everything you could possibly want from a chowder. Everyone who tried it loved it.

Fried chicken tenders topped with Avruga "caviar" was perhaps a slightly less ambitious dish but just as enjoyable in its own way, with greaseless fingers of crisp batter containing lovely white chicken meat, topped with creme fraiche and a generous dollop of the Avruga. It's very easy to make chicken tenders bland and cloying, but these were very good.

Then, we waited for the mains. And waited. And waited. And after about 45 minutes, they arrived. My own venison was good - the meat itself would have benefitted from a bit more of a crust (or in fact any crust at all, the fillets had the consistency of gammon although they tasted nice) but the accompanying sauces were top-notch, both the glossy 'chocolate peppercorn sauce' and the little blobs of parsnip (I think) puree. Fried shallots on top added the crunch that the venison lacked, and kale did its usual job of soaking up the rest of the sauce. Yes, it wasn't perfect, but I still enjoyed this dish - more went right than wrong.

Cod was a little bland despite some potentially good strong flavours - a shame as with a heavier hand with the salt it could have been really impressive. The fish itself was good quality though, and all the accompaniments were cooked properly, it just all needed a bit more attention to seasoning to really shine.

Ironically, flat iron steak had the opposite problem to the cod - it was cooked and seasoned properly and had a good flavour, but was tough and stringy and quite difficult to eat. Still, could be worse - and the chips were very nice.

For desserts, we were relocated to the noisy, crowded bar because, we were bluntly informed, "we need your table back". Don't spend 45 minutes bringing out the main courses, then, is my advice, because it was hardly our fault everything took so long. They didn't even seem that apologetic about it, just needed us out of the way. So I'm afraid our desserts (objectively pretty nice, a rum and banana sticky toffee pudding, and a Guinness and chocolate cake topped with blue cheese and mascarpone) suffered in the context of wanting to get out of that bar, where the music was so loud normal conversation was impossible. And did they take anything off the bill for our trouble? Did they buggery.

So there's plenty to enjoy about Barnacle, and lots of things to admire. The food itself, for example, is well worth the prices they're asking for it, and with a closer attention to service detail the place has the potential to be another mid-budget crowdpleaser in the realm of Wreckfish or Belzan. But I'm pretty sure neither Wreckfish or Belzan would make you feel like an inconvenience for a mistake of their making - an unforgivable misstep for a restaurant with ambitions like Barnacle. And I'm not going to break the habit of a lifetime and score the food and service and ambiance separately, because none of these elements exist in a vacuum - a restaurant is a product of all things working side by side. Can I recommend Barnacle? Right now, just about. Maybe. But there's certainly room for improvement.

6/10

The Hart, Marylebone

In an ideal world this would be a post about the 'proper' upstairs restaurant at the Hart, a serious (though not by all accounts stuffy) dining room serving seasonal British food in the heart of Marylebone village. Unfortunately, due to a combination of my own lack of organisation and the wild popularity of the Hart (despite it only being open a couple of months), the 'proper' dining room was full, and so on this particular Saturday lunchtime we settled for a series of the Hart bar 'snacks' served to our cozy, Christmassy corner table downstairs.

I say 'snacks' in inverted commas because the Hart team (also behind the brilliant Pelican in Notting Hill) do not do anything so straightforward as bar snacks as you might know them elsewhere. At first glance they may look like familiar stuff - pork scratchings, cheese straws, pork pie - but they're all made in-house in the same kitchen that's churning out the full A La Carte upstairs, and are level above what you might expect for the pretty reasonable prices they're charging.

These are the cheese straws for example - warm (probably not baked to order but at least nicely reheated) and crispy and gooey and topped with shaved gruyere (I think) - three giant pieces for £6.

Radishes were crisp and full of life and although I perhaps would have preferred the usual salt dip than the mayo-mustard (actually, ideally both), they were still extremely easy to enjoy. I wonder if one day we'll ever see the giant tennis ball-sized radishes in this country that I fell in love with in Seville a couple of years back? I'm keeping my eyes open.

The pork pie did seem like quite good value on paper (well, chalkboard) until you realise you're only served half of one. But it was a very good pie, with just enough salty, savoury jelly to season without being too much, and came with a dollop each of powerful English mustard and chutney.

The Hart make their own pork scratchings too (of course) and these were distressingly addictive - just the right amount of crunch without being tooth-shattering, enough soft fat without being sickly, and again seasoned perfectly. These disappeared almost as far as anything else on the table.

Sardines on toast came in the form of a kind of smooth whipped paté, evenly spread on excellent toasted sourdough. A fairly straightforward thing I suppose, but fish on toast in its many forms is one of my favourite things in the entire world (see also L'Escala anchovies on tomato-garlic bread) so I devoured this enthusiastically.

Next, chicken liver, a wonderfully cheffy silky-smooth version which spread like butter and tasted many times more rich and indulgent than its price point (£11) suggested. Toast was super thin and crunchy and melba-like and it also came with some very nice pickled pear (I think it was) chutney. No reusing of house chutneys in different dishes at the Hart, thank you very much.

And then finally the main event - something the Americans might call a loose meat sandwich but which the Hart call a 'mince roll'. A giant mound of gooey, salty, beefy rubble spilled out of and soaked through a toasted brioche bun, making the eating of it a rather messy but ultimately hugely rewarding process. When Quality Chop started doing their mince on toast back in the day I had optimistically assumed it would be the start of a new mince revolution, but I think it still feels to most people like too low-rent an addition to a modern British menu. Well, I love it, and I love the Hart mince rolls.

This wasn't an invite, but I was very kindly treated to this lunch and didn't see a bill. But with a couple of pints each (the beer list is good - we went for Deya Steady Rolling Man) and a mince roll each (I was hardly about to share, now, was I) I imagine the total would have come to around £140, so about £47 each - perfectly reasonable for a good couple of hours entertainment on a Saturday lunchtime. And the upstairs menu seems equally good value - starters £17 and under, no mains over £28 (not even the steak) - it's no wonder the place is popular.

The cliché always used to be that there were no good gastropubs in London and that you always had to travel out into the countryside for this kind of food without paying a fortune. Of course, it was never quite that black and white - the Drapers Arms has been a little slice of the countryside in Islington for many years, ditto the Red Lion and Sun, and more recently the Baring (Islington), the Audley and the Barley Mow (both Mayfair) have added themselves to the kind of places you can drop in for a pint of something interesting and a carefully crafted menu of modern British snacks without having to remortgage your house. And so welcome to Marylebone, then, the Hart - may London's gastropub tradition long keep evolving and maturing.

8/10

PSV, Waterloo

The tradition of exciting, regional SE Asian food appearing above or behind unassuming pubs in London is alive and well. The first time I encountered such a thing was all the way back in 2011 at the Heron in Paddington, where you could demolish fiercely authentic laab ped and tom yum soup while downstairs oblivious locals sipped on pints of Stella and ate crisps. More recently, Khun Pakin Thai set up shop in the Endurance in Hammersmith, serving happy ex-pats and Thai diaspora (and the occasional, stupidly overconfident white Londoner) food so full of fire and flavour it could make you see the future.

And now here's PSV (for the life of me I can't figure out what the letters stand for - if anyone knows please do share), a Laotian cafe tucked above the Crown and Cushion pub on Lower Marsh in Waterloo. Now I've never been to Laos, so I can't comment definitively on the authenticity or otherwise of PSV, but certainly the impression I get from this charming little minimalist room, through the friendly and attentive service, to the blindingly brilliant food they serve, is in its way just as authentically Laotian as the weird, dark room downstairs sparsely populated with Americans drinking bad Guinness is an authentic south bank tourist pub.

Sticking to the 'Laos' section of the menu, we ordered a few things that sounded interesting (which was most of it, but, as is my weakness, I steered towards anything involving offal) and knocked back Singha beers - the only alcohol on the upstairs menu - while we waited. I did notice a few other people bringing up drinks from downstairs, but I'm not sure if that was officially sanctioned BYO behaviour or they just got lost. Either way, beer seems far more appropriate a match with this kind of food than cheap Pinot Grigio.

First to arrive was the duck laab, and instantly we were smitten. This generous (as you'd hope for £23.50) pile of minced duck, gizzards and liver, shot through with garlic, chilli, lime and fish sauce was as perfect an introduction to the place as you could have hoped - the kind of thing you could really imagine being served on the streets of Vientiane (probably). It's a miracle just how much flavour they managed to get out of these otherwise pretty humble ingredients - each mouthful was a joy.

And from here on, they could do no wrong. This is tup varn - sliced pig's liver (look, it was my birthday so I may have had an inflated influence over the amount of offal ordered) mixed with ground roasted rice, lime juice, fish sauce and a crunchy mix of fresh herbs and onion. It came with steamed rice, and the laab came with sticky rice - my advice is don't order extra rice, you won't need it.

These are sai oua, spicy pork sausages, and my god they're good. I'd be predisposed to enjoy these just by virtue of the fact the'd gone to the effort of making them, from scratch, in their own kitchens but a delicate casing burst with a delightful snap to give forth herby, soft, rich sausage meat that could clearly only have come from a skilled, loving hand. A spicy tomato dip complimented them nicely.

Next, naem kao, a "famous" (their words, but I can see why) Lao rice salad containing ham, pork skin, egg, the ubiquitous lime juice and fish sauce, and - interestingly - paprika. Served inside a bowl of iceberg lettuce, topped with fresh herbs and chillies, it was exactly the kind of salad we wanted to compliment the liver and sausage elsewhere - ie. one that contained yet more pig - and, like everything else, it was demolished in record time.

The bill for 3 people, with 2 beers each and including the 10% service (which is all they asked for), came to just under £40 a head, a bit of a steal really for 2025 even if at the back of your mind is the sad knowledge that a decade ago or so the bill might have come to half that. But hey, we are where we are and to be able to eat this food, this beautiful, exciting food cooked with heart and skill and care for this amount of money, it still feels like a blessing.

It was all so good, in fact, that a week later we found ourselves there again, demolishing more plates of those incredible sausages and this time adding in tum lao, green papaya salad (sweet, sour, herby and fresh), laab seen dip (a herby beef tartare mixed with liver and tripe... this could again have been my idea) - absolutely superb, and tom khem, a rich, slow-cooked pork stew with a hardboiled egg which came with the most incredibly addictive fish sauce and green chilli dip.

So yes, the tradition of exciting, authentic South East Asian food setting up shop in unassuming London pubs is alive and well. And just like the trailblazers before it mentioned above, PSV is a shining ambassador for this cuisine, an authentic slice of Loas in Lower Marsh. My only slight reservation about writing about it is that once the word gets out it about this 20-odd seater restaurant it could very quickly be impossible to get a table. But hey, that's your problem, not theirs. They deserve all the success they can get.

9/10