The Highland Laddie, Leeds

At first, you can't quite believe what you're seeing. Right in the middle of a cluster of modern high-rises, behind a large neon-lit casino and steps away from a giant ugly motorway junction, is a beautiful little brick-built pub that seemingly has no business being there. How it's managed to survive presumably several attempts to raze it over the years I don't know, but it stands there proudly now, like the New York tenement block from Batteries Not Included, tastefully restored and full of happy customers. Even if I didn't quite need to book my table there 6 months in advance, well, I'm glad I did.

Inside, there are two cozy rooms, one it seems mainly for drinks (the beer and cider list is excellent) and one serving as a little restaurant. It would be well worth a visit to this gorgeous space just for a pint and a packet of crisps - and like any good gastropub, they have absolutely no problem with you doing just that - but the Laddie also serve a food menu so full of excitement and invention it deserves to be spoken about alongside some of the very best pubs in the country.

We started with oysters, 8 of them so we got to try two of each of the suggested serving methods between us. My favourite - as is often the case - was plain lemon juice but the house hot sauce, a remarkably punchy fermented affair, also drew some appreciative noises. The oysters, as you might hope from a city with some of the best fishmongers in the country, were perfectly opened, lean and fresh. That above is one of the few photos I took that evening that's in focus, too, so apologies for the others that follow below.

A half pint of prawns were perhaps if I'm going to be brutal very slightly overcooked and underseasoned but still perfectly edible. The Marie Rose sauce was great though, and I love the fact that serious gastropubs are still doing pints of prawns because they're as much a part of proper English pub tradition as steak and ale pie or fish and chips.

Paneer kebab had a lovely delicate touch of the coals, with nice blackened bits on the grilled veg and paneer that was crunchy on the outside and fluffy and soft inside.

Scallops, each served with a good, dark crust all sweet and salty, would have been worth an order served straight up, but here they came in a fantastic vinegary smoked bacon broth which had everything you needed to bring out the best in the scallops.

I didn't get a chance to try these stuffed Jersey royals - they look nice though don't they. I'm only really putting the picture up out of completeness and because it's almost in focus, which is more than you can say for the rest of the dishes.

Asparagus demonstrated another technically impressive way with a charcoal grill, were seasoned perfectly, and came with a very decent Bearnaise, packed full of fresh tarragon.

So far so lovely, and the Laddie would be the top of my list of Leeds recommendations if we'd stopped there, but it was with the larger dishes towards the bottom of the menu that the kitchen really started showing what it was capable of.

Firstly there was this giant pork meatball with wild garlic butter, an intensely flavoured yet remarkably light and easy to eat dish which was so packed with umami I think they may have put some parmesan cheese in the mince as well as on top. But either way, it was a brilliant thing and one of the highlights in a meal not short of highlights.

And this giant pork schnitzel, with a bubbly, golden-brown crust and draped in fried eggs and anchovies, which everyone agreed was something else they'd definitely order again. Schnitzels always come with the risk of being too greasy (or maybe I've just been unlucky) but this had just the right balance of greaseless, crunchy coating and thick, tender pork and was an absolute delight.

Also a delight was the house sliced ham "from the fire", which as well as being extremely good in its own right came with a bloody mustard menu, a new experience for this jaded blogger. And also not pictured was a brilliant rabbit hot pot, seasoned well and full of flavour and a wonderful texture - not easy to achieve with rabbit stew.

I'm sorry, then, the photos tailed off towards the end, and if you have a look at the final menu for 8 people you'll see yet more dishes I've not mentioned, but you'll have to take my word that everything was at least good, and occasionally superb - even the house bread (sorry, "dinner roll") was sweet and soft and salty in that brioche-y style. And it would be criminal not to mention the service too, who made you feel like you were invited to dinner in their own houses - it's a style of service, warm and friendly but also staggeringly efficient, that really lifts the whole experience of eating there onto another level.

So yes, I had an absolute blast at the Highland Laddie and urge you to book a table as soon as you possibly can. Unfortunately, due to its tiny size, its growing reputation in Leeds and elsewhere, and the fact it won the Good Food Awards number 1 best pub in Britain not to long ago (way to spoil our fun, guys), that's easier said than done, but if you do squeeze in you'll be rewarded with one of the most enjoyable and singular menus in the whole country. This pretty old interwar (I think... internet is inconclusive) pub, having already survived 100+ years of upheaval and change, looks towards the future full of confidence and brimming with talent. A jewel of a place.

9/10

Willy's, Margate

I have often come across menus that read better than they deliver - full of interesting ingredients and clever techniques on paper but not living up to the promise when the actual food starts appearing. This makes sense from a certain point of view - it's all very well writing the word 'bouillabaisse' on a menu but quite another having the knowledge and skill to serve it.

Much more unusual is to find a menu that under-promises and over-delivers. I'm not saying the menu at Willy's is unadventurous but it is quite familiar - certainly if you're as much of a restaurant spod as me. Black pudding Scotch egg, sausage and mash, trout with seaweed butter, these are all things you are very likely to have seen before, at a local bistro perhaps or popular rural gastropub, staples of British food that have stood the test of time. But if they're popular, it's because when they're done well, they work. The trick is doing them well.

Fortunately Willy's does everything very well, beginning with a cocktail called Penicillin involving whisky, ginger, honey and lemon juice, and tasting very like the concoction my nan used to give me when I had a sore throat as a kid. Minus the whisky (presumably).

Beef tartare was lovely - a good balance of beefy fat, sharp capers and peppery horseradish. Homemade crisps on top (I think perhaps fried in tallow) added crunch, and underneath it all was a fantastically beefy slab of dripping-fried sourdough. Again, it's very likely you will have seen beef tartare before but the extra attention to detail here - particularly with the big hit of beef flavour from the various fat elements - really lifted it into something quite special. I've had worse tartars that cost 3 times the price.

Charred courgette was also very nicely done - careful grilling achieving a nice dark crunch without the inside being too soggy. The effect was almost meaty (I'm sure they won't mind me saying), complimented with toasted pumpkin seeds (you get the impression the kitchen here are always thinking about texture) and little pools of pesto.

You will have seen chicken, mushroom and tarragon put together before, but very rarely as successfully as this. The chicken itself was the star - a huge supreme sliced into thick, moist slices, each topped with a delicate, salty cracker of skin. The mushroom and tarragon were bound by a super-silky sauce, powerfully flavoured and nicely seasoned, the perfect accompaniment to the chicken. Honestly, it was just great. My plate was completely wiped clean.

Cauliflower displayed yet more intelligent grilling, some earthy braised lentils and - my favourite element - celeriac remoulade that came chopped into neat little mustardy cubes rather than the usual spaghetti.

And finally from the savoury courses, a side of purple sprouting broccoli sporting yet another good bit of salty charring, and a nice hit of miso in the dressing. Vegetarians (and even vegans) would do very well here.

Incredibly, a humble sticky toffee pudding for dessert was pretty much the best thing we ate that day - rich and treacly, with just the right sugar/salt balance and a sponge that had been delicately toasted on the edges, it was pretty much a perfect example of its kind. I didn't detect much (or any, in fact) of the advertised ginger in the ice cream, but I only really wanted vanilla anyway so that worked out rather well. I love a home made, silky-smooth ice cream. This was a great dessert.

I didn't see a bill that day as this was an invite (thank you everyone involved in organising) but a quick adding up of the menu items comes to just under £50pp before service, which is pretty reasonable for 2026. It's a lovely bright room to sit in too, boldly designed in the 50s American diner style, and the staff didn't put a foot wrong although they did know I was reviewing so take that with a pinch of salt maybe. How lucky Margate is to have option of this exciting new venue to eat at, alongside what I believe is a fast-expanding breadth and depth of other bars and restaurants. The place really feels like a town on the up.

After lunch, we got snowed on but nobody's ever going to go to the British seaside in March for the weather. The gales and snow only seem to add to the place's charm, and give you all the more reason to huddle inside a nice old pub (there's plenty of them) and wait for it to all blow over. Which we very much did, and had a thoroughly lovely day of it. Willy's then - just the latest reason to visit Margate. But a very, very good reason.

8/10

I got invited to Willy's and didn't see a bill.

The Three Horseshoes, Batcombe

We were incredibly lucky with the weather on a mini-break to Somerset, in that it only rained some of the time, not all of the time. I am a huge advocate of tourism in rural UK, and have yet to find a part of the country I didn't get on with at all (and I've been to Blackpool), but the fact is it really really helps if you get a bit of sun. Pootling around the back lanes of Batcombe in the morning sun is a joy - slightly less fun is battling your way home through driving rain in soaked jeans under a £7 Boots umbrella that really isn't up to the task.

To offset the threat of inclement weather spoiling our attempts to holiday, then, we find it helps to have a nice gastropub dinner to look forward to. The Three Horseshoes is owned and run by Margot Henderson, of Rochelle Canteen fame (a place I enjoyed very much), and this village pub in a quaint 18th century building was the hook from which we'd hung our four day trip. If nothing else, even if the skies thundered and gales blew, we'd be able to escape the storm for a few precious hours of a Tuesday night and have a nice hearty dinner.

Events kicked off brightly enough, with a martini. It's probably too much to expect a local pub to have space to keep frozen glasses, but they'd made up for it with a superbly cold drink, and how many local pubs do you know that can make a martini anyway? Was only £10 too - take that, London.

Food-wise, things began more shakily. My own starter of mussels was pretty disastrous - unseasoned, almost entirely flavourless things in a thin, characterless "sauce" which tasted of little more than sweet vegetable stock, it must have taken real skill to turn fresh (I assume) mussels into something so insipid. The one saving grace was a slab of toasted sourdough underneath which was - bizarrely - lovely, although when we asked for a separate portion of the same bread they said they didn't have any. Odd.

Other starters were good, though. Fish soup had a robust flavour and the rouille/mayo loosened it all up nicely. This came with giant chunks of more excellent fried sourdough they didn't have, adding plenty of crunch.

Early season asparagus were also excellent, served slightly warm under a blanket of genuinely great sauce gribiche, chunks of pickles and egg and herbs bound with a tart mustardy sauce and topped with crunchy breadcrumbs (that they didn't have). It's baffling that a kitchen capable of the fish soup and these lovely asparagus would think those mussels were worthy of sending out, but maybe they were a genuine mistake.

My main course was lamb and laverbread sausage, and a very fine thing it was too - lean and salty and packed full of flavour, even if this was just a case of sensible sourcing (presumably from a local butcher) rather than technical skill. However, the lamb jus that surrounded it was also superb, silky smooth and a perfect balance of umami, salt and fat. The creamed leeks - despite the addition of wild garlic - were a little bit boring but maybe there would have been too much going on if these had been as powerfully seasoned as the sausage and sauce. Overall there was still plenty here to enjoy.

Wild garlic also featured in the brill en papillote, a nice little traditional French affair which means the fish and all the veg steam together like a kind of buttery stew. The fish itself was lovely - meaty and bright white, lifted by a good amount of the wild garlic which we had seen growing all over Batcombe earlier in the day. And full marks to the Three Horseshoes kitchen for flexibility when it came to a dairy-free member of our table, who got the same fish simply grilled with a side of kale - a concession they were under no obligation to make but which was really appreciated.

But best of all - and I'm not being facetious here at all - was a portion of chips cooked in dripping, which had a brilliant deep flavour and stayed crunchy and crisp right until the very last one.

Desserts were also notable - particularly a rhubarb "pavlova" which despite looking like someone had dropped it from a height had the most amazing flavour, richly creamy and spiked with vanilla. Cider sorbet was decent - perhaps the texture was a bit rough but that could just be personal preference, it still didn't last long. Washed down with a glass of Somerset cider brandy, it made for a very enjoyable end of the evening and the calvados did a good job of fortifying us for the journey home - only a 10 minute walk to our Airbnb on the other side of the village but in conditions best described as "difficult". I must remember to buy a better umbrella.

But the Three Horseshoes was, despite the weather - or perhaps because of it, worth the effort. With plenty to drink and eat the bill came to just over £75 per head, pretty reasonable for 2026 and certainly less than you can pay elsewhere for a similar sort of thing. They're not reinventing the wheel here in Batcombe, they're just serving a solid, accessible selection of seasonal gastropub dishes that (mussels aside) generally deliver on style and flavour, and if I wouldn't make a special journey all the way out to rural Somerset to eat here, if I was local and looking for somewhere to shelter on a cold and wet March evening, it would be my first choice. And, admittedly, my only choice. But not a bad choice at all.

7/10

Fiery Flavors, Surrey Quays

I am never really in my comfort zone talking about regional Chinese cuisine. I have next to no knowledge about the skills or practices involved in making it, the different use of ingredients or techniques that distinguish one region from the next, and I am the last person you should ask if any particular dish is cooked "correctly".

All that said, having never cooked in a professional kitchen or worked front of house anywhere in my life there's no good reason I should be pontificating on any other style of food, either. All I can tell you is that I know what I like, and I like Fiery Flavors (yes they spell it the American way, don't blame me) very much.

The first dish we ate isn't pictured, because it was already half-finished by the time it arrived on our table and it would be unfair to record that indefinitely on the blog. Let me explain - arriving hungry and cold this cold Friday night in March the very kind (and observant) group on the next table noticed how intensely we were staring at their half-finished plate of chicken with crispy rice cake and offered the remainder to us. It was gorgeous - fiercely hot, packed with numbing Sichuan peppercorns and full of flavour, a lovely bit of crunch from the rice cake added up to a brilliantly rewarding dish. It was a great start.

Wood ear fungus was equally brilliant - again bursting with flavour, with a lovely balance of vinegar and oil, texture came in the form of little bits of peanuts but also, cleverly, chopped coriander stalks which added colour and crunch to what could have otherwise been a bit of a monochrome experience. But the star of the show was of course the fungus, a lovely ingredient treated well.

Next was a dish described as 'Sliced beef and ox tongue in chilli oil' on the menu, and was indeed every bit as good as it sounds despite involving not tongue, but tripe. Now that's absolutely fine by me of course (if I see offal, I order it), but I do wonder how flexible some other customers might have been to having their chosen variety of offal substituted without consultation. Anyway as I say, it was still a fantastic dish, with all of those wonderful Hunanese flavours appearing again.

Roast duck was perhaps the only dish that wasn't firing on all cylinders but then I'm not sure roast duck is a Hunanese thing - maybe their heart just wasn't in it. Looking a bit mangled (compare for example with the beautifully presented, and very similarly priced, bird at Shikumen) and with slightly dry flesh, the skin was nice and crispy and seasoned correctly but overall I wouldn't bother with it again.

Fortunately, from here on Fiery Flavors was nothing but superb. A whole brown crab came dressed in a ginger and spring onion sauce and was deliriously messy fun right until the last knuckled had been picked empty. Underneath was a portion of slippery udon noodles which soaked up the crab sauce and became a notable side in their own right. Also, and I appreciate I wasn't paying on this occasion, the menu has this listed for under £25, which is insane value for a whole crab anywhere never mind one cooked this well.

Finally, a Hunanese speciality of steamed fish heads with chopped chilli - powerfully spicy, perfectly cooked with an interesting gelatinous texture that brought to mind that Basque dish pil-pil. Despite being more stuffed than a large char siu bao by this point we were very reluctant to stop eating until every last bit of cheek and collar had been found and consumed. Alas, we weren't completely successful but we did really well (our servers kindly told us).

Ah yes - a word on the service. Our waitress took absolutely no prisoners when correcting our cackhanded and unbalanced ordering and we absolutely loved her for it. When we tried to order the wrong sauce with the crab, she corrected us. When we asked if we needed any rice, she said 'no, have noodles with the crab'. It was like a crash course in ordering Hunanese food, and believe me, I absolutely needed it. If you're anything like me and might be put off regional Chinese food for fear of ordering the wrong thing, just make sure you get a front of house experience like this - it made the whole evening even more of a joy. Perhaps she should have talked us out of ordering the duck, but nobody's perfect.

After going through the menu bit by bit, and not counting those gifted bits of chilli chicken, I think our food bill would have come to £44.10 per person without service, which I'm sure you'll agree for a meal involving whole brown crab and giant bighead carp (I think that's what they said it was) is a hell of a bargain in London in 2026. And yes I know this was an invite so as ever, take any mention of service with a pinch of salt, but that aspect really made the evening.

We have, I'm told, an influx of discerning Chinese students into London over the last few years to thank for the relatively recent explosion in brilliant regional Chinese restaurants. It's a cliche that if a Chinese restaurant is full of Chinese people than it's very likely to be good, and though this doesn't necessarily have to be the case, it invariably is. Fiery Flavors is already popular with expats and others alike, because it's reasonably priced, exciting and - I presume - deeply authentic. As I said before, on that last point, I couldn't tell you for sure. But I know what I like.

9/10

I was invited to Fiery Flavours and didn't see a bill. But it would have come to about £44.10 + service without drinks.

Dover Street Counter, Mayfair

First of all, apologies - to Dover Street Counter and readers of this blog alike - for the atrocious state of the photos in this post. What's strange is that I don't remember the lighting in the room being particularly subdued - each generously spaced table had a decent spotlight on it, and I could read the menu clearly enough, but for whatever reason they've all turned out looking like they were served at the bottom of the sea. Don't get me wrong, it's not like regular readers will expect world-class food photography, but they deserve better than this. Even in the one photo taken under more normal lighting conditions, of the front window signage, I've managed to capture an overflowing bin in the reflection.

So maybe the lighting might be more camera-friendly in the main long bar area, but I was actually pretty glad we ended up on our own table and not sat cheek-to-jowl with fellow punters. Sometimes I like eating at a bar but it has to come with the correct amount of personal space - if I feel in danger of being poked in the ribs when the person next to me cuts up their steak, that's not fun. Far better to have a bit of space to stretch out and relax to enjoy my ice-cold martini - no nicer way of starting a Saturday lunchtime - and a bowl of nicely seasoned homemade potato chips with a refreshing sour cream spritzed with lime juice.

Disco fries - chips with mayo and chilli and a few other toppings - veered dangerously close to the kind of thing you can order in your local 'Spoons, but were just about lifted above this level by virtue of the chips themselves being of elegant shape and perfectly crisp and greaseless.

Summer rolls - a token Vietnamese dish on an otherwise largely Italian-American menu - could in lesser hands have been a bit of a disaster, but they actually turned out very nicely. The peanut sauce was thick and salty and satisfying and the rolls themselves came with a fantastic crunch of supremely fresh coriander. Obviously they cost half the price (and are just as good) at my local Vietnamese place but this is Mayfair not Lavender Hill.

Snacks out of the way we got stuck into our mains, in my case a huge French Dip sandwich. A delicate crunchy baguette loaded with strips of nicely rare roast beef, topped with rich ragu and bound - a very clever move - with funky Taleggio cheese, it was a very satisfying Italian-American fusion affair, a real treat to eat. The accompanying gravy "dip" was perhaps a little thin and underpowered, but still just about worked - fortunately the sandwich itself was around to do most of the heavy-lifting taste-wise. And at £19, in Mayfair, for all that beef and cheese, it was something of a bargain.

I didn't try the famous Dover Street Counter cheeseburger but was told it was "very good" - it certainly looked the part, with its nice low profile for easy eating, and I could easily detect the aroma of properly charred beef.

A side of un-Discofied fries - which I did steal some of - showed that fries this good don't need messing about with; they stayed crunchy right to the bottom of the cup. Broccoli had been aggressively grilled so had a good amount of crunchy charred bits, but was otherwise fairly unremarkable. Maybe I'm just not a huge fan of broccoli but I can see why it needed to be on the menu to counteract all the cheese and meat elsewhere.

Desserts, despite being fortified by a glass of Vecchia Romagna, ended up being a bit disappointing. I've often noticed a tendency for kitchens to focus all their energies on the savoury courses and run out of interest and imagination when it comes to pudding. It occasionally also happens the other way round, when a place has a great pastry section and the mains are a bit lifeless, but this is more unusual. The Dover Street Counter apple pie may have been a cheeky tribute to the McDonald's version but needs to be a lot nicer - and prettier - to justify being five times the price, and the chocolate choux - incredible for something containing chocolate, cream and pastry - somehow conspired to be bland and boring. Cheesecake was pretty decent though, so there is that.

It's easy to see why Dover Street Counter is popular - it pulls off the same trick that Bob Bob Ricard are so good at, serving friendly, familiar comfort food done (mostly) well, in glamorous Mayfair surroundings and doesn't charge the earth for the privilege. This, of course, is to be admired. And despite my grumbling about desserts and a very slightly slow service (wine glasses left empty for long periods with the bottle squirrelled away somewhere out of sight) I can probably recommend the place, even with the caveat that, of course, Bob Bob Ricard do it better. And although we all left happy enough (and £79pp lighter, not completely unreasonably), I think if I wanted this kind of thing again I'd most likely end up there. I think they have better lighting, too.

7/10