Banquet 88, St Katharine Docks

The St Katharine Docks are a very pleasant, picturesque and pedestrian-friendly part of London that deserves much, much better restaurants than they has hitherto been blessed with. Banquet 88's immediate neighbours are Café Rouge, Côte and Slug & Lettuce and though I can sense some of you bristling with indignant contrary defences of this particular rogues gallery ("The Côte lunch menu is actually pretty good value" ... "The Café Rouge steak frites aren't completely inedible" ... "I once ate at Slug & Lettuce and didn't die"), the fact is that being so close to one of the city's most popular attractions (the Tower is just through an underpass) means that the undiscerning tourist dollar is a considerable and ugly influence.

How odd, then - and pleasantly surprising - that Banquet 88 isn't a lazy proto-chain or timid tourist-friendly slop merchant but a vibrantly authentic modern Cantonese restaurant serving a menu so full of courageous and exciting dishes that it should have any Chinese food-lover (that's lovers of Chinese food, not food lovers who are Chinese, although I'm sure both are welcome) wanting to order from every corner of it.

So obviously, given the menu dares you to go as full Chinese Mode as you can, we tried not to disappoint. This is hand-pulled chicken with jellyfish, a dish that carefully balanced both the obvious contrasting textures - the bounce and chew of the jellyfish with the firmer strips of chicken - and lovely light flavours, with both proteins benefiting from a subtle sesame-vinegar dressing. With strips of crunchy cucumber and spring onion layered on top, this was an immensely satisfying and enjoyable salad (...type thing), very appropriate given the flag-cracking weather outside.

Hot and sour sesame aubergine came so fresh out of the fryer that we could barely go near them for about 15 minutes after they landed on the table, but once the searing hot sugar had cooled down a bit they were great, little gooey sticks all sharp and sweet with an addictive crunch and chew.

Banquet 88 are apparently known for their cheung fun, so we could hardly ignore that section of the menu. This is prawn with crispy red rice skin, which cleverly combined the sweetness and bite of fresh prawn with a layer of crunchy fried doughnut, all wrapped in a traffic-light red noodle wrapper that, we were assured, was not artificial but naturally coloured from the red rice used to make it. The chilli dip was great too.

More dim sum (Banquet 88 are pitching themselves as a kind of updated Yauatcha, with the whole menu available all day) came in the form of these pretty crab dumplings, containing plenty of fresh crab and having a nice just-firm-enough bite. Excellent of course - by this stage of the evening, excellent was becoming the norm.

Cantonese roast pigeon needed a very different skill set to the dim sum but was equally accomplished. The neat little portions each had a crisp, delicate skin next to expertly seasoned meat and was all distressingly easy to wolf down in record time. Perhaps if I'm going to be picky I would have liked some kind of dipping sauce for this, but there was still some chilli sauce and crispy chilli oil left over from the dim sum so that worked well enough.

In some restaurants you're lucky to get your seafood served in the right species of shell - there's been a worrying trend recently to present dressed crab inside scallop shells which is just... all kinds of wrong) but not many places serve fresh scallops not only in their shells but still attached to the very shell they lived in. So not only were these creatures served plump and fresh and dressed in a lovely garlic-vinegar sauce with glass noodles but you had the added joy of prying the meat from the shell, which lifted off in a single satisfying chunk. This is literally the first time I've ever had scallops served this way, and I'm very much hoping it won't be the last.

We did allow ourselves a couple of fan-favourite Cantonese dishes. Half a roast duck was extremely good - perhaps not as life-changing as the multi-course version served at Shikumen in Shepherd's Bush (currently, worryingly closed, though I hope just temporarily) but still mostly everything you could wish for, with another one of those delicately crunchy skins and good soft meat.

Even beef ho fun - something approaching a Cantonese staple - was the very best it could be, with big slices of smoky chargrilled beef, slightly pink inside, enveloped by giant lengths of soft noodles.

Finally from the savouries, a plate of pea shoots was a revelation. On the plate it looked like spinach or bok choy, attractive but familiar. But the taste was pure, summery, sugary pea, with a topping of crab roe to season and enliven it. I'm sure the kitchens at Banquet 88 can work wonders with whatever seasonal vegetables they can get their hands on, but this particular dish will live long in my memory of this dinner, one not short of highlights.

So far so brilliant then, and I'm tempted to ignore the sweet courses and leave on a high note, but it's probably worth wondering why I've never had a great time with desserts in Chinese restaurants. Two different dishes were brought out - a selection of mochi (I know, they're Japanese), and a mango pomelo sago pudding thing, and as expected I didn't much like either of them. The mochi, like any other mochi I've ever tried, were the texture of raw bread dough with all the personality of wallpaper paste, and the mango...thing had a decent mango flavour but a slightly off-putting too-firm texture. I've been lucky enough to eat at some very smart and high-end Chinese restaurants and I've never really understood why so often the wheels seem to come off after the savoury courses are done. But then maybe it's just me.

Either way, let's not dwell on the desserts (I certainly didn't). Banquet 88 had done more than enough to put it right near the top of my favourite Chinese restaurants in London before the mochi arrived and looking back over my photos a few days after I just want to go back and order all the other things I didn't get a chance to sample the first time - abalone maybe, or baked eel, or sake cherry foie gras. And although I didn't see a bill, and though it is possible to load up on some pretty premium ingredients (caviar features in certain corners, I noticed) a quick and dirty sum of the items we chose comes to a food bill of about £170 for 3 people - and we had leftovers. You will certainly pay more for a lot less in other parts of town.

It is, then, and after all, possible to run a restaurant with style and heart in the heart of Touristland, and although I'm not holding my breath for a world-class Southern Thai specialist to open on Leicester Square or for Westfield Stratford to get a Bob Bob Ricard, the point is that maybe we shouldn't be so surprised when somewhere with integrity opens so close to so many places without. And we should be very, very thankful that they have because it's places like Banquet 88 that make London one of the most rewarding and exciting places in which to eat on planet earth. OK so maybe I'm biased. But I'm not necessarily wrong.

8/10

I was invited to Banquet 88 and didn't see a bill.

Can Koya, L'Escala

I'm acutely aware that a review of a (hitherto) obscure restaurant in a small town in Spain isn't going to be one of my most read posts of the year. Back in the days when I was doing 6 or 7 posts a month, slipping the odd leftfield location in now and again just made things a bit more interesting for me - perhaps if I was lucky would provide some kind of inspiration for one or two readers, but it would soon be followed-up by somewhere a bit more Central London and I wouldn't lose too many of you along the way. More recently though, with my new routine of one or two posts a month, these "extra" reviews carry a bit more weight, and run the risk of shedding even more of my dwindling readership.

So in deciding to write about Can Koya, a relatively new Japanese restaurant in the Catalonian seaside town of L'Escala, I've made the judgement that despite its decidedly non-London location, its hardly groundbreaking approach to Japanese cuisine and the fact that the vast majority of the people reading this are extremely unlikely to ever cross its doors, it's so utterly brilliant that it deserves whatever tiny scraps of publicity I can throw its way.

Believe me, I was as shocked as anyone it turned out so good, although perhaps I shouldn't have been. There is a fairly long tradition of serious Japanese food in Spain - Barcelona has a number of very well-regarded sushi joints run by skilled ex-pats, and if the only other barrier to top Japanese food is the availability of top-quality seafood then, well, Spain's got that covered and then some. These are Guillardeau no.2 oysters, served naturally and presented perfectly, plump and fresh but zingingly lean - not a hint of that unpleasant creaminess that can occasionally appear in the summer months. I quite fancied some lemon to go with the second one but they brought out a homemade yuzu sauce which was exceptional - amazing to think this dressing wasn't even on the menu and they'd magicked it up on request.

Also exceptional is Can Koya's tempura game. There's very little place to hide with tempura - the batter has to be light and greaseless enough to create a crunch but substantial enough to coat all the ingredients (in this case a medley of early summer vegetables) thoroughly. I've only been to Japan once but I don't remember anywhere doing a better version of vegetable tempura there or anywhere else - this really was the best of Japanese technique applied to top Spanish produce, to stunning effect.

One of the constantly astonishing things about eating out in Spain is how often top-tier ingredients are served at prices that would barely be a cover charge in the UK. This tray of sashimi moriawase consisted of 4 chunks of toro (fatty tuna), 4 of akami (lean tuna) and a neat little pile of salmon, and is yours (well, was mine) for €24. I probably should have ordered another.

And on that same theme, this is a langoustine maki roll, boasting huge chunks of soft, sweet langoustine inside fluffy, body-temperature rice - a complete sushi masterclass. As with everything else before (and everything to come), there was that perfect marriage between serious Japanese sushi technique and the finest available Spanish (or in this case, probably Scottish) produce. Again, I could have happily polished off another portion of this, and probably another after that.

Yakitori scallops were off-menu, €4 each and an absolute delight. Like any Japanese restaurant worth its salt, the kitchen at Can Koya is nimble enough to work in any extra bits and pieces of top seafood come in that day, and these were absolutely belting, presented unashamedly and confidently straight-up, with no dressing or flummery (although we did still have the ponzu dip from the sashimi to use).

Finally, bonito tuna tataki, probably the most unexpected and quirky dish of the evening but just as impressive as anything else in its own way. Some attractively frilled and gently seared chunks of tuna came arranged next to a kind of ajoblanco sauce and a little clump of glazed vegetables. This was Japanese-Spanish fusion food done literally, but to great effect - an intelligent, seasonal dish marrying local and Japanese aesthetics. Very clever stuff.

With a bottle of cava to wash it all down the bill came to just under €55/head (about £47) - an insanely reasonable amount of money for even a middling Japanese restaurant, never mind one so thoughtful and accomplished as this. As soon as it was all over, I made plans to return, and did, only to find it closed. Another thing I should have known is to never trust Google Maps opening hours in Spain. But I'll try again, because restaurants like this, and value like this, deserves to be enjoyed as often as possible.

So you may find yourself in l'Escala looking for a Japanese bite to eat, and you may not. But a wider point about eating out in Spain stands - that I doubt there is anywhere else in Europe where the quality of ingredients is matched with such incredible value - and this applies to all levels of dining from the most modest tapas joint to the multi-Michelin-starred gastro-temples (of which, you may have heard, there are also quite a few). At the risk of sounding like a spokesperson for the Spanish tourist board (eating out in Spain tends to do that to you), you have to be extremely unlucky (or be in an airport terminal) to eat badly in this part of the world. I may never leave.

9/10

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