Lita, Marylebone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

Holy Carrot, Notting Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8/10

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

Tarim Uyghur, Bloomsbury

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8/10

etch by Steven Edwards, Hove

Hove is a very acceptable place to spend a day. I was last in the area when visiting the Urchin, a seafood-specialist gastropub and microbrewery (I bet there aren't too many of them around) which made the (pretty easy actually) journey down from Battersea more than worth my while. Since then, I've discovered that we paid way too much for our train tickets (apparently we should have gone Thameslink, not Southern) and also that etch by Steven Edwards has opened, thus giving me another great excuse to travel. This time on a much cheaper train.

The fact that Hove is so well connected to the capital city has a couple of main effects. Firstly, it means etch's catchment area is a few million or so people who can make it there and back for lunch (or dinner I suppose if you don't mind getting back too late) in a very sensible amount of time. And secondly, it means that the astonishing £55 they charge at etch for 7 exquisitely constructed courses (or another £28 for 9) is even more mind-blowing for day-trippers from the big smoke as it is for lucky locals.

We shall start at the beginning. Amuses - in fact extras of any kind - are more than you've any right to expect on a £55 menu but these dainty little things, one a Lord of the Hundreds biscuit topped with cream cheese and chive, the other a mushroom and truffle affair shot through with pickle, were an excellent introduction to the way etch goes about things. Beautiful inside and out, generous of flavour and a delight to eat, from this point we knew we were in safe hands.

Cute little glazed buns formed the bread course alongside seaweed butter. Perhaps the idea was for these to accompany the next couple or so courses, but I'm afraid because they were so addictive they disappeared way before anything else arrived. Still, no regrets.

"Soup of the day" was a bit of a misnomer as this consisted of two courses that arrived as a pair. One a gorgeously rich and fluffy winter vegetable soup - chervil and cauliflower with some irresistible chunks of roasted cauliflower hiding underneath and topped with toasted pine nuts - and a couple of beef tartare tartlets on the side (tartartlets?) to provide a nice companion to the soup. I'm not 100% sure if the tartare was just a blogger's bonus or if they really did come with the soup as standard, but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they do - I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong. Oh, and it was all paired with a Retsina, which was a touch of genius.

Halibut could have perhaps been taken off the heat a minute or two earlier but I'm only really saying this out of a dearth of anything else to complain about. It was still clearly a very good fish, with a bright white flesh and nicely bronzed skin, and the parsnip underneath made a remarkably good pairing as well as being nicely seasonal. The crunchy, seaweed-y, noodle-y bits on tops were fun to eat, too.

Of all the dishes, perhaps the crisp hen's egg made the least to write home about. It was perfectly nice, with some good texture provided by croutons and cubes of pickled veg, but the egg itself was...well, an egg yolk in breadcrumbs, decent enough but compared to everything else a bit familiar. Although having said that, I'm very aware I do have slightly more likelihood of getting 'familiar' with tasting menu classics than some people, and there's every chance this could be someone else's favourite course. Such is life's rich tapestry.

Scallop next, a good sweet specimen that had been given a nice firm crust, then sliced and shot through with pumpkin. It's in restaurants like these where you don't have to worry about waiting until the more abundant seasons begin before committing to a meal out - their skill is such that the dishes will be equally exciting and imaginative at every time of the year.

My own personal heaven was embodied in the next course, though, and I'm sorry to be so predictable but there's nothing I can do about that. Beef arrived brilliantly charred from the grill but beautifully tender inside, both as a neat medallion of fillet and - joy of joys - a slice of ox heart with a texture equally dazzling as the fillet but with an extra note of funky offal. Next to it, a little finger of celeriac and a cluster of enoji mushrooms which soaked up a glossy, beefy sauce that made the whole trip worthwhile on its own. I would have paid £55 just for this dish, then gone home happy, it was that good.

More was to come though - firstly a gently flametorched (can you gently flametorch anything? I can't think of any other way of describing it sorry) piece of Tunworth, with a red grape sorbet and bit of pickled endive. After having moaned for years about places trying to gussy-up the traditional cheese course by piling things on top or heating things up (I still have a bit of a problem with baked Camembert) I've realised that with a bit of sensitivity, applying (gentle) heat to a cheese is just a way of presenting its charms in a slightly different way. Think of when a sushi master briefly torches a nigiri before presentation.

And finally dessert, beetroot mousse topped with apple sorbet and with a little red hat of beetroot crisp on top. Colourful and cleverly presented, like a kind of miniature Miro sculpture, it was a lovely coda to the meal, which had ended with the same technical ability and attention to detail as it had begun.

In the interests of impartiality, and given certain recent experiences, I should probably play a little thought experiment and consider if I'd not had the scallop and cheese dishes, would I still have considered £55 to be value. And the honest answer is yes - there's a huge amount of work gone into the food here, with some courses consisting of multiple elements, and the scallop and cheese were just extra expressions of the same kind of theme. There was still more than enough to eat and enjoy without the supplements.

But look, enough hand-wringing. You will know by know if this is the kind of food you like to eat, and whether you think £55 (or more realistically £120-£150 ish if you have matching wine and supplemental courses) is the right amount to pay for it. All I can tell you is that this is the kind of food I like to eat, and Steven Edwards and the team at etch are exactly the people I want to bring it to me. And I would have no hesitation in going back to Hove later in the year, paying in full and seeing what other delights the seasons bring. This is a place worth revisiting.

9/10

I was invited to etch and didn't see a bill. As above, expect to pay between £55-£155 +service depending on what time of day you go, how many courses you choose and what you drink.

Vetch, Liverpool

The best way of experiencing 90% of the fun and frolics of a top-end restaurant whilst shelling out less than 50% of the usual cost is to go for a weekday lunch or early bird menu. Some of the most exciting dining spots in the country have some remarkably reasonably priced off-peak offers, designed to fill tables at times where otherwise they'd be empty, and as we all know there's nothing worse - from a diner's or restaurant's perspective - than an empty restaurant.

These special menus come with an understanding, however - that there will necessarily be cheaper ingredients used (cod instead of halibut, chicken instead of pigeon) and crucially that if there are fewer courses, the overall amount of food should remain largely the same, made up by bulking out with sides of carbs or slightly more generous cuts of the main ingredients. And there will be no squabbling about this, because everything coming out of a good kitchen will be worth the effort, made from the same wonderful stocks and sauces and using the same presentational flair, and if you get mackerel instead of turbot, or sticky toffee pudding instead of soufflé, then who really cares?

But Vetch seem to have gone in a different direction with their early bird menu, and though most - in fact all - of what we were served was impressive in many ways, instead of bulking out with extra carbs or bigger cuts, they have seemingly just lifted three dishes out of the £85/£105 10-course tasting menus, size and all. I should repeat that everything we were served was at least excellent, and occasionally stunning, there just wasn't nearly enough of it. A dainty loaf of Japanese Shokupan (milk bread) was first, warm from the oven, with a little bit of miso butter which soaked into the crumb beautifully.

Cauliflower chawanmushi was a lovely bowl of wintery comfort food, a silky-smooth savoury cauliflower custard topped with parmesan and chive velouté, kind of a deconstructed (if you like) and elevated cauliflower cheese.

Artichoke, goat's curd and truffle was another intriguing bowl of powerful flavours and textures, topped with a giant leaf of charred kale (I think it was) which was great fun to crunch through.

But favourite of the starters was this stunning chunk of monkfish, glazed on top and bright white underneath, next to a cute parcel of braised leek topped with charred stalks (more leek I think) and a little mound of some kind of fish roe. Everything about this dish was pretty much faultless, from the way the flavours worked together perfectly, the addictive textures, and the beautiful main ingredient. Everything, that is, apart from the fact we could have done with a bit more of it. But I'll try not to moan about that too much.

Mains, such as they were, followed. A finger-sized slice of (albeit perfectly cooked) duck fillet came with a pickled beetroot and kale, all soaked in a fantastic beetroot/duck jus. This would have been as faultless as the monkfish it if it had only included a bit of potato - fondant, maybe, or some creamy mash - to fill it out a bit.

Cod, chicken and mushroom was an exquisitely tasteful - and bijou - the fish fillet with a gorgeous glazed skin bound to seasonal wild mushrooms with a chicken cream sauce which you just wished there was more than a teaspoon of.

Desserts were equally beautiful, equally accomplished, and equally tiny. "Pumpkin, caramel, finger lime" showed a range of interesting techniques and textures, but the highlight was the pumpkin, sort of a dense, silky-smooth mousse. And "pear, chamomile, yoghurt" was an intelligent balance of crunchy fruit and decadent dairy, which also just left you wanting more.

So much like the service issues at the Hightown Inn which made the overall experience so frustrating to score, I'm in a bit of a quandary with regards to Vetch. I know for a fact they can cook, and the full tasting menu would most likely have been brilliant, and perhaps there are some people who would have considered the portion sizes if not generous exactly then still just about reasonable. These people probably do exist. But I can't remember the last time I left a restaurant hungry, and I have a very strong feeling that if it wasn't enough for me, it probably wasn't enough for most, and it most certainly wasn't enough for the giant bloke on the next table, 6'5" and nearly as wide, who made our drinks shake like a scene from Jurassic Park when he got up to go to the loo and who must have wondered if this procession of bitesize dishes was some kind of elaborate practical joke.

But all that said, Vetch undeniably has some real talent in the kitchen and I really do want to go back for the Full Monty, so perhaps that's what these off-peak menus are about. Or at least partly about. And it's in a beautiful Georgian townhouse, front of house were as charming as you could hope for, and although the matching wines arrived in slightly stingy portions (as fitting the general theme) they were offered with enthusiasm and real knowledge. And we really enjoyed our evening there, as I'm pretty sure you would too. But maybe have something waiting for you in the fridge when you get home after, just in case.

8/10