Dalla, Hackney

The comparisons with my last post won't be immediately obvious, but within the context of their own chosen cuisines Josephine Bouchon and Dalla are doing rather similar things. Both have a very strong and educated sense of what it means to cook French or Italian food. Both do so with skill and flair, showcasing said cuisine at its very best. And - crucially - both leave you wondering why so few other places seem to be able to do this kind of thing so bloody well.

Very like the Chelsea place, as soon as you step inside Dalla you want to stay there. True, tables can be a little bit close together (this is also true of Josephine... sorry I'll stop talking about that restaurant now) but it's a bright, buzzy, attractive little spot that seems absolutely machine-tooled for its job as a neighbourhood restaurant. A tiny open kitchen in the corner fizzes with activity (and seems home to about twice as many chefs as looks comfortable) and the welcome from front of house couldn't be more, well, welcoming.

All of which would mean nothing if the food wasn't any good, but here's the thing - Dalla serves some of the best Italian food I've ever had in London, or in Italy. Dishes which look exciting enough on paper arrive as the absolute very best versions of themselves, and often with a little extra unexpected twist that pushes them to even further greatness. These are Cornish sardines, which I would have been happy enough with just simply grilled whole, but at Dalla they're meticulously deboned and served warm fresh off the grill with a lovely sharp garlic vinaigrette.

Steak tartare avoided many of the pitfalls of lesser versions by being properly seasoned and containing nice big chunks of soft lardo. But the unexpected twist in this dish was the addition of toasted walnuts - and very good walnuts too, not the horrid bitter ones you get in British supermarkets - providing an extra texture and buttery nuttiness. It all added up to one of the better raw beef dishes I've enjoyed in years.

Next up, a silky-smooth slice of excellent sheep's milk ricotta alongside a deeply-flavoured caponata. It still seems strange, as a meat-eater, describing a vegan dish (I mean the caponata, not the cheese of course) as deeply-flavoured but as is often said, the best vegan dishes are vegan because they're supposed to be made like that, and aren't just vegetarian or meat or fish dishes with the dairy or protein taken out (or - worse - replaced with ultra-processed vegan alternatives). I am now a committed caponata fan.

I was torn on the next dish - not because it wasn't brilliant, because it was - but because I always have a problem with divided loyalties comparing the Italian style of anchovies on toast with the Catalan style with tomato and olive oil of holidays of my youth. But I suppose there's room for both in the world, and needless to say these were fantastically enjoyable, the thick layer of dairy matching the salty cured fish and neither element overpowering the other. But the twist towards greatness in this dish came in the form of a sprinkling of lemon zest, adding a fragrant, citrussy sweetness on the finish. Very clever stuff.

It should come as no surprise, then, given everything that had come before, that Dalla can also do world-class pasta. Tagliatelle with venison ragù was about as good as this dish gets (I imagine), the firm, fresh pasta topped with a deeply satisfying, gamey sauce studded with big satisfying chunks of the good stuff. It's one of the more baffling mysteries of Italian food in London that even in 2025 so few places can do a decent pasta dish (good pizza is everywhere, by comparison), but then I suppose that's all the more reason to celebrate when somewhere like Dalla comes along.

But if the ragù was excellent, this bowl of passatelli with lentils was close to life-changing. Lentils make a superb ingredient in a pasta dish, their vaguely soily, fatty texture binding together the pasta and the other ingredients to make hugely a satisfying bite. But the touch of genius here was the addition of red mullet broth, a powerfully-flavoured fish that can often, in the wrong hands, be a bit too fishy, but as a seafood stock used to infuse pasta and lentils made for heady, salty, seafood perfection. I've honestly never eaten anything quite like it.

Wikipedia tells me that saltimbocca is a dish of sage-and-prosciutto-wrapped veal, although thanks to London's seemingly endless capacity to never do what it's told I've had pigeon, guinea fowl and chicken versions of the dish in the past but never veal. Anyway I now have lemon sole saltimbocca to add to the list, and can confirm it works incredibly well, the dense, meaty flesh of the (again, meticulously deboned) sole seasoned and complexified by the ham and sage. Maybe one day I'll try the veal. I bet it won't be as good.

We never wanted lunch to end, and so ordered three out of the four sweets on offer. Apple tart was warm and soft and moist, with generous chunks of sweet poached apple and a nice sharp dollop of crème fraîche (or whatever the Italian equivalent is, sorry Italians) on the side.

Tiramisu I didn't try - I can't do caffeine - but I mean it looks alright doesn't it?

But pannacotta - so often a lazy pub dessert afterthought - was genuinely great, so ethereally light it practically disappeared in the mouth leaving a heady note of vanilla-flecked dairy and lovely sharp-sweet saba (a syrupy liquid made from grape must). I thought pannacotta was boring - it just turned out I'd never had it before.

If I was finding it hard to criticize anything about Dalla, then that wasn't about to change with the arrival of the bill. With plenty of wine, more than enough food - all of which was unimprovable - and including service that never put a foot wrong, the cost per person was £72. I'm so used to being shocked at the price of eating out in London in a bad way that the pleasant surprise of being nearly £30 under my contactless limit was a rare and precious thing indeed.

So it's no surprise that tables at Dalla are as rare as Italian speciality-breed hen's teeth. It takes a lot to stand out in a city that eats as well so regularly as London and yet this unassuming little bistro in a bleak, graffiti-strewn stretch of Hackney already feels like the future - an intelligent, flatteringly accessible take on modern Italian food that has deference to tradition and yet the confidence to stamp their own personality on dishes that are never less than great, and often extraordinary. It is, in short and in all probability, one of the best restaurants in town. What else do you need to know? Just go.

10/10

Josephine Bouchon, Chelsea

Last week, and for most of the week, there was a tube strike. A more lazy, and let's face it, less greedy me would have probably cancelled any dinner plans until things were back to normal, but reservations at Josephine Bouchon are hard enough to come by at the best of times and I didn't want to let an old friend down that I hadn't seen in years. So, I came up with a plan. I was going to walk the route of the 19 bus all the way from the office in Holborn to the King's Road, and if I ever saw an opportunity to get on a bus I'd take it.

Londoners will know where this story is going. Of course, every bus stop had dozens of people waiting for a tiny handful of spaces on the few buses that did creep around central London at a glacial pace, and I soon realised the chances of getting on any of them was nil. I saw near fist-fights between commuters attempting to skip the queues and jump on the back doors as people got off, I saw drivers screaming at people to keep the entry area clear so they could close the doors and get moving, and I nearly got knocked over by a bus myself as I hopped on and off the pavement on Shaftesbury Avenue trying to avoid the heaving crowds. All of which accompanied by a chorus of constant honks and yells from the members of the non bus-lanes that don't have a great deal of patience even when things are going well.

But once I'd cleared Hyde Park corner and I'd decided to finally completely abandon any hope of getting on a bus, I was able to pick a route through the more serene streets of SW London and it all became rather lovely. The stately old Georgian squares of Belgravia, leafy and autumnal, gave way to the grand Victorian townhouses of Sloane Street, and then the beautiful streets around the back of Fulham Road and before I knew it I was sat at a rather cozy table in Josephine Bouchon nibbling on home made pork scratchings and lovely buttered baguette and I knew the journey would be absolutely worth it.

The menu is unapologetically, unmistakeably, ludicrously French, and all the better for it. French onion soup was a great big bubbling pile of melted cheese and caramelised onions, shot through with glossy, thick beef stock, and is about as good a version as you can get anywhere - including France. I made a complete fool of myself attempting to control the long strings of melted Gruyère as they landed variously on the table, my clothes and my face, and it was so blisteringly hot it took a good 20 minutes before I could comfortably polish it off, but I wouldn't have changed any of it for the world.

Mains were equally French, and equally brilliant. A single veal sweetbread arrived topped with morels soaked in veal jus, before being doused in one of those thick, creamy mushroom sauces that takes about 3 days to make. I couldn't decide which was better (and still can't), the giant sweetbread with a fantastic contrast between the slightly crisp bite of the outside and soft, rich interior, or that incredible sauce with such a depth of flavour and so much going on - in a good, not confused way - that it seemed to morph into something ever more exciting with every taste.

I'm afraid I don't have pictures of the other starter (salade Lyonnaise) or main (côte de veau) and didn't ask for a taste because there's only so bloggery I wanted to act in front of someone I'd not seen for a while, but they looked superb. So there's every chance they were - particularly the veal which was huge and bronzed and nicely pink inside.

With the mains we had ordered dauphinois potatoes, and though they were beautifully done I'm not 100% sure they were worth £18 - the picture makes them look more substantial than they were because this was an awfully shallow dish with only about 2 or 3 layers of potato to it. Still, as I said it tasted great and we had no regrets.

The "problem", such as it is, with French food when it's done this well is that you want to order everything but are soon defeated by the richness of the sauces and the intensity of the ingredients. I had every intention of trying the rum baba or the lemon tart when I first scanned through the menu but by the time the last mouthful of creamy dauphinois potato had disappeared, and the above wonderful thing had been gifted from the kitchen (lamb shoulder, glossy and gamey and on a bed of perfect glazed veg) I'm afraid I had to admit defeat. The bill came to just over £100 per head with plenty of house wine, which probably is a bit unfair on the average because we had ordered two of the most expensive mains. They do a 3 course menu for £30 (at lunch and dinner) so it's possible to not go completely mad.

But the thing is, restaurants like this - and the best of French regional cuisine in general - are at their best when you do order to excess, when you gorge yourself on sweetbreads and lobster and lapin à la moutarde and truffle and desserts and Armagnac and then roll bleary-eyed into a cab wondering if you'll see the morning. Like its sister-restaurant-in-attitude Bouchon Racine, or Otto's in Holborn, sure you can have a portion of smoked salmon with soda bread and a glass of water then go home, but that's not really what they're for.

So if I'm duty bound to take a point off for the prices, I still want to recommend as many people as possible (apart from vegetarians or those with a dairy allergy, that is - this is French food after all) head to Josephine Bouchon. There are very few restaurants even in France doing this kind of thing at this level, and for Londoners to have it on their doorstep should be a source of extreme pride. This little slice of Lyon in SW10 is everything I needed it to be.

9/10

My dining companion was spotted and we were gifted that lamb dish, but otherwise we paid full price. Sorry about the terrible photos - in all the madness of the tube strike I forgot my Big Camera.

Serra, Mayfair

It's very often the case about the very top London hotels that despite the amount of money they have at their disposal, and the pick of whatever celebrity or otherwise feted chefs they can choose from, the restaurants end up being rather mediocre. Partly this is due to the unique demands placed on a hotel restaurant, who have to cater for all kinds of requirements at all times of the day, and often various wildly different cuisines (burgers, curries, pasta) and inevitably end up doing none of them well.

If you have room (and money) though, you can divide up your food offering amongst various different restaurants in the same hotel, and stand a much better chance of getting things right. In the brand-new Rosewood Chancery on Grosvenor Square there are fully six dining options (or at least will be - some are not going yet), ranging from super-spendy Japanese (Masa from NYC which once held the dubious title of New York's most expensive restaurant) down to GSQ (no I don't know what the letters stand for) a much more informal deli selling pastries and sandwiches.

And somewhere in-between sits Serra, a vaguely Modern Greek-themed bistro with attached bar in a room that one of our party that evening recognised as being the place where you used to spend hours waiting for your visa interviews (it's the old US embassy building), albeit slightly more gussied up these days. Actually, I'm being disingenuous - it's a truly stunning space that's a delight to spend time in, more than enough to banish any lingering memories of visa applications.

We began (after a decent gin Martini of course) with house breads - a sesame "koulouri" and a buttermilk pita. Both were either straight out of the oven or cleverly reheated as they were warm and fluffy and salty in all the right places. I've never been to Greece, but if these are indicative of the kind of bread they're eating over there, I need to make plans.

Taramasalata was also superb - supremely smooth and light, full of flavour and presented neatly. It's become a cliché over the years that Greek food doesn't travel - that you eat very well in Greece itself but that Greek restaurants outside of the country tend to be a bit ropey - but places like here and Peckham Bazaar are enough evidence that it can be done if you approach it in the right way.

This is beef loin with preserved tomato, studded with little blobs of 'grape must mustard'. Grape must (Wikipedia tells me) is an early stage of winemaking, and how they go about making mustard out of it is beyond me, but the effect was good, lifting what would be otherwise rather bland beef into something more interesting.

Much better were scallops with peas and marigold, the sweet seafood (and a pretty generous portion for your £22) boosted by fresh herbs and really good fresh garden peas. This was one of the highlights of the dinner, a genuinely surprising and innovative preparation that was quite unlike anything I'd ever tried before. Not rocket science of course, but quirky and clever and a departure from your usual raw scallop dishes.

Raw tuna (we tried ordering the sardines and the langoustines first but both were unavailable - don't put them on the menu, then, is my advice) was another top bit of seafood work, studded with lovely toasted hazelnuts, bottarga and - my favourite element - caper leaves. Like the scallops dish it took a familiar raw ingredient and added just enough intelligence and style to twist it into something new without losing what makes raw tuna so much fun to eat in the first place.

Middlewhite pork "souvlaki" was a neat little arrangement of beautifully tender chargrilled pork, not overly fatty but with just enough to create crunch and ooze, dressed delicately with fennel seed, mustard and lemon as well as some colourful pickles. Technically impressive, of course, but crucially succeeding on the strength of the main ingredient - this was very good pork.

And it was a slightly less than impressive main ingredient - the beef, again - that somewhat let down this grilled sirloin. As with the pork, the protein had been expertly grilled with a lovely pink colour and dark, dry crust, but just didn't really taste of much. The mixture underneath, in fact - aubergine peperonata - was the most notable thing about the dish, but you wouldn't really spend £40 just for that.

We had a couple of sides I think but for some reason I've only ended up with a photo of the "fried potato", actually a Quality Chop House style confit/mandolined affair. They had a very good texture but I'm not sure 5 bitesize pieces for £8 is very close to anything approaching value. Yes, that's me moaning about prices in a brand new 5* hotel in Mayfair. Sue me (don't, I can't afford it).

There was another main of wild prawn tartare pasta, which I didn't try because raw seafood on warm pasta makes me feel a bit queasy, but it looked like good pasta and I believe it went down pretty well.

The only dessert I tried was the Sicilian lemon sorbet, which they offered to convert to a sgroppino with a shot of vodka so obviously I did. It was very nice actually - the lemon flavour boosted by grated lemon rind on top.

I didn't get invited to Serra but I didn't see the bill as someone else was very kindly paying, so I can't tell you exactly what the damage was, but this is, after all, a brand new 5* hotel in Mayfair so you're not going to get away with a bargain. That said, service was on the ball the prices were generally not too crazy and we had a good time so I suppose it could be worse.

And when the food was good, it was very good, and sometimes it really is worth paying extra to sit in spectacular surroundings, and get cosseted by sparkling service. So if the prices bring the overall score down a bit, bear in mind that this is still way better than meals I've had in some other equally prestigious - and often far more spendy - places, and I can still recommend Serra, for trying to bring something genuinely new to top-end hotel dining.

7/10

Belzan, Liverpool

This was actually my second visit to Belzan. The first, according to my iPhone photo history, was on 8th May 2020, but was a little bit tricky to review as the building was operating as an improvised deli, with boxes of fruit and veg arranged amongst the booths and benches that would normally be hosting paying customers. Like so many restaurants during the first national Covid lockdown Belzan had pivoted to, well, just about anything they could think of to get them through the End Times and so this friendly neighbourhood restaurant became your friendly neighbourhood greengrocers and wine merchants. I can't honestly remember what I came away with - definitely a box of veg, possibly a bottle or two of natural wine, and I'm sure it was all lovely - but I think I'm confident in saying it's a period of time both they and myself are happy to forget.

Fast forward to 2025, and Belzan is happily back at doing what it's best at - namely charming the pants off lucky Wavertree locals and curious out-of-towners alike. It is utterly impossible not to fall in love with the place, which is close to the platonic ideal of an unpretentious local bistro as it's possible to imagine. Staff all act like they've landed their dream job - which of course they probably have - the menu is full of things that you'd want to eat, and it's all pulled off with such easy grace that you wonder why there can't be a Belzan on every street corner in the country.

I started with a "Peter Piper", a kind of dirty vodka martini involving guindilla (Spanish chilli) pickle juice. Like the best dirty martinis it sailed very, very close to being completely wrong while at the same time just about pulling it off - the pickle juice blasted your senses but the vodka and vermouth just about managed to ground the flavours in something approaching normality. That weekend, in a moment of hideously misplaced confidence, I attempted to make one myself using burger pickle juice and gin. It didn't work.

The bread course at Belzan - sourdough cooked by "Leila", a local who offered their services during that same first lockdown and has been a supplier since - comes with a choice cauliflower butter, a lovely concoction full of satisfying, earthy vegetal flavours, and oil and vinegar, the vegan option but which they'll happily provide alongside the cauliflower butter if requested. You can tell a lot about a place from their bread offering - the attention to detail here was very evident.

Also from the "snacks" was this giant grilled scallop gratin, a lovely plump bit of sweet, meaty seafood (with roe attached I was delighted to discover) draped in bubbling grilled cheese. I don't know why Coquilles Saint-Jacques have gone out of fashion - perhaps they just belong to a period of French cooking that's a little bit looked down on these days - but scallops and cheese definitely need to be a thing again. This was gorgeous.

Courgettes came soft and grilled, with bits of blackened skin adding some very nice detail, and topped with a strong, salty pine nut gremolata. Underneath was a hummus made from butterbean, bright white and silky smooth and the perfect foil for the other vegetables. This is one of those dishes seemingly so simple and rewarding it might inspire you to have a go on the BBQ at home, which one day I indeed may do, albeit perhaps with not quite so much of a cavalier attitude as that with which I approached the pickle martini.

Grilled hispi cabbage was only slightly less successful than the courgettes, possibly because the Lancashire cheese was asking to do a bit more of the seasoning heavy lifting than it was equipped to deal with. A bit more salt on the cabbage and in the romesco and this would have been better, and perhaps it could all have been a bit warmer, but it was still a fun thing to eat, with the little crispy bits of charred cabbage adding more of those interesting textures.

Poached trout came as a giant, well-seasoned and perfectly timed slab of fresh fish and was a joy from start to finish. Underneath a Vichyssoise sauce was full of satisfying earthy flavours and was studded both with runner beans and mussels, the latter being sweet-pickled somehow. Very clever stuff.

And finally from the savoury courses, a huge pile of grilled lamb chops, each blushed perfect pink and so deliriously tender you could have cut them with a spoon. They came on an interesting bed of labneh and grilled nectarines, a vaguely Middle-Eastern range of flavours that worked incredibly well, but the crowning glory was a thick, salty, rich lamb jus that I wanted to bottle and take home with me. If you can tell a lot about a restaurant from their bread course, you can tell even more from their ability with sauces. This lamb sauce was as close to perfect as it's possible to get.

We found room for one dessert, a strawberry choux bun so delicate and light that, when I attempted to cut it in half, flattened hilariously onto the plate, leaving us with a kind of strawberry-pastry Eton mess. It tasted fantastic anyway, you won't be surprised to learn, as did the sweet (but actually not overly sweet) Riesling I'd picked to go with it. Can't leave a place like this without trying a dessert wine - it's the rules.

The bill came to £75 each, which although not a complete bargain (I think the days of restaurant bargains have long gone, with certain notable exceptions) is still great value for the amount of skill and effort that had gone into everything we tried. And certainly, we weren't the only people to think so, with Belzan turning the tables throughout this Wednesday evening, quite a hopeful thing to see from an industry seemingly so consumed with doom and gloom.

So could there be a Belzan on every street corner? Should there be? Let's face it - the trick that places like this pull off so successfully is to make the difficult and skilful look easy and effortless, and if after 7 years they've not even opened a second spot in Liverpool never mind attempted to throw their net wider probably tells you all you need to know about the logistics of running a modern British bistro. But then that just makes what Belzan are doing all the more special - if you want great food, made with care and intelligence and served with a smile, then you will just have to come to Smithdown Road. You won't regret it.

9/10

Nou Bar del Poble, Peratellada

There's a part of me knows, deep down inside, that it probably is possible, if you try really, really, really hard, to have a bad meal in Spain. Burger King exist there, for a start, and although they sell alcohol as a concession to their European location I somewhat doubt they also do an arròs negre special or platter of Iberico ham to keep local sensibilities happy. And I'm sure if you went to the nearest Tex Mex off the Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona or ordered fish and chips from Mike's Bar in Torremolinos it's possible you won't be served anything worth writing home about but then if you were the kind of person who wanted to eat burritos in Barcelona or fish and chips in Andalusia then perhaps that wouldn't bother you too much.

But after a recent two-week trip to Catalonia where we didn't have one single meal less than very good, and most were in fact much better than that, I came away with the impression that this is a part of the world where eating well is as vital a part of normal everyday life as electricity or hot and cold running water, and that good food is something approaching a natural human right. In the first few days we would do our research, revisit reliable old haunts and Michelin-showered sure things, and it was all lovely. But after a while we realised that we could basically plonk ourselves down anywhere, order whatever seafood they had available with a few rounds of anchovy toast, and come away deliriously happy. Oh and having spent a pittance, too - that's another thing about Spain.

Some lunch spots though were just that little bit extra special. Peratellada is a quaint fortified medieval village rising out of the paddy fields between the coast and the Girona hills, although calling it 'quaint' is understating the reality somewhat. It's a quite extraordinarily beautiful little town, with dark narrow passageways winding between cloistered town squares and 12th century town walls, the streets sometimes cobbled and sometimes hewn directly of giant masses of bedrock (Peratellada means 'carved stone'), with deep gutters cut by hundreds of years' worth of cart wheels. In the centre of town is the Castell de Peratallada, a giant late-medieval structure once the home of the same family for a few hundred years and currently going through a state of transition and closed to the public. And in front of the castle, in the corner of a pleasant open square, is a tourist information office with a few tables and chairs outside.

Hardly a likely spot for one of the best lunches of the holiday, I know - but the first clue we were onto something good was that dotted amongst the usual family-friendly offerings of nachos and burgers appeared to be some rather well-selected seafood. First to arrive was a giant plate of clams, drowning in oil and garlic and parsley, which had that fantastic bouncy chew of the best fresh bivalves and a wonderful clean, meaty flavour.

Razor clams were also top-notch, dressed in much the same way and presented just as simply and honestly. They arrived alongside pa amb tomàquet - delicate thin coca bread with just enough squishy summer tomato to let them keep their crisp and shape, and a bowl of patatas bravas, lovely crunchy little bites of fried potato draped in aioli. It was all far, far better than it needed to be for a little honeytrap bar operating out of a tourist information office.

But if the clams and tapas had been great, these Palamós prawns were life-changing. I have gone on at length on this blog previously how these giant red prawns are some of the best protein of any kind it's possible to eat, and that they are a must-order if you ever see them on a menu. You do occasionally come across similar species in London at high-end places like Barrafina, where they're called Carabineros and are still lovely, except of course in the UK they cost about £16 each. This plate of six plump, salty, expertly grilled beasties that were probably flapping around happily in the Mediterranean sea a few hours previously, were a ludicrous €18 - the kind of seafood mega-bargain that only seems to happen in this part of the world.

There were still concessions to the tourist-friendly stuff that keeps the rest of the family happy - burgers were decent (I tried a bit of the wagyu one) and a bowl of cheesy nachos had, well, plenty of cheese, and none of it was unreasonably priced, but the real story here was the seafood - incredible, fresh, cheap, expertly cooked seafood, for what in the end came to about €20 per person.

After lunch we stopped by another local favourite - Gelat Artesà de Peratallada, an interesting little independent ice cream shop specialising in, shall we say, rather unusual flavours. Alongside classics like strawberry, mint chocolate chip and coffee you can try Roquefort, or gazpacho, or even l'Escala anchovy - certainly not the kind of varieties you can drag out of the freezer at your local corner shop. Not brave enough to try the anchovy I had a bit of olive oil, which was rather lovely, so maybe next time I should go full seafood. Certainly after the stilton ice cream at 8 I'm convinced that savoury/sweet ice creams are the way forward.

Behind the ice cream cabinet at the back of the shop at Gelat Artesà was a new gin bar, where not only do they serve their own gin - Outer Gin (flavoured with various local fruits and herbs) - but will incorporate it into a quite elaborate gin and tonic where the aromatics and dried fruits are painstakingly tweezered in to a giant copa glass. This too, alongside the ice cream experience, comes very highly recommended.

As I have said, we didn't have a bad meal in Spain and I could have picked any number of astonishingly good value lunches to write about today. I picked Bar del Poble partly because of Those Prawns but also because what it represents - namely, that there are still places only a short flight away, in some of the most beautiful and tourist-trodden parts of the country, where you can eat well for very little money, a fact worth stressing to anyone from London or the US (who made up our group that day) for whom eating out for around £20 a head seems like something that last happened in about 2004. Nou Bar del Poble is not unique, but it is special. And that's worth celebrating.

9/10