PSV, Waterloo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9/10

Kokin, Stratford

Lots of potentially very well-respected global cuisines have an unenviable, constant uphill battle against the enshittification of their brand by High Street UK. If your only exposure to Mexican food is Las Iguanas, or Zizzi's for pasta, or Domino's for pizza, or Nando's for... whatever-the-hell Nando's are trying to do, then you can be excused (though perhaps not completely forgiven) for thinking the cuisines in question don't have much going for them. I'm not completely blameless on this front, either - until I went to the US and Mexico I wasn't that interested in Mexican food. Now I'm utterly obsessed with it.

The point is, it's worth reminding yourself that Zizzi's is only a pasta restaurant in the same way that a Pot Noodle is a plate of linguine alle vongole and that whatever you might think about Wasabi or Itsu (and they are nowhere near the worst of the high street chains, in fact they're not even the worst high street Japanese (*cough* Wagamama *cough*)), Japanese food, and sushi in particular, has the potential to be utterly magical. And with that in mind, let me introduce you to Kokin.

In the bright, beautiful and comfortable space that used to be Allegra (of which RIP of course, but chef Patrick Powell is now at One Club Row where I believe he's doing even better) now sits an ambitious sushi+ restaurant. "Sushi+" is a phrase I've just invented now, meaning somewhere that does mainly sushi, but also a few other bits and pieces. There's probably already a word for restaurants like this, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

These kinds of places can often overwhelm with far too many menu options, but Kokin by and large keeps things simple. There's a page or two of tempting small dishes, some tempura and grilled options, and then a good healthy selection of sashimi and nigiri involving plenty enough rare and hard-to-get ingredients (conger eel, sea urchin, otoro) to get any sushi enthusiast's pulse racing. We started with this utterly beautiful assorted starter platter of oyster with "apple-smoked celeriac puree" and something called "nabansu jelly", which I couldn't quite figure out but seemed vaguely citrussy, crunchy cubes of fried tofu, mackerel rolls, a gorgeous bowl of rich, expertly-textured chawanmushi just the right balance between floppy and solid, and... one other thing I didn't try and didn't write down. It was probably good though.

Instead of the suggested chef's selection of sashimi, we couldn't resist going a bit leftfield so ordered otoro, sea urchin and sea bream. All were superb, as good as I've had anywhere, but the uni was particularly fresh and buttery and without much of that stale seashore taste (which I realise some people like).

We did, however, go with the chef's selection of nigiri, which used correctly body-temperature rice - by nowhere means a given at even pretty fancy places, I'm sorry to say. Salmon, akami, chutoro (I think), bream, and squid were all just about as perfect as you can imagine, lightly brushed with nikiri and worth every bit of the £27 (so just over £5 a pop).

Actually, this is probably a good time to talk about value. Obviously, as a top-end Japanese restaurant in a 5-star hotel, Kokin was never going to be cheap. And as a long-time London resident depressingly used to paying way over the odds for mediocre food, perhaps my expectations for what I might get for my money here were slighty on the low side. But honestly, I have paid way, way more for far less accomplished food, and alongside the beautiful theatrical flower-arrangement presentations and the friendly and attentive service, it all added up to, if not exactly a bargain, then certainly a more than acceptable return.

Anyway back to the food. We were now onto the larger dishes and this tuna collar was utterly brilliant. Gently marinated in ponzu, expertly chargrilled to get a gentle dark crust but still keep the tuna flesh inside pink and soft, it was one of the greatest tuna dishes I think I can remember eating in my life - worth the trip to Stratford on its own. I was quite unprepared for how good this was, and I think if I ever went back to Kokin - and I very much hope I do - I'd probably order one just for myself. Sadly, I had to share this beauty.

Next, miso black cod which I note isn't on the current website menu which at least shows a pleasing willingness to chop and change things depending on what's good and available. This was also superb - perhaps not quite as life-changing as the tuna but still extremely enjoyable, with a bright white flesh and delicate ponzu (I think, again) dressing.

Then a new experience for me - Amadai Matsukasa Yaki, an elaborate and difficult (by all accounts, hence why you so rarely see it here) process involving carefully ladling hot oil over a tilefish, which puffs up the scales and turns it into a lovely collection of soft seafood textures. This seems to have been served with a selection of delicately tempura'd vegetables which didn't appear on the menu so, as I say, I get the impression the offering at Kokin is pretty fluid - as all the best places are.

And that was all we ordered in round one, and would have easily been enough to have us skipping home our separate ways with a smile on our faces, but we were having so much fun we didn't want our lunch to end, so we ordered this pretty little fan of "olive wagyu" short rib. Now I have seen "olive wagyu" before on menus, for many, many times more than we paid for this plate, so either there are grades of olive wagyu I am not aware of, or somehow they've got hold of a job lot of the stuff at a discount. Or they stole it. Either way, it was beautiful, melt-in-the-mouth stuff, well worth £36.

And then finally, a selection of desserts presented in a kind of shelving wheel. There was some kind of pickled pear I think, and a green matcha cake, but I don't think you'd really come here for the desserts. Their strengths, and they are many, lie elsewhere.

The bill, for 3 people, came to £143 each. This is not cheap, but again - this is some of the best Japanese food I've had in London, and if you have a quick scan of the prices in other places doing uni and amadai and otoro, I'm pretty sure you'll find what Kokin are charging is more than reasonable. Also, that figure includes two bottles of £48 fizz, so if you went a bit more careful on the booze front you'd spend even less.

But you shouldn't just go to Kokin because it's one of the best value high-end Japanese restaurants in London. You should go to Kokin - and you really should go to Kokin - because it's one of the best Japanese restaurants in London at all, in one short(ish) lunchtime reminding me and a couple of friends just how good this kind of stuff is when done well, by people who understand the brief and are singularly equipped with skills to deliver it. The room, the service, the spectacular views over east London from the 7th floor, that's all a lovely bonus. But even if it was served in a dark basement for twice the price, Kokin would still get my vote. That's how bloody good it is.

9/10

Firestarter, Liverpool Street

It's often very difficult to stand out from the crowd in Restaurant London, especially when - as in Firestarter's case at least - you appear to be serving the same kind of live-fire, internationally-ambiguous, ingredient-led menu that began to pop up all over the place after Acme Fire Cult showed there was a market for it. If this sounds cynical, it's not meant to be - everyone needs to make a living, and deciding to serve the kind of food you know people want is just basic common sense.

What separates the wild-farmed wheat from the chaff, though, is whether or not your live-fire, internationally-ambiguous, ingredient-led food is attempting not just to ape the success of somewhere else but to genuinely impress in their own right. Sure, superficially the menu at Firestarter seems very familiar, certainly to this particular jaded food blogger who has seen this kind of thing at pubs and markets and food courts all around the city. But as soon as the crab doughnuts arrived, soft, sweet buns containing a generous amount of white and brown crab meat spiked with chilli, I was reminded that putting crab doughnuts on your menu is one thing; quite another is making them as confidently as this. And they were great.

Lamb haunch could hardly have been cooked better - crusted from the grill, seasoned perfectly and with just enough of a chew that spoke of a top-quality product, the flavour was incredible - dense and gamey and framed so well by the live fire treatment. Mint chimichurri was generously applied and very nice but the star here was the meat itself, an otherwise cheapish cut of lamb presented at its absolute best.

Sea bream, boned (mainly - we found a couple but it wasn't a problem) and butterflied, had a dreamy buttery, crispy skin and a meaty, bright white flesh. I think I would have preferred the accompanying dressings to have been in a little pile on the side rather than scattered on top, as without them the beautiful chargrilled flesh of the bream would have really looked at its best. Also, somewhere - presumably as part of the sambal cabe ijo (an Indonesian chutney, apparently) were some incredibly bitter chunks of sour lemon, which seemed a bit out of place. Still, as I say, this was all about the fish, and the fish was everything.

Smash burgers are everywhere these days, and although not quite up there with the best of them (step forward, Whole Beast) this was still hugely enjoyable. May the burger gods strike me down for saying so, but I found the use of gloopy melted cheddar an actual improvement on the usual processed slice, perhaps because it was so hot off the grill it hadn't had time to cool down and go chalky.

Finally from the savouries, a side of "barbecued baby gem tahini Caesar". If you think that sounds like a lot going on at once, well, you're not wrong - but it actually worked rather well, the tahini going well (as it often does) with the crisp, smoky grilled veg. This side was just as much about the range of crunchy, crackly textures as it was about the umami-rich salad, and we polished it off quite happily.

So far so good, but Firestarter had one final trick up its sleeve in the form of "Wagyu Bone Marrow Lemon Thyme Mousse". Now I don't know if you're the kind of person that can see Wagyu Bone Marrow Lemon Thyme Mousse on a menu and not order it, but I am certainly not one of those people, and jumped at the chance to order perhaps the one thing on the Firestarter menu you wouldn't see anywhere else.

It did not disappoint. If you'd have told me before last week that a lemon-thyme mousse flavoured with bone marrow would be one of my favourite desserts of 2025 then... well, actually I probably would have believed you because I love crazy fusion-offal experiments like this, but it still came as a delightful surprise just how well it worked. At first, you get a very nicely done lemon-thyme mousse, slightly salty and with a pleasant dense texture. Then as it warms up in your mouth the beef appears, not overwhelming or disgusting but a kind of gentle, farmy, earthy memory of a flavour that turns the whole experience up a couple of notches. Very clever stuff, including an almost tobacco-ey smokey pickled pear side, although I wouldn't describe two small half-bones of mousse as being "for 2 sharing" - I think I could have had 4 of these little buggers to myself.

As I said, I was worried when first looking at the Firestarter menu that it wouldn't end up doing enough to stand out with the kind of food that's almost become a shorthand for 2022-2025 London. But the devil is in the detail, and Firestarter really know how to do this stuff. The 'standards' (such as they are) like the grilled steaks and the smashburgers are way better than they need to be and well worth the (actually pretty decent) price of admission. But anywhere marrying together bone marrow and lemon mousse needs all the encouragement they can get - this imaginative, surprisingly, wildly successful dessert is one that I will remember for a long time to come. And if I go back - and I probably will, as it's a part of town I find myself in quite a bit - I hope to find something even more noteworthy.

8/10

I was invited to Firestarter and didn't see a bill, but the above menu would have cost about £50pp including a bottle of wine. Which I reckon is a bit of a steal.