Fiery Flavors, Surrey Quays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9/10

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

Dover Street Counter, Mayfair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

Bistro Sablé, Islington

Sablé occupies the handsome 1930s public house that, most recently at least, was home to Neil Rankin's Smokehouse. I spent many happy times in Smokehouse back in the day but such are the fickle whims and fashions of London food that, in 2026, low-n-slow American BBQ seems strangely dated. I don't know why this is - they're still very keen on it in America, as far as I can tell.

Anyway the site now offers traditional French bistro food, which as all the restaurant spods out there will tell you, and as popularised by Bouchon Racine and Josephine Bouchon, is what we should all be eating these days - that American BBQ rubbish is so 2018. And despite very clearly being London on the outside, inside they've done their best to soften the hardest edges of the pub decor although this largely consists of setting the lighting so low it's occasionally hard to tell where on earth you are at all. So yes, my photos are rubbish. Sorry.

Things all started brightly enough. A French martini (not really French at all, invented in NYC in the 80s) was nicely presented and though quite heavy on the pineapple was still a very easy drink. Judging by the people crowding around the bar area, in fact, Sablé are quite happy for you to just pop in for a drink without committing to a full meal, something I always appreciate in a place. I was somewhat distraught to learn that thirsty hikers that have been used to popping into uber-gastropub the Sportsman in Kent for a livener before heading on to Whitstable have recently started being told they must have booked a sit-down meal, and can no longer perch on the bar with a pint and a packet of crisps. Which seems as stupid as it is sad.

Back in Islington though, starters launched with this magnificent baked soufflé, confidently risen and powerfully cheesy. Thinking about it now I don't think I've ever had a genuinely disappointing cheese soufflé, which either means they're quite easy to cook (which is possible) or that I have a very low bar for anything involving baked cheese (which is far more likely).

Steak tartare was ordered not so much for the main ingredient as for the accompanying pommes allumettes, because for whatever reason matchstick fries are still a bit of a rarity in London. And it's just as well that the allumettes were as good as they were - greaseless, crunchy, seasoned correctly and with a lovely potato flavour - because the steak itself was quite astringent, the mustard (I assume) dressing rather overpowering the supposedly aged beef. But it was still just about worth paying £13 for those fries.

It was about this point, though, that things at Sablé started to dip off a bit, at least from my point of view. It's not particularly Sablés fault that I had watched a perfect Bouillabaisse being cooked on Culinary Class Wars the week before, and it's unrealistic of me to expect a version made in North London to live up to the standards of an internationally famous cooking show. But even if I'm not an expert in what Bouillabaisse should taste like, thanks to French Papa I know at least what it should look like, and it certainly ain't this weird pile of textureless mystery fish and potato draped in a thick, pallid sauce. It was just weird.

In fairness, some of the other mains did turn out slightly better. Boeuf bourguignon was probably the best of the rest, with chunks of nice moist beef soaked in a thick, salty, savoury sauce. And given that a good boeuf bourguignon is presumably at least as difficult to cook as a bouillabaisse, we need to give them credit for that.

But halibut, though better than the bouillabaisse, was still not great and suffered from more underseasoning, especially in the layer of white beans underneath. And a side of chips - sorry, pommes frites were bland and cardboardy, genuinely pretty unpleasant. And if you're a French bistro and can't get chips right, what are you even for?

I didn't try the rotisserie chicken or a few other bits and pieces of sides and snacks but to be honest, perhaps if they had looked a little more exciting I might have made more of an effort. The chicken is above, looking, well, as you might expect, but the one genuinely lovely bit of chicken I've eaten in the last few months cost fully £12 less per bird. Say no more.

The problem with this kind of food is that it has to be done perfectly, or it all just falls apart. People moan about the prices at the Bouchons (Racine and Josephine) but French bistro food all hinges on excellent ingredients cooked well, and if any element is off, it's a disaster. Tarte tatin - one of my favourite desserts when done well - was all poached apple and very little crunchy caramelised pastry, and as any tatin fancier will tell you, it really should be the other way round. Madeleines were a bit dry but otherwise OK. Save your money and get them fresh out of the oven at St John, is my advice.

So with one or two exceptions, I'm afraid Bistro Sablé is Not Very Good. A bill of £100pp with booze is not unreasonable if the food had been better - and indeed would have been a genuine bargain if it had been somewhere near good - but for that weird gloopy "bouillabaisse" and cardboard fries and the clumsy, flabby tarte tatin it's nowhere near value. The good news is that if this style of food is your thing, there are much better places to try it even if you might have to shell out a few extra quid. As for this particular site in North London, if their heart's not in the French thing I wonder if they might consider trying their hand at American BBQ? I hear it's all the rage over there.

5/10

Dorian, Notting Hill

This time last year, potential sites for an upcoming work lunch had been whittled down to a choice between Lita in Marylebone, or Dorian in Notting Hill. Both places, on the face of it, looked fairly similar - a crowd-pleasing list of modern bistro dishes with an emphasis on premium seafood and seasonal game, and both had received fairly unanimously positive reviews. Purely because Lita was a bit easier to get to, we ended up there, and, well, didn't really enjoy it very much. Good food at blisteringly high prices, served (at their own pace) to a cramped dining room with tables way too small to work in a sharing dishes concept, it left us all pretty underwhelmed. A week after our visit, they received a Michelin star. The inspectors probably had a better table than we did.

Anyway, more recently came an opportunity to see if Dorian could fare any better. And after being shown to a nice big table with plenty of elbow room they were already beating the Other Place on that side of things. God knows it's hard enough to make a living running a restaurant these days - I know this, honestly I do - but the fact is, if you try and make a few extra quid by squeezing shitty tables into your restaurant and you put people in them, they're going to have a shitty time and not come back. See above.

Back to Dorian though and this "Dorian Martini", ice cold and I think involving vodka and sake which worked pretty well. I'm also fully on board with this trend of floating a blob of oil on top of the drink - I think this might have been olive oil but not sure - which adds a nice aesthetic touch.

First bits of food to arrive were these snacks - "steak and sea urchin rosti", ordered enthusiastically by those of us who have tried sea urchin before, and I have to say rather insistently ordered for those of our party who hadn't. Sea urchin, depending on where it's from, can run the full gamut from fresh and buttery and clean to funky and fishy and briny, and these were sort of right in the middle of that scale, so a perfect example for the uninitiated. In this case, the smoky chargrilled beef made an excellent surf and turf combination with the uni and the potato element grounded the whole thing perfectly. There were probably a gazillion other things going on here but the point is the main ingredients were great, and so it all fell into place.

Next to arrive - even before the remainder of the snacks - was a starter of veal sweetbreads and Landes chicken, all with a superb light crisp coating and dressed in what they called "ranch dressing" but which tasted remarkably like a poshed-up version of that gloopy orange chicken sauce you get in cheap takeaways in the US. I don't mean to make this sound like a criticism - I loved it - it's just funny how some flavour associations work in your mind.

After two weeks in southern California I wasn't about to order a taco for my first lunch back but this beef taco with squid was apparently "excellent". Looks pretty as well, doesn't it.

"Skewered rabbit, red prawn and Bordelaise" was easily one of the highlights of the meal, and (spoiler alert) everything that followed was at least very good. Carefully jointed and grilled portions of tender rabbit were skewered alongside plump, sweet prawns and finished with a little bone-in morsel of rabbit which was like nibbling on a tiny chicken wing. If I am ever in the area again, I'm going to see if I can just perch at the bar with a martini and order one of these - it's one of those dishes that's so inventive and cleverly made and enjoyable to eat that it lives in the memory long after the meal itself is over.

Almost as good (and that's still a huge compliment) was this wild duck, roasted to tender pink with a nice dark, salty skin and served with a mushroom and clementine sauce. I liked everything about this dish, including (either by usual practice or because it was being shared between 4 people) the fact it was neatly divided into four and that they'd left the feet on. A bit like bone-in steaks, it may be entirely psychological but I always think game tastes better when they leave the feet on.

Venison - like all the other red meat, grilled to a good dark char - had bags of flavour (not always a given with venison) and came with a little bonus pickled sardine. A lot of the dishes at Dorian are not just rewarding to eat and nicely constructed, they often surprise with some little extra unexpected element or unusual combination - the sea urchin and steak, for example, or the "orange chicken" dressing with the sweetbreads.

We were now into the mains, and there's nothing more Main than a giant plate of bone-in ribeye. I hardly need to do anything other than show you the picture above, but yes it tasted every bit as good as it looked - slightly yellowy, funky aged fat sat next to perfectly cooked beef and all under a thin, crisp, dark crust. The crust was almost the most notable thing about the dish - crunchy and salty and slightly bitter, very much in the Peter Luger's / US style of fierce direct heat and strong textures rather than the increasingly more trendy genteel French butter-basted and pan-roasted. Now I have a lot of time for both approaches, and I imagine that the bitter charcoal hit from this steak wouldn't be to everyone's tastes, but I absolutely loved it. And the rest of the table did, too.

Iberico pork neck with langoustines was the second standout highlight dish of the lunch, and - probably not coincidentally - was another surf and turf arrangement. The pork melted in the mouth like only the very best Iberico can do, and was drenched in a reduced jus so good that the plate was scraped clean. But as well as the giant lango tails with the pork, the side of curried carrots (not pictured, sorry) came with pieces of unbelievably lovely extracted claw meat, so that everyone got to try every bit of the animal. Technically perfect (the lango tails were moist and smoky and popped out of their shells in one satisfying chunk), surprising and generous of flavour, it was another example of the best of this kitchen's abilities. We couldn't stop talking about how good it was, although a bottle of excellent Côtes du Rhône (in remarkably light and delicate glasses) probably helped with that too.

We were having so much fun by this point we never wanted to leave, so obviously attention soon turned to desserts. So after a round of dessert-y drinks (above is a Hazelnut Old Fashioned, a fabulous thing indeed) we have chocolate souffle-tart hybrid thing with Guinness ice cream, a rather esoteric take on a rhum baba which substituted the usual alcohol-soaked sponge for small chunks of rum-flavoured biscuit, a doughnut with peanut butter and quince and through a process of elimination I think that last one is a salted milk ice cream and blue corn nachos. It certainly wasn't either the pistachio ice cream and caviar (£39) or the vanilla ice cream with white truffle (£39) - we may have been on expenses but we still valued our jobs.

I have struggled with something ever since our glorious lunch at Dorian came to an end and we spilled out onto the cold Notting Hill streets last week. Objectively, Dorian and Lita are doing very similar things. Neither are cheap, both have a Michelin star (whatever you might think about the significance of that - it seems to mainly indicate the prices they charge these days) and the menu of seasonal premium British ingredients treated in exciting and intelligent ways looks, on paper at least, like it could have been written by the same team. So why did I feel so unwelcome and cramped at harried at Lita and like we could have spent another 6 hours at Dorian and the staff wouldn't have blinked an eye?

It's all to do with the room and the service, and I suppose those are both two sides of the same issue. At this level, and at these prices, you do not want to feel like the management are trying to squeeze you for every last penny and that your custom is just a means to an end. We managed to spend even more per head at Dorian (£207.50) than Lita (£170.78) but despite this, Dorian was just infinitely better value simply down to the experience we had. Every dish from the kitchen spoke of a group of people enjoying what they do and wanting nothing more than to spread that joy to others, but crucially at Dorian that also extended to the atmosphere and service in the room, and that made all the difference in the world. Get saving, then, is my advice. Because Dorian is worth every penny.

9/10

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