Chinzano, Liverpool

I have come to the conclusion that all Italian restaurants set in old railway arches are brilliant. I'm basing this assertion on the fact that all Italian restaurants set in old railway arches I've ever been to have been brilliant, and I see no reason to just write it off as a coincidence. First there was Archway in Battersea, where an ex-River Cafe team serve a menu of exciting Modern Italian food. Then the third (or fourth? Or fifth? I've lost count) branch of Bancone in Borough Market serving house made pasta to a way higher standard you have any right to expect from what is now essentially a chain. And now, underneath what I think is the abandoned track that once terminated at the grand Liverpool Exchange station, is Chinzano.

The first thing you'll notice about the place is how nicely spaced the tables are. We've become so accustomed to being squeezed into antisocially cramped restaurant environments, where you're very often closer to a stranger on the next table than your own +1, that for somewhere to have proper distances between guests is a genuinely pleasant surprise. I'm not necessarily blaming restaurants trying to maximise the return on their floorspace, and presumably the rent in L3 is not quite in the same ballpark as Farringdon or Marylebone, but the fact is that Chinzano probably could have shoehorned in a half a dozen more tables into this room, and that they haven't is to their credit.

Also to their credit is the use of a frozen glass to serve a negroni. Again, not every restaurant has the luxury of the freezer space to store glassware, but it's these little details that make the difference when you're otherwise just one of a multiple dozen places in Liverpool that can mix gin, Campari and vermouth together. And very nice it was too.

And so was everything else. This is an off-menu special of grilled peach panzanella that impressed in many different ways at once. Chunks of crunchy fried bread sat beneath a robustly seasoned collection of summer vegetables, all topped off with a bulb of burrata. It would have been a very enjoyable thing as a straightforward panzanella but the grilled peaches added a lovely sweet/smoky touch and the creamy burrata was clearly top quality.

Another off-menu special was this fried courgette flower stuffed with salt cod mousse, which came alongside a dollop of fantastic aioli. I've had this dish in various places and in various forms over the years, but I can't remember a version as successful as this, packing so much flavour into the seafood element and boasting a batter so light and delicate it was close to Japanese tempura.

Next, an extraordinary take on tuna crudo which ranks as one of the best things to have been done to raw fish I've enjoyed in a long time. Chunks of fresh tuna were bathed in a fantastic tomato and nduja dressing, lifting and highlighting the seafood without overwhelming it and providing an addictive punch of chilli while slices of cool radish on top provided some crunch. This was a bold, exciting and intelligent balance of textures, colours and flavours that demonstrates a kitchen right on top of their Italian food game.

Mains were no less impressive. Pork chop had a beautiful dark crust from the grill but was supremely tender and tasty within, and the hazelnut and potato dressing had all sorts of lovely textures and roasted nut flavours going on. It was also a hugely generous portion - you got plenty for your £26.

And crab taglioni was basically the perfect crab pasta dish - bouncy, moreish ribbons bound with enough brown meat to lend that earthy spritz of the sea, impossible not to love and yet another masterclass in Italian cooking.

Even truffle parmesan fries, a menu item perhaps not winning many authenticity points, were executed superbly - crunchy outside and creamy inside, staying crisp until the very bottom of the bowl, and topped with a healthy dollop of preserved black truffle and shaved parmesan. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention the service, which was as attentive and pleasant as you could want from a waiter who - certainly from behind - bore a striking resemblance to Hagrid from Harry Potter. I hope they don't mind me saying.

There's a whole other half of the menu that we didn't even try - Chinzano make a exciting sounding range of pizzas, with toppings like aged lamb ragu, or confit garlic and herb. And I'm sure they're lovely - and almost certainly worth a return visit - but that's for another time. Purely based on the primi and secondi we ordered, this buzzy little spot tucked away in a strange Victorian-industrial landscape north of the city deserves to be spoken about as one of the best Italian restaurants in the country never mind the North West - it really is that good. So you can add Chinzano to your list of must-visit restaurants today, and if you're ever wondering whether or not a particular Italian joint you may come across is worth your custom, check to see if it's in an old railway arch. If it is, you're probably onto a good thing.

9/10

I completely forgot to take a photo of the bill - I must have been enjoying myself too much - but with a bottle of nice organic white it came to £76pp, very reasonable for the level of cooking on offer.

Pilgrim, Liverpool

As Brits, we largely think of no-frills budget airlines as a way of jetting ourselves off to sunnier places (or more accurately this year, just as blisteringly hot but with cheaper drinks) for our holidays, but are less likely to consider that those same routes might be bring curious and enterprising traffic the other way. Spain may be far and away the most popular destination for British holidaymakers but it's thanks to those airlines and their cavalier attitudes to geographical accuracy ("London" Southend, "Barcelona" Girona) that previously rather culinarily insular cities like Liverpool seemingly overnight found themselves host to fantastic delis like Lunya, where Iberico ham is carved to order and fridges groan with packs of sobrassada and boquerones.

And it makes sense that where good ingredients go, and hospitality-trained labour can travel, good restaurants follow. Pilgrim is the second location for this team, but they seem a lot more comfortable in pleasant, village-y Allerton Road than in the hot and ear-splittingly noisy space above Duke Street market I visited all the way back in pre-Covid times. I enjoyed the food then enormously, but just wished I didn't have to scream to be heard above the din rising up from the food market below. This serene little spot is far more conducive to a pleasant conversation and a small plates concept.

I began with anchovies two ways (my description, not theirs) - a plate of plump boquerones drizzled in olive oil, and an anchovy martini. I can hear some of you rolling your eyes and yes, I know I have a compulsion to order the weirdest thing on any given menu but this was actually a very straightforwardly enjoyable drink with a slight tang of brine which sat very successfully next to white vermouth. Drops of olive oil on the top prettified it as well as adding a little extra grassy note, and I could recommend it to anyone. So there.

At £9 a plate the "Jamon Iberico" was of course not the full acorn-fed bellota but a kind of prosciutto-style presumably made with some variation of Iberico cross-breed. It was still perfectly enjoyable though, the soft and salty protein drizzled with olive oil and topped with crunchy breadsticks.

Octopus with butter beans was a dish so enchantingly authentic it could have been served exactly in this state in any little bar in the suburbs of Barcelona or Girona - add in a row of old men arguing about Catalan politics over giant balloons of sweet brandy and (price aside) you could have been 800 miles away (yes I know Pilgrim are inspired more by Galicia than Catalonia but that is my own reference point). Pickled red onions on top added a nice zing and crunch but the real touch of genius here were the chunks of hot guindillas studded around the place, one of those rare instances where Spanish food allows itself to be properly, eye-wateringly spicy.

Giant Atlantic prawns came with a nice hit of smoke and lots of those lovely crunchy crumbly blackened bits you get whenever you put shellfish in contact with direct heat. Top quality seafood as is an essential a part of the Spanish diet as bread and wine, and dishes like this can be a complete disaster if the main ingredient isn't up to scratch, but fortunately these were very good even if not quite as stunning as the examples you find in Spain.

Tuna tartare was bound with a very clever grapefruit and roasted tomato sauce, hinting towards a kind of ceviche but softer and less citrussy. You also got a lot of tuna for your £15 which was nice to see in these frugal times.

Not pictured (the photo is awful and I won't subject you to it) is roast hispi cabbage topped with shaved manchego and chive butter, which demonstrated again how good this kitchen is at live fire cooking. What I did manage to get a half-decent photo of though are the above Jersey royals, which had been crisped up, doused in salsa verde and served alongside a generous dollop of aioli. A huge portion for £7, they still disappeared thanks to the fantastic mix of textures and technique on display.

The only real mis-step of the evening were these lamb chops, which although cooked accurately to nice and moist and pink inside and with a good dark crust on the outside, were so incredibly salty they were bordering on inedible, snd I have quite a high salt tolerance. Perhaps they'd been seasoned twice by mistake, or someone accidentally knocked a packet of Maldon into the chimichurri (tximitturi was on the menu, presumably the Basque spelling) but they really shouldn't have gone out in this state. Still, they look nice don't they.

The bill, with a nice bottle of rioja, came to £207 for 3 - so £69 per person for plenty of food and wine, not to mention a very competent round of cocktails, which seems to be about right. Service was super friendly and on the ball, and it's a lovely room, with the large windows opened onto the pavement on this sunny day, though I can imagine it being cosy and warm in the winter as well. It's a neighbourhood restaurant that takes itself seriously enough where it matters, but delivers everything with enough of an easygoing charm that you can't help be charmed by the place.

So whether or not the link between low-cost Spanish flights and top-tier Liverpool restaurants can be proven convincingly, I like to think that rather than just being a method of funnelling thousands of pasty Brits to and from the Costas every summer, the ease and relative low cost of travel between the two countries has - despite Brexit's best efforts to sabotage it - forged something a bit more meaningful between these parts of the world. May hand-carved Iberico ham and octopus and butterbean tapas be long here to stay in Liverpool, and may us all be the better for it.

8/10

Khao Bird, Soho

Before I was able to assess the authenticity or otherwise of the food at Khao Bird, I could at least appreciate the ambient temperatures in the dining hall were at genuine Thai levels. It's not really their fault that we visited during one of the hottest day's of London's seemingly endless heatwave, but it really is getting to the stage that if your place doesn't have actual AC (or if it's not turned up (down?) enough) then I'm really going to have to think twice on whether I want to spend time there, no matter how good the food is.

So it's thanks to the food at Khao Bird being rather good indeed that I was able to - temporarily - put up with the raging temperatures and for a few moments on a Sunday afternoon enjoy an interesting variety of Northern Thai BBQ (their own description of their own food). But not before tucking into one of these bad boys, a spicy margarita made with mezcal and a pleasingly significant dose of chilli which blew open the taste buds in preparation for the food to follow.

At this point I should say that yes, I know the photos are awful - it was dark in there as well as hot, and I was only halfheartedly paying attention to my blogging responsibilities as I was meeting a friend from Liverpool for dinner and didn't want to embarrass him too much with my Big Noisy Camera. But these (I promise) are crispy pigs ears, just the right balance of crunchy and chewy, served with an addictive nam pla and a fantastic nibble with the margarita.

I've been served such a huge variety of things over the years sharing the name laab that I honestly am not sure what is the core laabness that makes a laab a laab other than, more often than not, a borderline hallucinatory hit of chilli. This is steak tartare and Campari (full marks for imagination at least) and was both so good and so hot that I was forced to take tiny mouthfuls of it every 10 minutes or so, the breaks just enough for the burning to dip from acute pain to a dull throb, then back again. Crispy tofu skin on top provided a nice crunch to offset the raw beef texture and various other bits of fresh veg and spices rounded the whole thing off nicely. Not your traditional laab, then - if such a thing even exists - but well worth an order if you're a chilli fiend.

Another Thai staple, Som Tam, used Isle of White tomatoes and local "shrub veg" (your guess is as good as mine but I like to think someone's got their foraging on) with the usual tamarind-chilli mixture and was finished with "our family honey", which was a very nice touch. The trick, I imagine, in running a successful Thai restaurant outside of Thailand is knowing when to substitute local ingredients and when to stick to imported Thai originals. I love the idea of creating a Thai salad with English garden vegetables and authentic imported fish sauce, especially when the result is as good as this.

Also ordered and not pictured (I did take a photo, but you really don't want to see it believe me) was a giant steaming bowl of grilled chicken khao soi, a northern Thai curry that involved a rich coconut broth, egg noodles two ways, boiled and crisped, pickled mustard greens and chilli. Even without the chicken this would have been a fantastically enjoyable thing to slurp down, but the chicken managed to hold the crisp and char of the coals despite being dunked in the sauce, and thanks to an aggressive marinade the flesh was salty and firm right to he bone - not a hint of dryness. Impressive stuff, and well worth £23 considering the amount of work that had clearly gone into it.

With a couple of pots of jasmine rice and - I have a vague memory of this - a little dish of miso broccoli, the bill came to just over £50pp which is pretty much exactly what you should be spending on interesting, intelligently constructed food of this kind in London. If I'm going to be absolutely brutal I'd say Kiln is still my favourite Soho Thai spot but these days that's altogether a more serious and spendy affair. Khao Bird is fun, accessible and - by the standards of 2026 - good value, and easily makes my recommendation list as an unpretentious little spot that takes itself just seriously enough where it matters. And if they fixed their AC, it would be even better.

8/10

Barnacle, Liverpool

If it sometimes feels like Liverpool is short on quota of restaurants of sufficient quality befitting a city of its size (something that, fortunately, is increasingly improving), then it can never be said that there are a shortage of beautiful buildings to potentially host them in. The School for the Blind on Hardman Street is a stunning spot - an elegantly proportioned, early Victorian honeyed stone building borne of the golden age of Industrial Age philanthropy. It's an absolutely beautiful thing, and if nothing else it would be worth visiting Barnacle just to thank them for taking on custody of this place and not having it turn into another awful chain bar or hair salon.

And once inside, first impressions were good. Staff were friendly and (initially) efficient, bringing us a nice cold martini (not a frozen glass but you can't have everything) and another very pleasant long drink involving gin and basil ("Barnacle Bill"). A third cocktail advised "Allow 11 minutes" but was worth the wait, a rum and coconut concoction called Lost at Sea which came all frothed up with egg white like a big cold soufflé.

In the meantime, we were served genuinely lovely pickled oysters with buttermilk and dill. There was a time when I wouldn't entertain anything happening to oysters apart from being opened and served raw, but it turns out that when a good restaurant poaches - or batters and fries, or pickles - the things they can be just as enjoyable in a different way. The pickling process here was very subtle, just enough to take that very ocean-y, briny edge off and replace it with something smoother and cleaner.

Miso Scotch egg had a good loose texture, nice crisp coating and the yolks were timed perfectly, which are pretty much the only things you need to get right in a good scotch egg.

The only vaguely disappointing snack were the "cheesy chips", a slightly clumsy pile of skin-on potato wedges and melted cheddar, with the odd sliver of crisp Jerusalem artichoke. Not inedible, just a bit uninteresting and the kind of thing you might expect to find on the menu of one of the aforementioned awful chains. You know the ones, I'm sure.

Snacks and cocktails despatched, we were onto the starters. New Liverpool chowder was a rich, comforting mixture of thick dairy, smoked haddock, clams, potato and sea herbs which was a real highlight. Crisp fried potato skins, Parkers Arms-style, provided crunch and it looked the part with its drizzle of dill oil, but the broth itself was the real star here - everything you could possibly want from a chowder. Everyone who tried it loved it.

Fried chicken tenders topped with Avruga "caviar" was perhaps a slightly less ambitious dish but just as enjoyable in its own way, with greaseless fingers of crisp batter containing lovely white chicken meat, topped with creme fraiche and a generous dollop of the Avruga. It's very easy to make chicken tenders bland and cloying, but these were very good.

Then, we waited for the mains. And waited. And waited. And after about 45 minutes, they arrived. My own venison was good - the meat itself would have benefitted from a bit more of a crust (or in fact any crust at all, the fillets had the consistency of gammon although they tasted nice) but the accompanying sauces were top-notch, both the glossy 'chocolate peppercorn sauce' and the little blobs of parsnip (I think) puree. Fried shallots on top added the crunch that the venison lacked, and kale did its usual job of soaking up the rest of the sauce. Yes, it wasn't perfect, but I still enjoyed this dish - more went right than wrong.

Cod was a little bland despite some potentially good strong flavours - a shame as with a heavier hand with the salt it could have been really impressive. The fish itself was good quality though, and all the accompaniments were cooked properly, it just all needed a bit more attention to seasoning to really shine.

Ironically, flat iron steak had the opposite problem to the cod - it was cooked and seasoned properly and had a good flavour, but was tough and stringy and quite difficult to eat. Still, could be worse - and the chips were very nice.

For desserts, we were relocated to the noisy, crowded bar because, we were bluntly informed, "we need your table back". Don't spend 45 minutes bringing out the main courses, then, is my advice, because it was hardly our fault everything took so long. They didn't even seem that apologetic about it, just needed us out of the way. So I'm afraid our desserts (objectively pretty nice, a rum and banana sticky toffee pudding, and a Guinness and chocolate cake topped with blue cheese and mascarpone) suffered in the context of wanting to get out of that bar, where the music was so loud normal conversation was impossible. And did they take anything off the bill for our trouble? Did they buggery.

So there's plenty to enjoy about Barnacle, and lots of things to admire. The food itself, for example, is well worth the prices they're asking for it, and with a closer attention to service detail the place has the potential to be another mid-budget crowdpleaser in the realm of Wreckfish or Belzan. But I'm pretty sure neither Wreckfish or Belzan would make you feel like an inconvenience for a mistake of their making - an unforgivable misstep for a restaurant with ambitions like Barnacle. And I'm not going to break the habit of a lifetime and score the food and service and ambiance separately, because none of these elements exist in a vacuum - a restaurant is a product of all things working side by side. Can I recommend Barnacle? Right now, just about. Maybe. But there's certainly room for improvement.

6/10

The Hightown Inn, Liverpool

Despite spending the first 20 years of my life about 100m up the road from the Hightown Inn (then the Hightown Hotel), I never really considered this grand old Victorian building to be much of a "local". I was far more likely to get the train to the Railway in Formby where most of my friends lived, or the Grapes in Freshfield if we were feeling particularly Footballer's Wives. The Hightown contingent did - occasionally - persuade others to join us in L38, but the building's constant change of ownership, focus and purpose (was it a pub with food, a food pub, or just a plain old boozer? A hotel? A wedding venue or events space?) combined with the fact nobody ever seemed to know the best way of using the vast structure - a series of huge high-ceilinged rooms that depending on the time of day would be ear-shatteringly noisy or intimidatingly quiet - created a strange atmosphere that was never really anyone's favourite place to hang out.

There's still a vague sense of prevailing awkwardness in the dining areas of the Hightown - the giant spaces certainly give them a flexibility when it comes to catering for groups (we noted with some trepidation on arrival that each room contained a few tables for 20, although actually they weren't stag or hen do's and it was all very convivial and - crucially - a sensible volume) but do in the end still feel like a dance floor that's been temporarily emptied out for a banquet. There's no real sense of permanence, and you get the very strong impression that if the whole gastropub thing doesn't work out they could clear out the tables, put up a DJ booth and be back to putting on karaoke evenings and pub quizzes faster than you could say "Merseyrail Northern Line".

Further unease was spread once we'd taken our seats, from a waitress who unapologetically began with "We've got no steak tartare".

"Oh that's a shame. We-"

"Or focaccia, or Caesar salad, or mushroom parfait-"

"Can we-"

"Or ribeye, although there's alternative steaks on the specials."

Having had to go back to the drawing board food-wise, attempts to fill the gap with alcohol were thwarted too.

"Can I have a Bloody Mary?"

"No tomato juice, sorry."

"A prosecco?"

"Sorry."

Eventually we managed to piece together a drinks order from the few items they did have, and once they'd all arrived we tried again.

"Can I have the beef & ale pie please."

A pause, then she wordlessly scurried off to the kitchen. A minute later, she was back.

"We don't have that either."

Just as our lunch was on the verge of turning into a complete Monty Python sketch, between the six of us we did somehow come up with a food order, but by this stage I'm afraid our expectations had dropped all the way down through pessimistic to downright despondent. Even an attempt to fill in the yawning gaps on the a la carte with an item or two from the bar menu - a couple of Scotch n'duja quail egg would have been nice, or a grilled beetroot salad - was met with icy indifference.

"Different menu sorry, we can't serve those here."

We looked forlornly over to a table about 6 feet away in the raised bar area, where a family of four were happily tucking into an order of Scotch eggs alongside a portion of fish and chips and a burger. Somehow we'd ended up in the only gastropub in the country where the bar menu was bigger than the dining room's.

And in any sane universe, that should have been that. Another half-assed attempt to relaunch a pub with a vaguely ambitious menu that after a couple of months has fallen back into serving fish and chips, burgers and steaks because honestly, why try harder?

But then the food arrived. And it was all quite lovely.

Parmesan truffle potato chips were so fragile and delicately fried they dissolved in the mouth, and though there's nothing natural about the truffle oil they'd used (nobody's expecting real truffle on a dish worth £4.50) there was still a pleasing amount of it, the aroma filling the room and I'm sure prompting a few more orders from other tables. Assuming they hadn't run out by that point.

Oysters were a bit on the small side but nice and fresh and lean and opened well, with no shell fragments. They came with a decent mignonette but also Sriracha which it turns out goes with oysters perfectly.

Skagen toast is a Swedish thing - head chef Daniel Heffy spent some time in 3* Frantzén in Sweden - best described as a prawn cocktail on toasted brioche. It boasted lovely plump fresh prawns bound with a delicate light mayonnaise, and despite the hugely generous portion size was supremely easy to eat and disappeared very quickly.

Also fantastic were red tail scampi, huge sweet things in a batter that at first looked like it might be too much but thanks to the flavour punch of the prawns turned out to be balanced just right. The jalapeño aioli might have needed a bit more of a chilli kick but then that could just be me - this was still another very nicely done bit of seafood.

Tomato tarte fine looks great and tasted better, a delicate (there's that word again) pastry base layered with powerfully tomato-y (possibly stewed down or partially dried somehow) tomatoes and fluffy goats cheese. I've probably said all I need to say about the annoyance of having so many menu items unavailable, but things like the tomato tart and parmesan chips demonstrate that there is real skill in this kitchen and a future in something more than doing the classics well.

They do the classics well, though, of course. I tried a bit of this burger which had a good crumbly and crusty beef patty with a sensible arrangement of pickles and cheese above. Crucially as well you could eat it without dismantling it, never a given with pub burgers.

Pork schnitzel with fried capers and anchovy butter was doing almost everything right, although with the memory of a Berlin schnitzel in my mind from a couple of years ago the relatively small size of this one came as a bit of a surprise. But I doubt there's many people in Merseyside really want to eat a piece of deep-fried pork the size of a table, so this is probably just a case of knowing your audience.

Steak was definitely worth an order - lovely and charred properly with little bits of fat all crunchy and dark - and though the quality of the beef wasn't quite world class, all was forgiven thanks to how well it was all cooked and seasoned. Fries were impeccable though - crisp and full of flavour right to the last one.

There were more mains as you can see from the bill, but I won't exhaustively go through everything a table of 6 ate for a long lunch. But it's a testament to the quality of the food that despite the shaky (to say the least) start, we all left the Hightown Inn happy as Larry and more than eager to go again when, fingers crossed, they may have a few more interesting things on the menu.

With desserts (tarte tatin, above, a particular highlight - fantastic gooey treacly pastry with crunchy bits) and lots of holiday booze the bill came to £63 a head, and it's probably worth pointing out that even on a "good" day (assuming these do happen) the most they charge for service is 10%. Maybe if you offer the usual 12.5% they'll consider carrying a dish from the bar menu over to the dining room without fear of the world ending. It might be worth a shot. Oh and by the way, we also tried ordering the chocolate fondant. They didn't have any.

So scoring the Hightown has left me with a bit of a conundrum. The food alone, even the hugely reduced selection we ended up with, is probably 8 out of 10, but I can't ignore the fact that you could turn up and find half the dishes and drinks you had your eye on unavailable, and coupled with some bafflingly inflexible service decisions this has the potential to rather spoil your day. So I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and settle with a 7. Room for improvement from a fairly promising start, and here's hoping that in the next few months they become the dining destination they're so very clearly capable of being.

7/10