Lita, Marylebone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

The Buxton, Brick Lane

Continuing a recent theme, here comes along another example of excellent restaurant pedigree producing a fantastic place to eat. The Buxton is a smart and buzzy spot halfway down Brick Lane, within trotting distance of sister restaurant the Culpeper which is also a lovely (if often wildly oversubscribed) modern British bistro with rooftop kitchen garden. The same guys also run the Green in Clerkenwell and the Duke of Cambridge in Angel, neither of which I've been to in many years but are probably still worth a look.

So, they've got the pedigree. And with that comes the ability to write an absolutely beautiful menu full of seasonal British-French delights, at prices that are scarcely believable (in a good way) in 2024. If this was a brand new restaurant in its honeymoon period, I'd have to caveat that with the possibility that after a handful of reviews came in they'd quietly bump up the prices - it happens a lot. But no, the Buxton has been open since May 2019 and has somehow survived all the way through lockdowns and facemasks and disrupted supply routes with (as a quick Instagram history check reveals) the same attitude to value.

Choosing from the chalkboard menu at the Buxton is largely an exercise in deciding which handful of dishes you can just about live without, then ordering everything else. We decided cheese croquettes with chive emulsion sounded too good to pass on and indeed they were lovely, all gooey inside and greaseless outside, the chive dressing superbly light.

Whipped cod's roe panise came as cute little square fritters of fried gram flour pastry, topped with neat folds of salty, smooth tarama. As you'll see even from the slightly murky photos (the bartop lights had a very strange orange hue which I didn't notice at the time) presentation of the dishes at Buxton went from charmingly rustic when appropriate, all the way through to exact and geometric when it made sense to do so. There was quite the range of techniques on display.

As if the chalkboard didn't contain enough joy, there were even two off-menu specials we were told about as we took our seats. This was the first of them - homemade bottarga crumbled over chalk stream trout tartare, with pickled radish, wild garlic flowers, herbs and who knows what else, so prettily and colourfully arranged it could have easily come out of a Simon Rogan kitchen. At one point in the evening I overheard one of the front of house mutter "wow, beautiful" under her breath as she picked up a plate of this from the pass. And if you can still impress someone with presentation of a dish she's probably been serving all day long, you're probably doing something right.

Asparagus - great big thick spears, nicely charred from the grill - came on a bed of brown butter sauce, best described I suppose as a kind of toasty, nutty hollandaise. We're right smack bang in the middle of asparagus season at the moment, and so of course they're on the menu everywhere but I'm still impressed with places that are finding some new way of showing them off.

I wouldn't normally have ordered tomatoes with stracciatella - I'm less forgiving of this kind of thing being on the menu absolutely everywhere than I am of asparagus, because I love asparagus - but actually this was very interesting, with a kind of sharp keffir lime dressing to liven it all up. Tomatoes were well seasoned too.

For £15 I was expecting perhaps one langoustine, or maybe two teeny ones - there's more than one restaurant I've been to in the last couple of years serving langos so small I'd questioned whether they ever should have been landed at all - but not here. Two giant beasties, with claws so big they contained more meat you'd find in a tail in some places, perfectly timed with sweet, soft flesh, came drenched in "fermented prawn butter". And if you're thinking that maybe they gave the blogger table bigger specimens than everyone else, I can assure you that our seats overlooked the kitchen and every other plate of langoustine that hit the pass was at least the same size.

Last of the savouries was a mutton chop, tender and full of flavour, with a neat little pile of pickles. It was very good, but once you've tasted the Cull Yaw from such places as Mangal 2 or Kiln, other types of mutton tend to disappoint slightly. Even so, we quite happily polished it off, and had no real complaints.

For dessert, rhubarb Paris Brest (or even "Breast" as they'd put on the menu and someone had tried to gingerly correct) which had an irresistable light, flaky texture and a good strong hit of rhubarb purée, and "croissant ice cream", apparently made by soaking croissant in water, making a kind of croissant stock, and then making ice cream from that. Maybe I've been lucky, but I can't remember being anything less than happy with any homemade ice cream in any restaurant in the last few years. And I'm pretty sure I'm not getting less fussy - places are just getting better at ice cream.

So, yes, the Buxton is good. Very good. Food in central London as well-chosen, intelligently treated and smartly served as this could - perhaps even should - cost easily double what they're charging for it. True, portion sizes are controlled, but it takes just as much skill to assemble two exquisite whipped cod's roe panise as it does four or six, and £15 for two big langoustine is vanishingly rare in the capital. It's a little tricky working out what our bill would have been as a couple of the dishes were off-menu, but if I say the food came to about £50pp, and drinks another £20pp, I don't think I'd be too far off the mark. Very reasonable indeed.

And I very much hope the team behind the Buxton don't stop there. It must have taken a heroic amount of steel and determination to survive through two years of pandemic after having been open barely a few months, but to come out of all that with an operation quite as mature and confident is an achievement indeed. I hope we see a few more tastefully updated East End boozers with a seasonal chalkboard menu and a nice cocktail list over the coming months and years, but even if they stay where they are for the moment, we've still got so much to be thankful for.

9/10

I was invited to the Buxton and didn't see a bill.

Oren, Dalston

Mumbling and grumbling during my journey to Dalston the other night, as the 38 bus did an average speed of just less than walking pace all the way from Holborn in the pouring rain, just helped to highlight how I end up travelling to some parts of town for dinner over and over again, and how much of a restaurant desert are some other parts (Battersea, for example, where I live). It hardly seems fair that so many thrusting new restaurants set up shop within walking distance of each other in the East, while the single only spot worth visiting within walking distance of my house is Mien Tay - lovely on its own terms of course, but man cannot live by Pho alone.

Oren is yet another wonderful neighbourhood restaurants in a neighbourhood not short of good neighbourhood restaurants. And that I felt that despite the stress of getting there and back (don't even get me started on the journey home) is testament to just how good it is. The menu is Eastern Mediterranean/Middle Eastern leaning, but using seasonal British ingredients. So far, so Dalston. But never make the msitake of thinking this kind of thing is easy, or that an intelligent small-plates seasonal restaurant is some kind of inevitable endpoint in trendy parts of town because there's very clearly a lot of work gone into not just the food at Oren, but also the manner in which it is presented.

Take this huge arrangement of mezze, for example, served alongside a piping hot flatbread straight out of the charcoal oven. There was a pile of tomato pulp in good grassy olive oil, a super-smooth hummus rich with tahini, some extremely good house pickles with a kick of fermented funk, pickled beetroot, some kind of sour cream thing which could be labneh or toum (though I didn't detect much garlic if it was toum) topped with za'atar, and finally some spicy chopped/pickled carrots. All stuff you may have had elsewhere, but refined and elevated to a very high standard (as you might expect, for £17).

I did think twice about using this absolutely awful photo of the pollock "pastrami" (smoked salmon, only made with pollock) but hopefully even out of focus you will notice its translucent jewel-like appearance and the neat ring of burnt romano peppers which had a fantastic charred/smokey taste. If I'm being brutally critical, the pollock was a little too salty - and I'm someone that usually complains things aren't seasoned enough - but it was still a very clever bit of work.

Jerusalem artichoke fritters - fried very aggressively to a slightly bitter, extra crunchy outisde but then perhaps that's entirely deliberate - had nevertheless a lovely soft interior and came alongside a little blob of sour cream topped with zhoug (a kind of coriander/chilli/garlic green sauce).

With the veggies more or less covered by this point, and with Oren already demonstrating its ability to be a very good vegetarian restaurant in its own right, we moved on to the meats. First, the "Jerusalem mix grill", a wonderfully soft, pillowy pita containing all kinds of bits of tender offal - kidneys, liver and heart at least I think - bound by amba (mango) sauce. This was just great, and at £9 would make a very good lunch for one to takeaway if you were lucky enough to live or work nearby.

Finally, a pile of lamb breast shawarma so tender and full of flavour it made a case for the awful journey here all by itself. The meat itself was wonderful of course, but as well as containing plenty of soft lamb fat into the mix, it was also - a stroke of genius - studded with little cubes of fried bread, for a bit of extra texture. Topped with more excellent pickles and with another silky smooth sauce (tahini yoghurt) it was the kind of dish that forces you to wipe the plate clean. Which indeed we did.

With a bottle of Chin Chin Vinho Verde (when in Dalston) and a cocktail (Oaxaca Old Fashioned, very nice) the bill came to £60 each, pretty much right in the middle of what you should be paying for this kind of thing these days. Certainly we felt like we'd got our money's worth, especially when you throw in the super attentive and lovely service (although minus a point for the inadequate single toilet, for which there was a queue most of the evening).

When I eventually got home, after a journey that involved an Uber, the overground, the Jubilee line, a train and then another Uber, I realised I would have to approach my review of Oren as if it was somewhere newly opened on Lavender Hill, and not nearly an hour and a half away on one of the wettest nights of the year. Objectively, then, Oren is a gorgeous little neighbourhood restaurant, serving food you want to eat at prices you can afford, and it's no surprise it's doing very well. But please, future restaurant owners, please can you consider something like this in Wandsworth or Clapham? Would it kill you?

8/10

Honey & Co, Bloomsbury

On one of the hottest days of the year - and God knows we'd had enough of those - it feels appropriate to eat food from a part of the world a little more used to coping with the heat. The husband and wife team behind Honey & Co are both Israeli by birth, but have honed their skills in various high-end London restaurant kitchens, including (and most influentially) Ottolenghi's NOPI, who's done more than most to introduce the city to the delights of pomegranate molasses and zat'ar than anyone else I can think of.

The thing is, delightful though Ottolenghi's recipes are in the context of a lavish double-spread in the Observer, I wasn't a huge fan of NOPI - the rustic charm that works so well in tender close-up scattered with pomegranate seeds and flat-leaved parsley, served in a restaurant looks a bit, well, lazy - especially considering the rather terrifying prices they charge (£13 for roasted carrot).

The original Honey & Co was an instant London hit because it combined the colourful, veg-forward eastern Mediterranean ingredient base with a more refined, yet still reasonably-priced, restaurant aesthetic. It was food that made you feel good about eating it, full of life and personality and with certain dishes, specifically the taramosalata, becoming must-order classics.

Now shifted to Bloomsbury, in excellent foodie company just over the road from Noble Rot in a nicely refurbished, air-conditioned (thank God) space, it's a delight (not to mention somewhat of a relief) that the tarama has made the journey across town largely intact. It's a really wonderful thing, salty and satisfying, topped with chopped egg and pickles and with a few trout roe to provide a bit of texture. It's still a must-order item and worth the journey alone.

Other dishes were less successful, but we'll come to those later. House pickles were certainly generously proportioned, with a giant pile of funky yellow turnip next to pickled chillies and kalamata olives. Best of all on this plate though was cabbage which had been soaked in some kind of sichuan-style smoked chilli oil, a surprising turn for a Middle Eastern restaurant but one that worked very well.

House bread was, well, fine - the grassy olive oil it came with was certainly more interesting than the bread itself, which was a bit like the kind of thing restaurants used to boast about making themselves before people started making genuinely good sourdough on site. The milk bun was probably the best of them, then the warm pita, and then the slightly disappointing sesame.

I'm still not sure what to make of the prawns and watermelon dish. Somewhere perhaps, in a parallel universe, I can conceive of a watermelon and prawn dish that does work, maybe involving lots of chilli and slicked with oil or butter to counteract the sugary crispness of the melon. But plain (I didn't detect a trace of the advertised lemon or oregano) poached prawns on plain watermelon dressed with plain dry mint leaves and chunks of plain feta was all too...well, plain. A spritz of raw lemon helped spruce it up a bit, but this was still an awkwardly bland dish, not much fun to eat at all.

On the other hand, despite being almost buried under a cupboard's worth of ingredients (cherry tomatoes, pine nuts, breadcrumbs and various herbs) the grilled sardines were absolutely lovely. I could probably have done with a bit more of a charred skin, but the flesh inside was perfectly timed, and pulled away from the bones in a pleasing whole fillet. We should all of us eat more sardines, they're very sustainable as well as being great to eat.

Dessert, when it eventually arrived (staff were struggling towards the end of the evening, although it's probably not a good idea to make too much of this given everything that's going on), was perfectly nice, a dense flourless (I think) chocolate cake packed with various different nuts, and served with a "marzipan sorbet" - actually quite an interesting idea. I'm not sure whose idea it was to put a dry sherry on the dessert menu though; I should have known better than to think an amontillado would go with a chocolate cake but I took a chance and ordered it anyway, and it really didn't.

The bill came to £113 for three people, which I suppose is just about in the ballpark of acceptable. Rampant inflation and soaring energy costs have forced restaurants to make some near impossible decisions re: the price points on their menus, and it would be extremely unreasonable of me to expect dinner in Bloomsbury in 2022 to be the same price as Warren St in 2013. Honey & Co is still at the lower end of the budget for a central London restaurant, a fact reflected in their popularity - every table taken on a Thursday evening.

The fact it didn't quite live up to my expectations, then, is possibly more my fault than theirs. I loved the original Honey & Co, I loved what they were doing and I loved that they loved what they were doing - everything had such heart and personality it was impossible not to be completely smitten. It was always likely that a change of location (and to a much larger location at that) may test the limits of an operation, so maybe we should be thankful that, despite a couple of things not quite going to plan, so much of what they do is still so good. And I've every confidence that given a few more months, they'll be back to their old selves.

6/10

The Opera Tavern, Covent Garden

There are a few restaurants - increasingly few - that despite at least one very pleasant meals at, I've for whatever reason never got around to writing up. My 40th birthday last November was an excuse to plug a few of the more glaring gaps (many thanks the Guinea Grill and Chez Bruce for countless good times), but to anywhere else I love that still remains unblogged I can only apologise and say that I'll hope to get round to it eventually. Promise.

So consider this post a very long-delayed response to so many very brilliant meals over many years at the Opera Tavern. This Italian-Spanish bistro, part of the very commendable Salt Yard group, arrived in Covent Garden at a time when decent Covent Garden dining spots were pretty few and far between. It immediately made a name for itself by offering what soon became its signature dish, a mini Iberico pork and foie gras burger, a revelation at a time when the Meatwagon's #meateasy popup in New Cross had only just got going, and Londoners had only just started discovering the joys of rare meat in a bun.

Weirdly - and slightly disappointingly - that Iberico burger appears to no longer feature on the Opera Tavern menu, at least not at time of press, but then perhaps that's for the best. These things are generally better in our memories than revisited, and there's every chance it would pale in comparison today to offerings from Bleecker burger or Zephyr in Peckham. Or maybe not. I suppose we'll never know.

What I do know is that there's still more than enough reasons to visit the Opera Tavern, burger or no burger, beginning with their excellent - I mean seriously excellent - jamon & manchego croquetas. These beautiful little mouthfuls of gooey bechamel spiked with top Iberico ham, glued into place with silky-smooth aioli, are alongside José Pizarro's, pretty much the best in town, and a must-order even if popping in briefly for no more else than a glass of cold sherry. Opera Tavern is competing in this year's "Croqueta challenge" taking place at sister restaurant Ember Yard, and on the basis of this, they stand a good chance of coming back with a (croqueta-shaped) trophy.

Padrón peppers, I realise aren't the most demanding dish a tapas restaurant could produce (even I've never managed to balls them up, and I once tried frying potatoes in a ceramic tray on the hob; it didn't end well), but are I think an essential part of any Spanish meal nonetheless. These were, as expected, all salty and crunchy in the right places but also contained a surprising number of quite spicy ones. Someone once told me that the percentage of hot padróns in any given batch is depending on the time of year - more in the summer, fewer in the winter; I'm not sure how true that is but I'm going to believe it until someone gives me a better explanation.

If I missed the nostalgic hit of the Iberico pork burger, this plate of smoky chargrilled chorizo took me right back to my first few months as a food blogger all the way back in 2007, waiting shivering in the line at Borough Market for a Brindisa chorizo roll. Here it came on a bed of chunky hummus, topped with sundried tomatoes and paprika-spiked chickpeas, and was as comforting and addictive as ever. Tapas - and Spanish food generally, outside of the most falutin' of 3* gastro-temples - is often defined by being stripped-back and simple, but there was actually quite a bit going on in this dish. It still worked, though.

Patatas bravas, invitingly golden brown but not over-crisp, arrived dusted with paprika salt and with a little pot of romesco (I think, or tomato - sorry I wasn't really paying attention I was too busy wolfing them down) sauce to dip them in. As an aside, this was a vegan dish, and like all the best vegan dishes (in fact the only good vegan dishes), it just happened to be vegan to begin with rather than being a bastardised version of something else with the dairy taken out.

Next, a wonderfully colourful tomato salad, involving huge sliced bull tomatoes, smaller cherry tomatoes, a lot of salt and good olive oil, and little sprigs of micro basil. I don't blame British restaurants for using home-grown tomatoes, or the best of the Isle of Wight which I often see mentioned on menus, but the simple truth is tomatoes grow best where there's lots of sun and very little rain, and the best tomatoes are Italian, or Spanish, and I'm going to make the most of them before Brexit kicks in and they cost £10 each.

Last of the small plates were these very deftly-fried courgette flowers stuffed with Monte Enebro goats cheese and drizzled in honey. Another Spanish classic, done brilliantly, perfectly balanced vegetal bitterness with sweet honey and rich dairy, satisfying in every way. They'd be a must-order, too, if there weren't so many other must-orders.

But speaking of must-orders, we had been invited here on this occasion for a reason. The "Sharing plate of Iberico pork" is 300g of the very finest black-leg pig, roasted to such a gasp-inducing softness of texture the only way I can describe it is that it's like the slow-roast duck they do at very top Chinese restaurants like Park Chinois, where the little slices of meat just seem to dissolve on the tongue. It came with little blobs of pepper sauce, and a kind of chutney, but really this was all about the stunning main ingredient - £30 for what is surely, by some distance, the finest pork dish in London. And if you don't agree, you haven't had it yet, simple as that.

So after all these years, the Opera Tavern - stately, seasoned, sensational - is still, in 2019, the pride of Covent Garden. Sorry - to them, mainly - that it's taken me so long to put my thoughts down but better late than never, and anyway I'm convinced that their food will have found even more fans in the next decade than the last, with or without the odd gushing blog post. A confident, mature operation that barely puts a foot wrong from the menu to the service to the polished surroundings, it is as close as this part of town gets to a Sure Thing - a crowdpleaser, reliably great at what they do. And there's hardly any greater compliment than that.

9/10

The above meal, and the incredible pork platter, were comped, but I have paid for dinner at the OT about 10-15 times over the last decade, and will do many years into the future.