Willy's, Margate

I have often come across menus that read better than they deliver - full of interesting ingredients and clever techniques on paper but not living up to the promise when the actual food starts appearing. This makes sense from a certain point of view - it's all very well writing the word 'bouillabaisse' on a menu but quite another having the knowledge and skill to serve it.

Much more unusual is to find a menu that under-promises and over-delivers. I'm not saying the menu at Willy's is unadventurous but it is quite familiar - certainly if you're as much of a restaurant spod as me. Black pudding Scotch egg, sausage and mash, trout with seaweed butter, these are all things you are very likely to have seen before, at a local bistro perhaps or popular rural gastropub, staples of British food that have stood the test of time. But if they're popular, it's because when they're done well, they work. The trick is doing them well.

Fortunately Willy's does everything very well, beginning with a cocktail called Penicillin involving whisky, ginger, honey and lemon juice, and tasting very like the concoction my nan used to give me when I had a sore throat as a kid. Minus the whisky (presumably).

Beef tartare was lovely - a good balance of beefy fat, sharp capers and peppery horseradish. Homemade crisps on top (I think perhaps fried in tallow) added crunch, and underneath it all was a fantastically beefy slab of dripping-fried sourdough. Again, it's very likely you will have seen beef tartare before but the extra attention to detail here - particularly with the big hit of beef flavour from the various fat elements - really lifted it into something quite special. I've had worse tartars that cost 3 times the price.

Charred courgette was also very nicely done - careful grilling achieving a nice dark crunch without the inside being too soggy. The effect was almost meaty (I'm sure they won't mind me saying), complimented with toasted pumpkin seeds (you get the impression the kitchen here are always thinking about texture) and little pools of pesto.

You will have seen chicken, mushroom and tarragon put together before, but very rarely as successfully as this. The chicken itself was the star - a huge supreme sliced into thick, moist slices, each topped with a delicate, salty cracker of skin. The mushroom and tarragon were bound by a super-silky sauce, powerfully flavoured and nicely seasoned, the perfect accompaniment to the chicken. Honestly, it was just great. My plate was completely wiped clean.

Cauliflower displayed yet more intelligent grilling, some earthy braised lentils and - my favourite element - celeriac remoulade that came chopped into neat little mustardy cubes rather than the usual spaghetti.

And finally from the savoury courses, a side of purple sprouting broccoli sporting yet another good bit of salty charring, and a nice hit of miso in the dressing. Vegetarians (and even vegans) would do very well here.

Incredibly, a humble sticky toffee pudding for dessert was pretty much the best thing we ate that day - rich and treacly, with just the right sugar/salt balance and a sponge that had been delicately toasted on the edges, it was pretty much a perfect example of its kind. I didn't detect much (or any, in fact) of the advertised ginger in the ice cream, but I only really wanted vanilla anyway so that worked out rather well. I love a home made, silky-smooth ice cream. This was a great dessert.

I didn't see a bill that day as this was an invite (thank you everyone involved in organising) but a quick adding up of the menu items comes to just under £50pp before service, which is pretty reasonable for 2026. It's a lovely bright room to sit in too, boldly designed in the 50s American diner style, and the staff didn't put a foot wrong although they did know I was reviewing so take that with a pinch of salt maybe. How lucky Margate is to have option of this exciting new venue to eat at, alongside what I believe is a fast-expanding breadth and depth of other bars and restaurants. The place really feels like a town on the up.

After lunch, we got snowed on but nobody's ever going to go to the British seaside in March for the weather. The gales and snow only seem to add to the place's charm, and give you all the more reason to huddle inside a nice old pub (there's plenty of them) and wait for it to all blow over. Which we very much did, and had a thoroughly lovely day of it. Willy's then - just the latest reason to visit Margate. But a very, very good reason.

8/10

I got invited to Willy's and didn't see a bill.

Karpo, Kings Cross

A couple of weeks after suffering at the hands of a huge, geographically vague menu at Cha Cha Moon, here we are in a brand new restaurant in Kings Cross that has exactly the same problem. Look at the size of it - Brunch, Lunch, Larder, Hot Starters, Wood-fired Oven, Not Wood-fired Oven (weirdly), Puddings, Ices, it goes on and on and on. And I can see why they wouldn't want to lump quite so many items under anything so prosaic as "Starters" and "Mains" but how the hell am I supposed to know which of "Speck & pickled quince" or "Vegetables a la grecque" - both filed under "Larder" - are big enough for a starter without guessing based on their price?


Karpo is also billed as an American-style diner, but despite the appearance of a burger, "Shrimp & grits" and a Macaroni cheese, the rest of the dishes seem to hail from more or less anywhere. There's risotto with buffalo mozzarella, sourdough toast with Gentleman's Relish, a fish taco (lunchtime only) and Omelette Arnold Bennett (for breakfast). It is usually a good idea to be wary of anywhere trying to master too many cuisines under one roof, so first impressions of Karpo, not helped by the strangely soulless décor (complete with walls of plastic ivy), are not great. In that case, why did I end up enjoying myself so much?


Perhaps because, unlike Cha Cha Moon, the food at Karpo is worth the effort. The menu may be confusing and way too big but everything we ate was at least good, and occasionally very good. A trio of things on sourdough toast - whipped lardo, white bean purée and aforementioned "Gentleman's relish" (not out of a little white tub but made in-house) were all lovely - bursting with flavour and freshness. Speck with pickled quince was only adequate - I always think restaurants have something to hide when they serve their supposedly premium ham with fancy distractions - but was at least a generous portion for your £7 and disappeared quickly.


"Southern-fried quail" was as good as you'd hope, remarkably moist inside for what can be a dry bird and cleverly butchered so as to remove all but the biggest bones and sinew. It came with an astonishingly good celeriac slaw which cut through the ever-so-slightly-too-greasy quail and the breadcrumb coating on the meat contained a very commendable go at the familiar Southern-Fried mix of herbs and spices. I'd like to see the range of deep-fried poultry at Karpo expanded, based on this example.


The one main-sized dish we tried, a hanger steak with bone marrow and shallots, was also very decent. Seared deftly to rare and enhanced rather than swamped by the addition of rich marrow and caramelised roast shallots, it wasn't perhaps the hugest portion for £15 but you couldn't fault anything else about it. Boston Baked Beans were more generously pitched at £3.5 for a fairly large bowl and were just as rich and satisfying as the ones I'd ordered from a BBQ place in Boston a couple of years back, so no complaints there either. And Hasselback potatoes were a more interesting alternative to roasties and had a great flavour.



I wish we'd had more room to try some of the more interesting baked goods (Karpo do Macaroons as well as Eccles cakes and fresh cookies) but we just about managed to squeeze in a small bowl of assorted ices; all very good but I was particularly taken by a shocking pink rhubarb sorbet which is my hot tip if you go to yourself and fancy a dessert.


There will be those who find it easier to find fault with Karpo than I do; it's hardly a budget option, I've mentioned my issues with the overlong menu and the unfriendly décor, and indeed my friend wasn't taken at all - "like eating in a shopping centre" she said. But if you choose wisely enough (and make the most of the lovely staff to help you on this front), enjoy the great wine list with its healthy number of rare biodynamic and organic options (we had some lovely examples by the glass but don't expect me to tell you which - one was an Alsace Riesling I think) and start with a cold martini, there's a very good chance you'll come away happy.

7/10



I was invited to review Karpo

EDIT: I'm reliably informed that Karpo actually contains real ivy, not fake. Happy to put the record straight on this!

Bukowski, Shoreditch

Had I done a bit more research, taken a bit more advice, even gone to the effort of checking their website, I would have known to avoid Bukowski like the plague. Everything about the place seems designed to irritate, from the wilfully quirky way they describe themselves ("We are a new-school fast slow-food American diner", sod off) to the exhausting list of worthy suppliers and liberal use of hipster foodie buzzwords like "single estate organic heritage" (tomatoes) and "artisinal[sic] wood oven" (bread). It seems obvious now, looking back, that this is an outlet that values how they look on paper (and specifically the calculatedly rustic paper they print their overblown menus on) above anything that comes out of their kitchens, but on Sunday afternoon I was in the mood for a burger (shocking but true) and thought I could do worse than mooch around the new Boxpark shopping centre in Shoreditch.


Boxpark is a restaurant and retail space based inside converted shipping containers. If you're thinking that sounds a bit odd, then you're not wrong - the only units that seemed like a comfortable size were those where two had been knocked through into one; most single-container shops had barely enough room to shuffle through single-file, and perhaps understandably the food side of things tended to lean heavily towards a lunchy takeaway theme - Pieminister were there, as were dull rabbit food-peddlers Chop'd. Bukowski itself only has seats inside for a maximum of 16 people; presumably all the retailers are looking forward to spring where the large outdoor seating areas will be of slightly more use, although I do wonder how the already massively inadequate toilet facilities (just some portaloos behind a code-locked door) will cope. I guess Pizza East is only over the road if you want to use theirs, you certainly wouldn't want to visit for any other reason.


Everything you need to know about the food at Bukowski is summed up in the fact that they shun Heinz tomato ketchup for their own homemade lumpy, watery "organic heritage tomato ketchup made from single estate organic San Marzano tomatoes". Heinz tastes better, is cheaper and is good enough for every other restaurant in town but no, why settle for that when you have a golden opportunity to bugger something up? I glumly worked my way through the rest of the wordy menu whilst sipping on a watery Bloody Mary in a plastic cup containing bitter chunks of raw horseradish. I guess it was only a fiver but it didn't taste like it had more than a single shot of vodka in it and still wasn't worth the effort.


I'm not going to dwell too long on everything that was wrong with the Bukowski bacon cheese burger - there aren't enough hours in the day - but briefly, the David Tomlin Rare Breed Survival Trust Hereford Steer beef was overcooked to grey (we'd ordered medium-rare) and tasted of nothing, the Greens of Glastonbury Organic Aged Double Gloucester cheese was completely inappropriate for a burger (I know it's not to everyone's taste apart from geeky burger purists like me but at least give me the option of American Yellow), the Topolski of Kruszewo naturally fermented gherkins would have been better served sliced inside the burger than slowly drying out on the side, and all the ingredients were fighting a losing battle against the overwhelmingly powerful smoked Gloucester Old Spot streaky bacon, which was the only thing that really had any flavour. Oh, and the Bridget Hugo's "Bread Bread" artisinal[sic] wood oven bakery buns had quite a nice soft sweet taste but weren't strong enough and fell apart after a few bites.


Bukowksi are equally adept at royally cocking up other American classics too, though. A pulled pork sandwich contained bland, dry meat and was no better than the version I'd had from Barbecoa, and that was bad enough. House fries - sorry, "Hand cut Heritage Organic chips" were greasy, a strange orange colour (strangely, my iPhone seems to have made them look more normal than they actually were) and absolutely covered in salt although actually when you found one that wasn't too soggy it tasted OK. We briefly tried dipping them into the Scotch Bonnet relish ("Very HOT - Use with caution!") which wasn't that hot and didn't taste of anything much more than blitzed pepper, but very soon lost interest.


You may be thinking that a mediocre lunch for around £15 is not something worth spending too much time fretting about. Ordinarily I'd agree with you, too - this is still not the worst burger in London and at least it's not another branch of some tepid high street chain. But what worries me about Bukowski is the sheer amount of energy and (presumably) expense that has been lavished on finding oh-so-impressive sounding "local" and "artisan" producers without any trace of that effort being reflected in the actual finished product. So keen are they to tout their earnestly foodie credentials that the menu is almost a parody of itself; reams of text describe every item on the menu in such mind-numbing detail you wonder whether you should be ordering off it or submitting it for peer review. And yet despite - or even perhaps because of - all that self-important bluster and showmanship, the food was terribly ordinary.


I think it all goes back to the issue with the 'home made' ketchup. It takes a very specific kind of mind-set to conclude that Heinz not only can be improved upon, but that the way to do that is to blitz up some "heritage" (whatever the hell that even means) tomatoes with a fancy name and put it in a swing stopper bottle. Anyone, literally anyone, and I'm including whoever's in charge of the food at Bukowski here, would prefer Heinz to this bland alternative and yet there it is anyway, an expensive and pretentious waste of time and energy. That Bukowski have gone down this route at all suggests they care far more about having correctly on-trend words on their menu than making good food - even the name 'Bukowski' looks like an attempt to curry favour with local hipster intellectuals - and that saddens me. Save yourself the disappointment and the irritation, and spend your money elsewhere.

3/10

The Diner, Shoreditch

I'm sure there are many people who will disagree with me, but I've never considered a good burger to a particularly difficult thing to get right. As long as the lettuce isn't brown and the bread isn't stale, I'm generally happy with anything from a Burger King whopper to a hand-chopped ostrich fillet steak burger, as by the time you've smothered the thing in ketchup and pickles the quality of the actual meat isn't crucial. Which is often just as well. It therefore follows from this shaky proposition that I've had at least a decent, if not excellent, burger and chips in many an otherwise crappy pub or kebab shop up and down the country, and it is always my first choice on any menu when my faith in the standard of the other dishes is less than great. An omelette is another good "safe" bet - at the very least you'd hope they'd use fresh eggs.


But while the vast majority of chain pubs and kebab shops can make me a burger I would happily eat, it's only at the other end of the scale where I start having problems. The only times I've ever had a disappointing burger is when I've been paying through the nose for ludicrous "luxury" versions that do nothing more than waste premium ingredients and give you heartburn. The Boxwood Café's veal and foie gras burger costs a whacking £25 and is so stuffed with wobbly pink liver it's like eating a fist-sized lump of butter in between two slices of toasted bread. It's telling that when Heston Blumenthal attempted The Perfect Burger as part of his In Search Of Perfection series, the end product looked suspiciously like, well, a normal minced-meat beef burger. You can't fix something that wasn't really broken to begin with, at least not without spending weeks on end micro-measuring the width of your tomato slices or aligning your meat fibres with ley lines.


So given the ability of nearly anywhere to make a decent burger, it's probably no surprise that The Diner, in Shoreditch, being a trendily authentic recreation of a Golden-Era American diner, served me a very decent burger indeed. Golden brown toasted bread buns, crispy lettuce, a generous slice of sweet pickle, a coating of lovely bubbly melted cheese (Monterey Jack, ubiquitous in 'authentic' US diners) and of course a perfectly good slab of juicy minced beef. I liked the home made guacamole (nice and garlicky), the range of condiments on each table, and I also liked the way the burger was served open and you slapped the two halves together yourself before chowing it down - very satisfying. They also scored extra points for the skinny fries, which were as tasty as they were numerous.


The Diner is serving food which is honest and straightforward, not too expensive and brought to you with the standard excellent London service. It's nothing to get ecstatic about, but then again there's literally nothing not to like either. On the one hand, it's yet another place to get a decent burger for a reasonable amount of money. On the other hand, what's wrong with that?

8/10