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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Firestarter, Liverpool Street

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8/10

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

Kolae, Borough Market

Everywhere you look the cost of living crisis bites, and few areas is that more evident than the restaurant industry. If you're a regular anywhere you will have noticed your favourite dishes and tipples creeping up 10%-20% every few months, seemingly in an existential race with energy prices to dare you to contemplate which you can cut back on first. Being a hopeless restaurant addict, I'd rather put a few extra layer of clothes on and sleep under a second duvet than miss out on at least an occasional meal out (although you will notice my rate of posting being down recently for that very reason), but I'm not so naive to think it's that easy for everyone. And let's not think for a second that the restaurants like charging these prices - everyone's stuck in the same horrible cycle of inflation and cost-cutting. Very few are immune.

When a place comes along that offers great food for less than a fortune, then, it's a genuine pleasure to report on it. So, hot on the heels of the Dew Drop Inn's extraordinary £39 lunch menu comes Kolae, from the Smoking Goat Som Saa* (see edit) team, offering fresh and very reasonable Thai food in the heart of London's Borough Market.

Now, you may have skipped to the end of this review and noted that £90pp is not, even in these troubled times, anything that could be mistaken for super low budget. But in my defence - and theirs - we hugely overordered for two people and the amount of (incredible) food we ended up with could have at least fed 3 or 4, making the total per head steering a lot more towards the £ or ££ category.

From our high seats at the kitchen table (is there any better place to sit in these kind of places?) we watch as chefs enthusiastically prepare a variety of dishes both over charcoal and a (occasionally terrifyingly deglazed) wok. First to arrive was biryani rice crackers, towered high and dressed with pickled ginger and "nahm jim". I'm not going to waste your time attempting to describe everything that goes into Thai dressings (as I'd probably get it wrong anyway, they're usually fabulously complex and contain a bewildering variety of ingredients which change from kitchen to kitchen) but this definitely had at least garlic and chilli in it and was lovely.

Grilled mussel skewers definitely were up there amongst the best things we were served that evening. Marinated in a complex, earthy sauce very different from the winey/citrus notes you would find in Western mussel dishes, they had a wonderful note of charcoal smoke from the clearly very good fuel they were using, and a bewitching texture of just slightly chewy enough and yet yielding perfectly to every bite. They were brilliant, and worthy of the title of "signature dish" just as much as...

... these lovely things, which had been doing the round on social media - fried prawn heads. It is testament to the skill and nous of Kolae that they've taken a bit of the prawn that is usually at least thrown away if not actually not even served in the first place, and turned it into a must-order dish. Fairly similar to the mussels, the coating was earthy - almost soily (but in a good way), with the seafood flavours mixing beautifully with the crispy coating.

Dressed and prepared in a similar way were crispy chicken skins - also dangerously moreish and definitely worth ordering, but it's full disclosure time. Usually it's either the chicken skins or prawns that are available, the former a replacement when they're running low on the latter. We only ended up with both because either they saw us taking photos and put two and two together or (and unfortunately more likely) they overheard us muttering about the missing prawn heads as we looked over the menus. So very many thanks to them for making two food obsessives very happy indeed, and if you're planning your own visit maybe just check they have them on beforehand. Because they are well worth the effort.

All of the 'larger' dishes were noteworthy - you really can't order badly at Kolae, just (as we did) too enthusiastically - but I'm going to say a special word about the "gung siep dried prawn and shrimp paste relish" which arrived next. We were told/warned that the dried prawn was a bit of an acquired taste, and - to put it mildly - isn't for everyone. Kolae could have easily left it off the menu and presumably suffered no major losses, but sometimes a restaurant will put certain dishes on the menu just to provide the exhilaration of the new. With its funky, salty flavour matched with an aroma of old dried fish, tempered only slightly with tomato and chilli and garlic and various pickles, it was unusual and just on the verge of wrong and yet strangely addictive. It was also fiercely hot, which presumably added to its addictive qualities. I absolutely loved this, and yet it's perhaps the kind of thing you only need once in a while - a real rollercoaster of a dish.

I'll talk about the chicken skewers and hogget chops together, as they were great for very similar reasons - a deft skill on the grill, with a rich, complex dressing. Interestingly the hogget wasn't from Warrens (as you might expect from a Smoking Goat-adjacent restaurant)* (again, see edit) but Swaledale, but was still fantastic, the gamey meat standing up very well to the Thai flavours.

Minced venison, with its blisteringly hot chilli spicing, felt to me like a kind of play on a laab. It came dressed in crisp betel leaves, and I don't think I've ever not enjoyed a betel leaf. This was one of those dishes you eat with your mouth painfully on fire but can't stop because it tastes so good, the minced venison studded with nuts (peanuts?) for extra texture. I feel like I'm repeating myself saying it was another must-order.

There was more - a lot more. As I said, we may have gone a bit crazy. But it's hard not to over-order when everything read so well. Sour mango salad with roasted coconut and anchovies had all kinds of different textures and flavours going on, sweet and hot and salty and sour and umami. Kale fritters with fermented chilli were notable not only for the fantastic greaseless crunch of the kale but a lovely sweet/sour broth they were sat in. House pickles were all good but of particular interest were tiny green chillies which were - as you might expect - blazingly hot but also sweet and full of character. Excellent stir fried greens and a bowl of rice also appeared.

Towards the end of the meal we were persuaded to have a dirty martini made with fermented pickle juice, which seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, no, it was a good idea, I have no regrets. And of course, although we couldn't possibly hope to have polished off all of the food we ordered, they happily put the leftovers in boxes to take home, so nothing was wasted.

So, try and ignore that rather inflated bill and imagine which of the above you would have needed to make a satisfying yet sensible meal for yourself. The mussels and prawn heads, definitely. The shrimp relish goes without saying, as does the minced venison. You have to try the herb fritters, too, and the hogget chops, too so don't forget about those and- well, you can see the problem we had. You can eat at Kolae quite cheaply, it's just once you're sat there and are presented with that menu, you may find it impossible. Anyway, however you order, chances are you're going to have a very good time indeed. Just maybe budget for a little bit more than you'd normally expect to eat - you may not be able to help yourself.

9/10

EDIT: As I was told perfectly clearly beforehand, Kolae is from the team behind Som Saa, not Smoking Goat, so happy to correct that.

Acme Fire Cult, Dalston

Like lots of places, Acme Fire Cult was closed during the two most extreme days of the heatwave early last week. Being a restaurant largely based outdoors, and with the smaller inside bit not air conditioned, they quite rightly decided they could neither comfortably serve their customers or put their staff through a full shift of cooking over hot coals when even the un-chargrilled air temperature was pushing 40C.

It is perhaps for this reason, then, that due to a reshuffling of bookings, tables at this exciting young restaurant (it's barely a few months old in the current location) are even harder to come by than usual. And believe me, even on a usual day they're pretty hard to come by. Without perhaps deliberately setting out to be one of the most talked about spots in East London, the guys at Acme Fire Cult (that's chef-owners Andrew Clarke and Daniel Watkins) have nevertheless hit upon an attitude and approach that anyone interested in good food in the capital will swoon over, whether they know it yet or not.

Firstly, and almost uniquely for a live-fire restaurant (although Berber & Co had a good bash) the menu is largely vegetable-focussed. Seven out of the nine starters, and two out of the five "large" plates have a vegetarian main ingredient, and while it's true they do serve pork chops and sirloin to those determined to get their fix, myself and a friend found ourselves, unrepentant meat eaters on any normal day, ordering no steaks or chops and just two seafood dishes. The scallops were first to arrive - skewers with plump, rich roe delightfully included (why is this still such a rarity?) and topped with a slick layer of fragrant green curry.

Bread comes from the wonderful Dusty Knuckle bakery right next door (literally, they share a party wall) and appears on the menu in various exciting forms. The house bread, for example, is an excellent sourdough soaked - and I do mean soaked - in "Marmite" butter, the "Marmite" in quotes no doubt down to the fact it's some kind of experimental yeast extract the AFC fermenting and pickling boffins had come up with themselves rather than anything out of a jar from Unilever. Also full marks for having a healthy shaving of truffle as an option for only £3 extra, in stark contrast to a certain mac & cheese dish in Berkshire.

Smacked cucumbers and watermelon, gently and intelligently smacked (pickled), came dressed with ancho chilli oil, and let me tell you now there's few things better than the cooling texture of cold watermelon and the fire of chilli oil battling their way around your tastebuds at once. And for extra waste-free sustainability points, this dish included delightfully bouncy, jellified pieces of pickled watermelon rind as well.

Mutton merguez, lean and gamey and interesting, came with hibiscus-pickled onions and guindilla chillies. On a hot day I am often to be found eating fridge-cold guindilla straight out of the jar, so I was hardly going to object to their inclusion in a Spanish sausage dish. Labneh was fresh and light and cooling.

One of a couple of unordered extras (it helps to be lunching with the editor of a live fire magazine) this is a giant Cuore del Vesuvio tomato which I first thought was a bit underseasoned until I realised that the slick of "green goddess" underneath was a heady, anchovy-spiked dressing that combined beautifully with the tomato and impressive pile of wet herbs on top.

A giant slab of toasted sourdough arrived with a generous amount of white crab meat and salted cabbage and a kind of jalapeno pesto, all of which worked beautifully of course. But binding it all together was the most amazing brown meat and bone marrow sauce, which soaked into the bread and seasoned the crab and cabbage, resulting in an almost decadently rich explosion of seafood flavour. Worth travelling to Dalston for alone.

Also stunning was a coal-roast aubergine in "sourdough mole", Mexican mole made using some kind of waste product of the Dusty Knuckle sourdough baking process. The aubergine was nicely done, soft and smoke-licked and easy to eat, but the mole was genuinely impressive, gently bitter and complex and chocolatey, and impossible to leave alone.

Finally one other veggie bonus, trombetta courgettes, deftly charred on the grill, served on a nice chunky hummus and "vadouvan" (an Indian spice mix) butter. Fried curry leaves provided a bit of occasional crunch, as did some gorgeous fried chickpeas which were studded around the place. It all added up to a very successful thing indeed.

And much the same can be said of the restaurant as a whole. Live-fire cooking has a long and proud tradition in London and is not in of itself any kind of revolution. Similarly attempting to tilt your menu towards a focus on high-quality home-grown vegetables alongside a well-chosen and sustainable selection of ethical meats is something that various places have done and are doing, many of which I've reviewed on the blog over the years.

But it seems to me that Acme Fire Cult have taken what could have been a rather worthy and self-consciously hipster East London operation, and made it, well, fun. All the dishes are intelligently realised and skilfully cooked, service (albeit with the caveat that they did know we were coming) was spot-on, and the attention to detail leads not to a stubborn inertia of suppliers as so often happens but to a judicious and open-minded use of nearby top-tier producers (Dusty Knuckle bakery, and 40ft Brewery beers also in the same little courtyard) when it was clear they were the best option. But none of this would matter at all if you didn't pay your bill at the end of the meal with gratitude and joy and a smile on your face, and that is exactly what we did. Behind the rows of house pickles, the small plates and the pints of Dalston IPA, beats an operation with real heart.

9/10