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 Baring, Islington

You'll often hear it said that while the country as a whole boasts many great gastropubs, London - where by all accounts the movement began in the 90s with the Eagle in Farringdon - doesn't have any. This is not quite true. The Draper's Arms is by anyone's standards a fantastic Pub With Good Food, a place you can just as easily turn up and have a quiet pint at the bar as sit down for a plate of duck hearts and roast grouse, and it's one of my favourite places in the world. But it's still true that for whatever reason (and I'm baffled as to why), the capital can not hold onto the simple notion of a pub and restaurant simultaneously - they tend to either quietly involve into one (the Harwood Arms, now just a restaurant, not a pub) or the other, where a meagre offering of microwaved chicken tenders and curly fries exist only to soak up the alcohol.

The Baring, then, is playing a delightfully old-school game, attempting to serve elevated pub dishes while still retaining the feel of a friendly neighbourhood dog-friendly boozer. It's been given a lick of paint and new upholstery since it traded as the Poet as recently as a few weeks' back, and though the walls and furnishings could do with a few softer elements to lessen the rather echoey soundscape, it's clear some thought has been given to how to be both a restaurant and pub at the same time, with some tables left bare for walk-in drinks, and others set with cutlery and glasses for dinner.

Snacks were familiar on one level, and yet with a touch of the extra. For example a little plate of saucisson from the Basque Pyrenees made from Ibaïama pigs I'd not been familiar with before, which had a lovely dense salty flavour. And not just salted nuts but sugared and salted cashews, like they do at Rules bar, as dangerously addictive here as in Maiden Lane.

I'm going to start the menu proper with my only real moan about the Baring - the way they serve their mackerel starter. When I see 'charred mackerel' on a menu, I don't think I'm out of sorts to expect a freshly torched specimen, with a crisp layer of blackened skin encasing melting fat and firm flesh. For whatever reason, the Baring serve theirs almost cold, with a soft, soggy skin and dressed in a couple of twigs of rather offputtingly slimy succulent. In their favour, the salmorejo (kind of a thicker gazpacho) was absolutely gorgeous and had it been the only thing on the plate ironically would have scored pretty highly. But whether through accident or misguided design, the mackerel was no good. Sorry.

But everything else was great. Skewered quail was perfectly cooked and seasoned, the chilli and yoghurt accompaniments just fresh and hot enough to provide a nice interesting battle for the tastebuds.

Chips - triple-cooked, obviously - were crunchy and soft in all the right places, with lots of lovely bits to fish out from the bottom of the bowl at the end and dip in the provided garlic mayo.

And finally the mains were a masterclass in mature, confident gastropub cooking. Suckling pig loin was a superbly generous portion (so much so we struggled to finish it and then couldn't find room for desserts) in an excellent glossy jus, and the white bean and spring green mixture soaked up the sauce wonderfully.

But even better was lamb, served both as neatly sliced and perfectly cooked rump and a little skewer of kofte, charred to a crisp outside but lovely and moist within. Add to this a homemade babaghanoush which tasted of an autumn log fire, and another one of those marvellous glossy sauces, and you have what is surely the best lamb dish I've eaten so far in 2022. And I don't think there's much chance of it being bettered this year, either.

It seems almost a shame to mark the Baring down after they did so much so right, but there's no avoiding the fact that mackerel dish wasn't very nice, and so this is perhaps a kitchen on the road to perfection rather than with perfection already in its sights. But there's nothing wrong with that - we all have to start somewhere - and I'm sure before too long you could choose from the intelligent and tasteful menu without fear of hitting a dud. Joining a very exclusive list of London gastropubs that still definitely are pubs, the Baring will I'm sure before too long become a reliable staple, and a star of Islington. I wish them all the best.

7/10

I was invited to the Baring and didn't see a bill. Think it would have been about £50pp with booze.

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

Zaika, Kensington

For a time after I first started this whole blogging thing, I was quite sniffy about 'posh' Indian food. This is largely due to the fallout from two desperately disappointing meals, one at Benares in Mayfair which we'd trooped to for a friend's birthday to be served a variety of bits no better than you could get at any high street curry house, and another at Amaya where I seem to remember they refused to serve us poppadums with chutneys. And this is completely their prerogative of course, but I want poppadums and chutneys.

Maybe I'm less fussy these days - though this seems unlikely if I'm going to be honest - or maybe the posh Indian restaurants have gradually realised they have to do something more special than serve the same high street curries in fancy bowls and with nicer toilets, and have gradually upped their game. Surely this is something to do with the arrival on the scene of JKS superstar places like Trishna and Gymkhana, which must have made the existing Mayfair/Kensington set really sit up and take notice. Since then I have had genuinely enjoyable meals at Tamarind, Amaya and the like, and of course at any number of Surrender Mohan (Jamavar) and Rohit Ghai (Kutir, Manathan) operations which have taken the cuisine to a new level still.

Zaika is, I'm sure they won't mind me saying, one of the old school, a stalwart of Kensington High Street since waaaay back in 2002 in a space that was once a fancy banking hall - in fact the old safe, too large and heavy to remove, is used as a pantry. The menu is comfortable and familiar and attractive, with the usual array of kebabs, tikka bites and tandoori dishes alongside curries and biryanis, with plenty of decent pescatarian and vegetarian options. The tasting menu, which we were treated to, comprised a selection of highlights from the A La Carte, starting with (no poppadums, so a point off for that) this summery avocado and mango chat salad thingy, studded with pomegranete seeds.

Next came two vast scallops (admittedly this was to share between two), gently coloured and surrounded by a moat of amazing tomato, chilli and pineapple sauce, and topped with a very interesting coconut and beetroot "chutney" the texture of soft cheese. The scallops were nice and sweet, and we both enjoyed the coconut but the real star here was the complex, fiery pineapple-chilli sauce, quite unlike anything I'd had before.

Always my favourite part of meals like this, the platter of tandoori dishes did not disappoint, from wonderfully charred and textured lamb chops to a firm yet tenderly spiced tandoori seabass, and some juicy chunks of chicken, also coloured with flecks of black char. And yes, if I'm going to be brutal the lamb chops at Gymkhana probably have the edge, the fish at Jamavar is more deliriously complex, but these were still very enjoyable, very competent examples of their kind.

As is the tradition in these kinds of meals, all the remaining savoury dishes arrived at once, tableside, on a giant serving platter groaning with bowls, plates and jugs. Notable amongst them were the butter chicken, which all the best Indian restaurants do so well, a lovely silky yellow daal and a stack of tandoor-fresh naans, all fluffy and crisp in the right places.

This being an invite, though, we were treated to a couple more a la carte dishes intended to show off all the skills of the kitchen. First, a stunning slow-cooked lamb shank sealed in pastry, with a chimney of bone poking out of the top. Into this bone was poured a thick, rich cumin sauce, basting the lamb meat even before the pastry was cracked. Clever stuff.

Second (and not pictured, sorry, must have been enjoying myself too much), a chicken biryani so powerful and fragrant it not only drew gasps when the pastry casing was broken, but when other tables in the room had the same dish at various moments the same evening, the same incredible aroma launched itself around the room.

Desserts were a decent if slightly crystallised ginger stem ice cream and a nice and moist if otherwise unspectacular gulub jamun. I don't think there's any restaurant in this category that's yet completely nailed the dessert course, and though I'm not completely distraught considering I could barely eat much of it anyway thanks to the mountain of food they'd given us previously, it does make you wonder why so many stunning courses of complex and skillful cooking are so often followed by ice cream and a bit of cake. Or maybe I'm just not a fan of Indian desserts, who knows.

Desserts aside, though, this is a restaurant well worth bothering with, and even if you ignore the lamb shank and biryani which were cheeky extras, a hugely generous amount of rewarding and exciting food for the £65 price tag. For Kensington indeed, that counts as something approaching a bargain, and with a couple of cocktails and glasses of wine you should expect to come away with a bill of about £100pp. True, it's slightly overshadowed by the flashier new wave of high-end Indian restaurants, but that's no reason to dismiss it - it does what it does very well, efficiently and with a smile on its face, and you can't ask fairer than that. Here's to another 20 years.

7/10

I was invited to Zaika, and didn't see a bill.