What the critics say: Petrus, The Old Brewery…

28th June 2010, 10:59am

A round-up of the latest reviews

Petrus, London
Zoe Williams, The Telegraph, 28 June 

"So, my beloved started with the pan-fried mackerel fillet with tomato chutney and niçoise salad. The fillet was fine – it had a crispy skin, but the filleting was incomplete and some remnants of gristly spine dented the romance a little. The tomato chutney tasted like Dolmio, and I don't mean that as post-ironic praise. I had the pressed foie gras with confit and smoked duck, pear carpaccio and cardamom caramel, about which I would say it is in the nature of foie gras to be delicious. The duck was very good, the pear was a bit characterless and the cardamom caramel only tasted of caramel. Which was fine – I'm not even a huge fan of cardamom. It reminds me of the 1980s. But it lacked impact; it was a little flat. 

"I continued with the pan-fried sea bream (I sound repetitive, with all this 'pan-fried', but the term is ubiquitous on this menu. I would favour some exception reporting, where they mention only when something is not fried in a pan), with brown shrimp, samphire and oyster velouté. The fish was fine, but the samphire was overcooked. It looked limp and a bit sad to have been wrenched from the sea. Good God, it's bad enough when you accidentally remember where meat comes from; the last thing you want is to start feeling sorry for your vegetables."

Cambio de Tercio, West London
Matthew Norman, The Telegraph, 25 June

"If you do go (did I mention that you must?) what will strike you first is the vibrancy of the room, its walls deep yellow and lurid red after the homeland flag, and bedecked with those grotesque-naif Daliesque surrealist paintings the Spanish so adore. Opposite our table, the image of a pregnant woman, bald on top and wearing an Aids ribbon, stared quizzically at Christ. 

"The welcome from waiter Eric and owner Abel Lusa, who ought to open a joint with Michael Caine solely for the name (Michael & Lusa has a pleasing ring, don't you think?) was warm and charming, and led to a long tennis debate that bored my friend less than I feared. The smelling salts worked at once, in fact, and he came round with his appetite sharpened."

The Old Brewery, Greenwich
Tracey MacLeod, The Independent, 26 June

"We start with the echt Greenwich experience – a plate of devilled whitebait, and a glass of Hospital Porter. No longer are the tiny fish rolled in flour and plunged live into boiling lard. But they were pretty damned fresh, dusted in paprika and served with a caper mayonnaise. Oysters – half a dozen rocks for £8.50 – get the full production, raised on a platter over cracked ice, with shallot vinaigrette, Tabasco and a jug of stout to pour over them. 

"Main courses were decent, without living up to the spectacular heights of the setting. Pan-fried cod came with an array of heritage tomatoes which failed to deliver on the taste front, while beer-braised mutton, with ratte potatoes and hispi cabbage, was like a pie-filling without the pie."

Trullo, London
David Sexton, Evening Standard, 24 June

"The menus change daily, using ingredients in season, presented simply. Everything we tried, in two visits, was good. Ravioli verde with homemade ricotta and sage butter (£5 for a starter portion) were fantastically fresh. Tagliarini with brown shrimps, zucchini, butter and chilli (£6) was fairly hot (a bit of a Jamie taste there?) but suffused with the taste of the shrimps, so much more rewarding than prawns in a dish like this, and made colourful by a mixture of yellow and green courgette strips."

"There's a fierce charcoal grill here that Siadatan uses to good effect for many of the mains. Chargrilled wild sea trout, fresh peas, Castellucio lentils and aioli (£13) came crisped on the outside, pleasingly undercooked inside, with the slippery lentils and crunchy peas nicely mixed up, lifted by the fierce garlicky and lemony mayonnaise. A chargrilled whole mackerel (£12.50) seemed at first glance overcooked but it turned out to be smokily delicious too, well accompanied by some intact sprigs of salty samphire."

Roux at Parliament Square, London
Jay Rayner, The Observer, 27 June

"Upstairs is a bar which is furnished in golf club chic, though without any of the glamour. It is thousands of pounds of heavy furniture and glowering banquette. It is the kind of room that senior management sits in before being summoned to be told they've been canned. The ground-floor dining rooms are another orgy of beige. It looks like someone has been invited to go crazy with a John Lewis charge card. I can't believe the people responsible for this place stayed awake long enough over the visuals to approve them.

"Against this background, the food was always going to have to work very hard to take off, and it never quite manages it. It is all professional, well executed and – a foie gras starter aside – error free, though the latter was calamitous. The liver was rendered dry and featureless under a dusty pistachio crust, as though it was the interior design realised in food. When the only thing worth talking about on a foie gras dish is the braised rhubarb, you know something's very wrong. Other starters were better: roast quail with hazelnuts, crunchy pickled radishes and a scatter of pomegranate was an evolved riff on textures. A tranche of confit salmon with crab in a jelly tube, cannelloni style, with samphire was fresh and inoffensive."

The Mulberry Tree, Kent
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian, 26 June

"For a main I have veal, which is well cooked and tender without being overexciting. The big disappointment, though, is The Ginger's halibut, which is insipid and flabby, and which she goes on whingeing about. It is, she says, like fish from the chip shop with the batter pulled off, and is destined for the inside of a friendly cat that tries to join us, but that is quickly shooed away by the owner of the restaurant. The Ginger, a lover of cats, whinges about this as well. Given that there was no gratification to be had from her halibut, she would have liked some feline company, which she generally prefers to mine. But that would have contravened health and safety, I imagine."

"The Mulberry Tree sits in a beautiful, bucolic corner of the garden of England, but the building is modern and also unlovely, and there's no sign of their own herd of Kent Middle White pigs outside (I'd like to see them skipping about happily, before their heads get compressed). Instead, there's a fleet of Audis and Range Rovers parked up on the gravel; there's something of the golf club about this place."

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