Squares

After a big day out, it feels fantastic to grab a proper dinner and a drink in our plush and polished restaurant and lounge. Reserve a table today.

Squares Restaurant & Bar | Trafalgar Square Hotel | Thistle Hotels

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Leicester Square Kitchen: Restaurant in Leicester Square London

Embracing the art of shared dining in the heart of London’s most iconic square, Leicester Square Kitchen offers relaxed luxury in a sophisticated yet unassuming setting.

Welcome to our kitchen.

Vegetarian London: Foodilic Restaurant Review | Londonist

We expected Foodilic to be the lovechild of Leon and Ottolenghi: healthy fast food married with colourful salads and own-made cakes.

The café is a long, narrow space, with a serving counter displaying salads and hot food at the front; plus a small fridge containing pre-packed salads, sandwiches and soft drinks to takeaway.

Although the salads are imaginative and contemporary, the hot and cold veggie dishes are curiously old-school, comprising stuffed vegetables, lasagne, soup and quiche (only lasagne and stuffed mushrooms were available on our visit).

The most successful item we tried is the signature ‘super Foodilic’ salad of cracked wheat, broccoli, avocado, cherry tomatoes, sweetcorn, cucumber, finely diced feta, pine nuts, chia seeds, spring onions, parsley and mint in french dressing.

The potato slices had a stale, overly-waxy texture and some were too salty – the salad clearly hadn’t been mixed properly.

Yen Japanese London: Restaurant Review - olive magazine

Smart buckwheat (soba) noodle restaurant opens up on The Strand in London.

Expect stylish contemporary décor with handmade noodles, sushi and Japanese dishes.

The noodle gurus have brought their art to London in a stunning restaurant off The Strand in a space so smart it could be mistaken for a concept design store – high up on the walls, different shades of maple wood slot together to form eye-catching features, the bespoke pale grey and maple chairs and tables are made by Italian designers, and instagrammers are already taking selfies on the wooden staircase.

As with many Japanese restaurants, the menu can be a little overwhelming at first glance, with sections for sushi, noodles and rice dishes as well as the usual starters and mains.

We began with a couple of starters – super silky homemade tofu mousse, whipped until it veered into angel delight territory, mixed with dashi sauce, fresh ginger and spring onions for little bursts of flavour, and lightly seared salmon marinated in ginger and citrus, topped with tiny drops of egg yolk, plum sauce and a single fried crunchy caper, served with crisp squares of deep-fried salmon skin and grassy pea shoots.

Ametsa, London SW1, restaurant review - Telegraph

It boasts Juan Mari Arzak and his daughter Elena, from the eponymous restaurant in San Sebastian, as the chef 'consultants', and I mean the verb on every level – they're the world's best chefs, according to the place's own blurb.

Hers consisted of little parcels of ribboned butternut squash, with some kind of squid-ink jelly square on top of each; a waiter poured over a squid-ink broth, whereupon the jelly disappeared.

I finished with French toast, with mango and coconut (£12.50) – more appetising than I expected, daintily done, the toast the size of (large) postage stamps (well, thicker…but not the great slabs suggested by the word 'toast').

And not just the chefs, either, but all of us, the maître d', the waiters, the diners with our grey faces…all as ridiculous as each other.

There's PX vinegar to dip your bread in, and slivers of peppery salchichón (£5.50) to whet your appetite before seared king scallops with artichoke purée and parma ham (£8.95) Beneath the vaulted ceilings of this restaurant (below the Galleries of Justice Museum) you can feast on hunks of manchego with pickled figs (£9.95), butternut squash with chorizo jam (£4.50) and lamb with spiced aubergine (£7.95) Squeeze into this narrow restaurant (straight on to a stool at the sherry-lined bar, if possible) for charred padrón peppers (£5) and patatas bravas (£4) alongside more adventurous tapas such as slow-cooked ox cheek with liquorice and sage (£7.50)

Spuntino, London W1, restaurant review - Telegraph

Spuntino is the latest, American frond of the much-loved Polpo experiment across Soho – drop the formalities, don't take bookings, ditch the tablecloths, the starters and the mains and reinvent everything you can as a finger food, like Cher in Mermaids .

The aubergine chips (£4) were good, rolled in a sesame carapace and fried to a very burnished crunch; some yogurt on the side was intensely fennely.

Of course, when I saw the first word I had an image of crispy rings in batter (the ink!

J's peanut butter and jelly sandwich (£6.50) was inventive – two triangles of peanut-butter ice cream, cut to look like Mother's Pride, with a sharp and sweet home-made cherry jam in the middle.

Plump burgers made with Scottish beef come with piles of chips and salad – a topping of roquefort butter is especially good (£9.30) Another teensy café, walls plastered with posters, which draws in the crowds for its varied garnishes – from home-made mustard and apple sauce (£9.95) to cheese and crispy bacon (£10.50) – and friendly service.

A Wong: restaurant review | Jay Rayner | Life and style | The Guardian

A custard bun might just be London’s best dessert, says Jay, when he visits A Wong.

The prawn cracker is identifiably so, but is a single large piece, the size of a plate, and used as a platform for a tangle of finely knotted deep-fried seaweed (or whichever brassica they’re using), a dollop of their own sweet chilli sauce, some pickled daikon, a smear of satay and a few other things besides.

I begin to think deep-fried things could be a lost health food.

But now we are at the sweet end of the meal, which naturally enough begins with pork, a sweet fragrant stew of the stuff, inside a sugar-crusted bun.

So it is with the deep-fried pork ribs crusted with salt and chilli, in a huge pile of chillies and fried peas, served at Baiwei, a café on Little Newport Street in London’s Soho, and part of the Bar Shu Sichuan restaurant group.

Winemakers Deptford, London SE8: 'This is seriously assured ...

We are swiftly brought good bread and an unsolicited bowl of water for the terrier; even the noise seems to drop, though that might just be the softening effect of the first glass of wine.

Not that it’s what you would call easy-drinking, exactly; the Winemakers partners with small producers who make “regional wines that reflect local flavours” – just as it does in its first location in Farringdon.

Mains are equally generous in size and spirit: Mersea gurnard with a delicate tangle of leeks vinaigrette and crumbled egg is crisp on top and dense within, while my Swaledale lamb ragù with cannellini beans and green sauce (a Dales sheep would have no truck with anything calling itself salsa verde) is soft and deeply savoury, with an earthy sweetness from hefty chunks of carrot; that said, a few leaves would have been a welcome counterpoint to the unctuous broth.

Good as that lamb is, I can’t help coveting my mother’s poached Yorkshire partridge: juicy as you like, paired with a sweetly meaty, house-made cotechino sausage, for which I would happily travel south of the river, finished with fine slivers of sharp pickled fennel.

• Winemakers Deptford 209 Deptford High Street, London SE8, 020-8305 6852.