Fingers Crossed

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The Greene Oak, Pub & Dining

Situated a few minutes drive West of Windsor in Oakley Green, The Greene Oak offers diners the best in fresh, local & seasonal food along with an eclectic and 'interesting wine list & local ales.

A warm and cosy interior with it’s restaurant-feel and full table service allows you to relax whilst enjoying some of the finest examples of fresh seasonal British food, carefully prepared and beautifully presented .

When the sun comes out (fingers crossed) there are plenty of tables in the quiet garden to soak up the warmth while sipping on a crisp rosé or a lovely bottle of chilled red.

A recent extension means there is now a private space for dinning, larger gatherings and meetings, so let us know your needs and we will ensure we look after you.

The Greene Oak is ideally placed to entertain clients with plenty of private parking or after taking in the sites of Windsor and  a perfect antidote to a frazzled day at Lego Land.

Critic Grace Dent Waits Her Turn to Give Sabor 8/10 - Eater London

Kettner’s Townhouse Whether or not by pure coincidence, things get verrrry breathy in ES Magzine’s review of Kettner’s Townhouse by Joy Lo Dico, who becomes the latest guest critic for the publication: Sausages are eaten on the sofa in bathrobes, breasts are stroked, flesh is served “pink” and “plump,” “sweet sauce” is dripped down shirts, crème brulee is shared before “an invitation to the rooms above” (and the potential for a naughty zeugma) is extended.

Marina O’Loughlin has similar things to say about second statement-making restaurant to have opened at Somerset House.

This despite an offering that doesn’t quite suggest total harmony: a fairly unremarkable room with some heating issues, a male-heavy clientele presumably there for the meat cooking “at the restaurant’s heart” (plus the promise of “vast claret consumption”) but which must also navigate scary flashes of modernity and Brexit-busting globalism like blue corn tostadas and lemongrass aioli.

To the UK’s noble history of cheesy music pundits — Smashie and Nicey, Alan Partridge, Tony Blackburn — we might consider adding Jay “two pianists are joined on stage by a gang of other musicians to form one of the tightest house bands I’ve seen in years” Rayner, who is seriously hip to what the hot cats at Studio 88 are serving, mama.

Rayner expects as much going in, so this isn’t so much a restaurant review as it is a Jazz Quartet crossover event, an Infinity War of chart hits, baby.

Riding House Café, London W1, restaurant review - Telegraph

Apart from being handily positioned for a chap keen to rebuild his fashion career, possibly as a trainee buyer or third-string cutter, this is as achingly voguish a joint as has opened in town in a while.

Everything about it – from the breakfast-until-late opening hours, via a dreadlocked manager who reminded us of the ultra-cool French tennis star Yannick Noah, to the menu – screams “strike a pose”.

For all that, the room buzzes seductively and feels as fashionable as a menu dominated, although not monopolised, by that restaurant fad du jour, the small plate.

Several of the best meals I’ve eaten in the past year, most memorably at the nearby Polpetto, involved a large sequence of small plates and, but for a couple of misfires, this one would have been in the same league.

Superfoods – and some reservations about a large plate of spiced whiting that shrugged off the attentions of chilli oil to taste primarily of cardboard – aside, all else ranged from the good to the excellent.

Massimo, London WC2, restaurant review - Telegraph

The first and last thing to be said in Massimo’s defence is that it is a prisoner of one of those hotels, The Corinthia off Whitehall, that suck the life out of restaurants like dehumidifiers.

This was in part because it was virtually empty: the only other occupied table was taken by a trio of American women, one of whom bemused a waiter with: “Do you have, like, an iced tea lemonade?”

So we sat there, subdued by the chilliness and faux grandeur of a rectangular space dominated by a quartet of giant, gold-plated chandeliers running down the middle, styled after the bathyspheres in which deep-sea divers are gently submerged, and the fancy oyster bar at the far end of the room.

During this hiatus, which we felt might have been briefer had we ordered a bottle of Maldon, we found a novelty in the menu – a long, chefly spiel signed by one Massimo Riccioli, written in his native tongue and left untranslated.

But then this mix of the flashy and the desultory had nothing to offer the set-menu diner other than outrageous drinks prices (£2.75, forsooth, for a splash of tonic), confused service and sullen mediocrity.

restaurant review

It’s the details that count at this City gem, says Jay Rayner, as he looks back on the highs and lows of the past 12 months Treves and Hyde, 15-17 Leman Street, London E1 8EN (020 3621 8900).

The other negatives are not worth dwelling on: a Test Kitchen that made me feel too much like a lab rat, a steak house from Jamie Oliver that left me moaning about the sommelier, and a Scottish country house hotel whose idea of hospitality extended to slagging me off in the comment section under the review.

Chef Neil Bentinck’s egg, full of frothy whites and shards of toasted Dale End cheddar with, at the bottom, a mushroom duxelles cooked down in sherry, remains a dish of the year.

At the other end of the price continuum, chef Claude Bosi took over Bibendum and made it all shiny and new.

Still, Louie Louie’s braised ox cheek on hummus and the Other Naughty Piglet’s XO linguine were other dishes of the year.

Fingers Crossed | Restaurants in Shacklewell, London