Yumi, Covent Garden

This should have been a review of Bigbe, a Taiwanese fried chicken hole-in-the-wall on Little Newport Street which had been gathering rave reports from people I trusted and seemed the ideal spot for a greedy deep-fried lunchtime binge. Only, when I got to Bigbe, it seemed all was not well. In the kitchens, a woman was yelling in Chinese at a man slumped face down at a prep table, arms over his head. After a lot of shouting, the man slowly raised his head, and turned first towards the woman, and then, wincing slightly at her continued verbal onslaught and wild gesticulations, towards me.

I smiled brightly, in an "I would like some fried chicken" kind of way. I sensed the man was attempting to figure out what I wanted, but the effort involved in refocusing his eyes was too much. He stared through me for a few seconds, groaned, and then collapsed back onto the table, arms once more folded over his head. Perhaps today wasn't the day to pursue my craving for fried chicken. I slowly backed out of the front door and away, the sounds of angry Chinese fading behind as I trotted towards Shaftesbury Avenue.

Fortunately, I had a backup. Yumi is a brand new "Izakaya" on Shaftesbury Avenue, attached to the Piccadilly West End Hotel (there's a space on the bill to charge your meal to a room) and backed, apparently by the ETM Group. Certainly there are worse restaurant chains than ETM - the Gun in the docklands and the Well in Clerkenwell were some of the defining gastropubs of the early noughties, and I believe the Jugged Hare is great for cheap(ish) game - but a Japanese bar in Covent Garden is quite a different beast entirely. Could the skills be transferred? Well, let's find out.

Miso soup was first up, and was nice. I'm not entirely sure how mind-bendingly brilliant it's possible for miso soup to be, but the seaweed had a good bite and the tofu was soft and the broth itself was hot and umami-rich. And at least it didn't have big flabby mussels floating about in it.

"Kimuchi" is, as far as I can gather, a slightly bland Japanese version of kimchi; not inedible by any stretch, just missing some of that funk and fire of the real Korean deal. OK, so I'm criticising a dish in a Japanese restaurant for not being Korean, which could be unfair, but the point is, this is London not Hokkaido - proper kimchi is available, at Koba and On The Bab and (further afield) the fantastic Jin Go Gae in New Malden - and anyone lucky enough to try the real thing in those places will be fairly nonplussed with this version.

From the robata - eventually - came these chicken thigh skewers. I say eventually because it took a good half an hour for them to appear (dishes arrive as they're ready), and I was increasingly worried that either the meat would be wildly overcooked or their grill wasn't hot enough. In the end, it turned out to be the latter. Pale, wobbly and fatty, these desperately needed a bit of colour and crust from the coals, and a decent gloss of powerfully-seasoned tare marinade did not make up for the pretty unpleasant texture.

Gyoza were better, but not perfect. The overwhelming taste of the filling seemed to be spring onion, although the menu didn't mention that as ingredient at all so perhaps it was just a lot of pickled ginger that tasted of onion. Either way, the pork element was quite low-key and what I did detect was rather dry and mealy, although the casings themselves held up well and the dipping sauce was good. I mean, they were fine, you know, just not quite as good as you might expect. Which pretty much sums up the place, in fact.

What I really want, I realised after I'd paid up and left, is for Bincho Yakitori to move back to London. Their grills were always full of the most weird and wonderful cuts of meat and interesting vegetables, from chicken neck skewers to hearts and liver, to stuffed mushrooms, accompanied by pig's tripe soup and vibrant house pickles. And the bill rarely stretched over £20 a head no matter how much you ordered. But it seems the Soho rents became to much and they relocated to Brighton. Where apparently they're doing very well, so good luck to them.

Maybe my expectations were too high. Yumi is a little unpretentious Japanese restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue serving (charmingly and attentively) a small menu of undemanding Izakaya dishes and they're clearly not aiming for the heights of gastronomy. Which is fine, but I just wish someone would at some point take the food side of things a bit more seriously - I'm convinced that there's a way of doing this stuff incredibly well and for good value, and we shouldn't have to choose between some corporate proto-chain concept on one hand and a £100/head glitz-fest of Roka or Umu on the other. Or maybe - and this is the really terrifying thought - the economic realities of London in 2016 mean that the days of Bincho Yakitori are a thing of the past. I bloody hope I'm wrong.

6/10

Central London still waits for a decent Izakaya. Meantime, there's plenty of other options for booze and food on the app.

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Talli Joe, Covent Garden

There are good restaurants, and there are great restaurants, and there are influential restaurants. Restaurants whose style and individuality, and bold or unique take on a particular cuisine sets them leagues ahead of the pack, and whose identity and attitude becomes a template for countless others. I'm thinking about places like Polpo, who reinvented the wine bar with food for a generation that suddenly discovered sophisticated dining wasn't all about tablecloths and silver service and was for them, after all. Or MeatLiquor, who did for restaurants what punk did for music, matching a counter-cultural aesthetic with irresistable comfort food classics hitherto unseen at this standard in the UK. These places changed the way we eat - and not just in London; poke your head into any town in the country and see how many "burger & cocktail" shacks there are, or ciccheti joints serving Aperol Spritz.

If you've been keeping your foodie eyes and ears open you'll have noticed a number of Indian restaurants opening recently with certain features in common. There's Kricket in Brixton, which I honestly will get around to doing a proper review of as soon as possible because their food is seriously impressive. And Gunpowder in Brick Lane, another tiny, friendly space that's made a fan of anyone lucky enough to have eaten there. Both serve a selection of idiosyncratic Indian flavoured small dishes for not very much money, alongside craft beer and cocktails and served by warmly informal staff, and it's really not too difficult to spot their spiritual ancestor - Dishoom, which moved Indian food away from the High Street curry house, made it funky and fun and is now (quite understandably) spreading across London. There are now four of them, and they're all brilliant.

So who cares if the menu, and décor, and attitude at Talli Joe, on Shaftesbury Avenue, feels a little familiar? If you're going to be inspired by anyone you may as well start with one of the great London restaurant success stories, and as you'll hopefully see, Talli Joe are still offering a menu of remarkable inventiveness and variety, and a few things I've never seen anywhere else in town. For example, the idea of putting a fresh tomato/chilli mixture inside mini baked papadum cones, which look pretty and taste great (fresh and with a bright chilli kick); perhaps it's not the most revolutionary idea on the planet, but I've never had them before.

These were also new to me - "wafers" made out of raw Kerala banana, seasoned with citrus salt. A great snack, and though the banana itself didn't have a huge amount of flavour, the citrus salt was incredibly addictive.

"Rasam Shrimp Shot" was a shot glass of powerful tomato-chilli soup, and with a single large prawn on a cocktail stick. It was very nice, although perhaps £3 is quite a bit to pay for one prawn and 70ml of tomato juice, a theme that was to resurface...

I'm afraid I didn't much like the Talli Joe house pickles - they were too heavy on the vinegar and not sweet enough, and maybe a bit of colour variety would have been nice instead of just a small bowl of pink cauliflower topped with a single (and seemingly hardly pickled at all, just raw) green chilli.

The Talli Joe lamb chop is, unquestionably, a prime example of its kind. Soft pink flesh inside, encased in complex spicing and a good char from the tandoor, it was everything you'd hope for in a lamb chop. But is £5.50 too much to pay for what is barely more than a single mouthful of food? At Dishoom, £11.90 gets you three. Just sayin'.

The tandoori guinea fowl ("Junglee-Murhi Poha") was also excellent, and better value - a decent-sized bowl for £6.75 containing huge chunks of moist poultry. It's always good to see curries made from something other than the usual ingredients; the influence here is perhaps more Gymkhana (with their occasional game dishes) than Dishoom. Still, there's worse places to be influenced by than Gymkhana as well.

And maybe this bone marrow dish has another Sethi family restaurant - Hoppers - in mind? The bones themselves were expertly roasted and the marrow fell out in satisfying buttery chunks, but I'm afraid in comparison to the wonderful roti at Hoppers this rather dry bit of bread, resembling scrunched up paper and not tasting too dissimilar, suffered. Still, the little pot of curry that came with it was nice, and it's at least something that's still rather unusual to find on an Indian menu in London. So points for that.

Chicken 21 was superb; tender cubes of meat that had been cleverly fried to a crunchy casing, in a rich and rewarding spice. I loved every bit of it.

The only dud note - in fact the only main dish I didn't much enjoy out of everything I tried - was this Nepalese prawn salad, a daily special which contained too many very bitter leaves of radicchio for my liking. Still, one dish out of ten I wouldn't order again isn't a bad hit-rate is it?

And so, as you can hopefully tell, I liked Talli Joe. Yes, it wears its influences on its sleeve somewhat, but those influences are themselves so positive that the end result of cherry picking bits and pieces from Dishoom, Gymkhana, Hoppers and the like could only ever have turned out to be a success. Perhaps the prices are £1 or £2 more per dish than you'd ideally want but this is, after all, a large, modern restaurant in the middle of Covent Garden and in stark contrast to a lot of the other rubbish in that area at least you can see they're trying. And for that reason, and so many others (not least the fact it's 10 minutes walk from the office), I can see myself being a bit of a regular.

7/10

I doubt Talli Joe has done quite enough to make it into my 2017 top 100, but see where else did for 2016.

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Thyme, Southrop

The weather forecast was not good. The BBC predicted heavy showers, albeit with one of those confusing "sun-rain-cloud-lightning" combo icons that makes you wonder if they're not just covering all bases. 90% chance of rain my iPhone said, another only vaguely useful bit of information, for in the event that it didn't rain they could always just say "ah, but we also said there was a 10% chance it wouldn't!". So we peered out nervously from the windows of our train as it powered west from Paddington, eyeing each dark patch of sky suspiciously, fingers and toes crossed.

Because it is possible to enjoy yourself in London whatever the weather. Instead of a walk around Hyde Park or the South Bank you can mooch around the National Portrait Gallery or the Victoria and Albert Museum; instead of lunch in the garden at the Drapers Arms or the terrace at Pont de la Tour you could, well, just watch the weather bash the windows from inside or get above the clouds at Duck & Waffle or Galvin @ Windows. There are always options. But the only reason to go to the countryside is to enjoy the countryside, and I've had quite enough weekend breaks sheltering from the elements in the nearest pub or killing the time before dinner in the hotel room, thank you very much. I want sun, or at the very least an absence of precipitation.

So as the sky, dense and dark with moisture, threatened to break and spoil our day at any moment, the taxi pulled up in front of the stunning 17th century converted farmhouse at Thyme, in the tiny Cotswolds hamlet of Southrop. And once we'd dumped our bags and had a quick tour of the main buildings (a cozy bar decorated with life-size fake sheep; vast, gleaming new kitchens used for masterclasses and lucky resident chefs; a cavernous events space for lucky guests), we headed down the road for lunch.

The Swan at Southrop is part of Thyme, and you can see the family resemblance. Cleanly and precisely restored but still retaining enough of the original Thomas Hardy-country charm, it's the quintessential ideal of the quiet country pub, but unlike many country pubs you may wander into for a pint and a snack, the food offering here is well above par. A Scotch egg was faultless, solid white and a dark-orange, runny yolk, surrounded by chunky, loose sausage meat and seasoned well. And crab tagliatelle had plenty of seafood, good thick bouncy pasta and leaves of fresh basil artfully wilting on top. We ate them in the garden outside, that strange pre-storm air hanging heavily around us, wondering when the heavens would open.

After lunch, expecting to have to dash inside any minute, we tentatively wandered around the immaculate gardens attached to Thyme house, the Toad Hall annexe with its galleried dining hall in honey coloured stone, which housed our room for the night. Lawns so bright green and perfectly cut they looked like laid carpet, a dinky orchard of head-high apple trees surrounding a large metal brazier. Then down the gravel path and away from the main buildings, to a field of wild flowers and in its centre a vast oak tree with a trunk so thick you could drive a road through it. On any other day this would be a deeply surreal journey but today, with the dark, low clouds and strange syrupy air that played tricks with your eyes and sucked all the contrast out of everything like some low budget sci-fi camera trick, it took on a particularly bizarre turn. It was like walking through the illustrations in a Lewis Carroll book, everything neat and tidy and precisely drawn and somehow other than natural.

But whoever came to the Cotswolds for reality? This is escapism as only England knows how, an Anglo-Disneyland of picturebook stone cottages and ancient moss-softened stone bridges over babbling streams, a way of life that the rest of the country hasn't known for 500 years, if it ever did at all. It's not so much that time has stood still here that just bypassed it completely; from my attic bedroom window I saw a couple of people in brown overalls lazily tending to their immaculate front gardens outside a similarly perfect building just over the way, and wondered for a moment what they did for a living, what life choices led to this moment of them taking part in this strange open-air theatre. Or even if they were real at all, and the moment we and our luggage were packed back off to Swindon station they would flicker briefly into black and white and then disappear completely.

That evening, in that grand dining hall, now lined with fine glassware and candles and stirring with smart staff offering English sparkling wine, we ate a fine, Modern British menu cooked by the only chef in the country who could look like he belonged somewhere like this, Jeremy Lee. Canapés of cod's roe and peas, a dainty teacup of chilled lovage soup, a delicate artichoke and Berkswell tart, a bold, firm fillet of trout in a lawn-green sauce. It was a supremely intelligent menu, accessible and friendly but still with enough odd twists and turns to keep you guessing. There were matching wines from France and New Zealand, and a rice pudding for dessert studded with elderflowers and rhubarb. It was all quite wonderful.

And the rain? It never came. In the morning, the peculiarly dreamlike atmosphere of the day before had been replaced by a different kind of fug - persistent and powerful hangovers. And after a short stroll and a brief lie under the shade of an oak tree to regain our strength (where I was only once woken by a dog licking my face), it was soon time to repack our bags and head out of town into cold harsh reality. Or, as it's otherwise known, Swindon rail station. Back in London now, it's quite hard to believe I ever was in that strange, serene place, with its lawns and its orchards and its old oak trees. And I'd recommend you go yourself, have a Chase martini in the bar, chase the chaffinches around the herb garden, wake up to a breakfast of summer fruits and local yoghurt, if it weren't for the distant sneaking doubt that Thyme, and Southrop, in this idyllic corner of the Oxfordshire countryside, ever existed at all.

We were guests at Thyme but paid our way at the Swan at Southrop. Thyme hosts a series of guest chef dinners (called Thyme's Table, quite brilliantly), more details available here.

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Native, Covent Garden

Native is the kind of restaurant that, if it had opened a few years ago, before the Dairy and Picture and all those other new-wave Modern British "foraged and seasonal" places popped up, would have probably made a bigger splash. That's not to say Native is lazy or derivative; food such as this, however much it's inspired by anywhere else, is never easy to get right, and the dishes they're turning out here are - by and large - impressive by anyone's standards. And if the whole "foraged and seasonal" shtick is wearing a little thin, that's hardly their fault is it? It's only jaded restaurant spods like me that ever end up bothered by it.

So I'll try and leave any creeping sense of "been there, done that" to one side and tell you all the reasons why Native is a great little restaurant and why you should take the time to visit. Firstly, and first impressions matter after all, all the staff are lovely and do as well in this tiny, slightly shabby space as you could hope for. True, it's not terrifically difficult to be attentive when you're kept within arm's reach of the people you're serving, but even so it was noted.

And the food is well worth sticking around for as well, but firstly a couple of things that didn't quite hit the mark. I get the impression that Native haven't yet decided where their strengths lie and are still drawing influences from far and wide to see what works and what doesn't. From my own perspective, I'm afraid a wood pigeon kebab didn't - work, that is. There are too many different elements specific to training and equipment and setting and ingredients in Middle Eastern food that make it incredibly difficult to get right in anywhere that doesn't specialise in just that style of cuisine. So I'm afraid the herb crust on the pigeon itself was clumsy and bitter, the sauce too jammy, and the bread thick and cloying, more a kind of thin scone than a proper flatbread. Perhaps, in their defense, Native weren't aiming for a completely authentic pigeon kebab (is there one?) and I'm sure one day they'd love access to a proper wood-fired bread oven, but until then, why compromise?

Across two recent visits, a weeny bowl of "confit garlic" was the only other thing I didn't think much of. There are probably ways of using cow's curd and garlic that don't mean you end up with a pile of unseasoned, flavourless gloop with a distressing honk of old garlic but I'm afraid that's essentially all we have here, about a tablespoon's worth for £4. Not recommended.

Fortunately, everything else I tried at Native was well worth the effort. On one visit there were these rabbit dumplings floating in a powerful smoked bacon dashi soup, packing a super umami punch and with bags of lovely meaty flavour. It didn't need the chunks of cold, vinegary pickled walnuts that were floating around in it but these were easily avoided, and hardly spoiled the enjoyment of the rest of the dish.

House bread was warmed to order and though not particularly interesting of flavour, still had a nice crust. I still can't quite believe I'm still having to complain about butter in restaurants in 2016, but I don't know, maybe some people like having their bread shredded apart into small pieces while trying to apply fridge-hard strips of butter to its surface. All I know is, I don't.

Hog skin chicharron, hogseet salt and 'Hayonnaise' had a great mix of textures, the delicate crunch of the puffed pork dotted with soft dollops of fresh mayonnaise. But my favourite thing about this little snack was the spiced salt, which had fenugreek and cardamom and all sorts of interesting things going on.

Wild boar and caraway saucisson was from Cannon and Cannon and therefore was a prime example, moist and well seasoned and packed with good, colourful lean meat. Accompanying pickles were fine, though the sliced gherkin worked better than the slimy pickled mushrooms.

Asparagus with lardo used very good asparagus, and very good lardo, and so could hardly fail. Having the kitchens so close to where the food is consumed has many benefits, but particularly in the serving of asparagus where if they're very fresh off the grill they're still nice and plump - after a few seconds they cool down and go a bit wrinkly.

Venison, a big slab of it, cooked medium rare and served with Isle of Wight tomatoes. I feel like I'm not as big a fan of Isle of Wight tomatoes as everyone else seems to be - they're nicer than your local supermarket SmartPrice tomatoes perhaps, but not worth swooning over. However the deer was hugely enjoyable, confidently seasoned and bleeding sweet, meaty juices.

More Isle of Wight tomatoes came with the scallops, and were even more of a distraction. I think the rich seafood flavours of scallops need citrus rather than tomato to balance it, but I liked the use of sobrasada in the mixture underneath, and I also liked how they'd kept the roes on for extra rustic points. Surf and turf.

The bill at Native comes on an iPad. I'm sure you can ask for a printout for your records, but I didn't (save the planet) so you'll have to take my word that the bill on each occasion came to about £20-25. Which is a pretty reasonable amount of money to pay for lunch anywhere, never mind an ingredients-led Modern British bistro in the centre of Covent Garden. I've also just noticed with some horror that the menu says 'Service Not Included' and I don't know if I left an additional charge on my bill; if not, sorry Native, service was faultless - I'll make it up next time.

And I'm sure there will be a next time. No, Native the restaurant isn't perfect, but the occasional failures are noble and the attitude from everyone involved is so honest and attractive it's hard not to just go with it all and enjoy yourself. I also noted with some relief that none of the desserts involved any root vegetables or peas; a worrying recent development in restaurants of this kind. So thanks for doing your thing, Native - you may not be London's first foraged and seasonal Modern British restaurant, and you surely won't be the last. But you are doing it confidently and you are doing it well, and there's no shame in that.

7/10

In Covent Garden and Native is full? See your other options in the area with my app.

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Burgerac's Burgershack at the Social, Fitzrovia

The best thing about reviewing a burger joint (apart from the actual eating of the burger, of course, if things go well) is that I don't need to feel guilty about passing judgment after eating only one or two items on the menu. I can see Burgershack at the Social do a mushroom burger, and a Korean chicken burger, and a lard-fried buttermilk chicken burger, and based on the chicken burger I tried at their outpost at the Royal Oak in Marylebone one lunchtime a year or two ago I'm sure they're all lovely, but really any burger joint's success is measured on the strength of its main offering - the mighty cheesebuger. And that's just what I ordered on a recent trip to Fitzrovia.

And here it is, in all its glory. "Burgerac" is an ex- burger blogger who knew what he was talking about when he was writing about burgers, and knows exactly what he's doing now he's making them. A nice thick, loose-mince patty, seared to a good dark crust but pink inside, with a layer of salty, gooey American cheese soaked into the top of it. Beneath, a few thin-sliced pickles and white onion, and finally that all-important cross-hatch of Heinz ketchup and French's mustard. If I'm being brutal the one thing I'd change is the bun, which is it a bit bland in taste and with a slightly dry texture, and could perhaps do with a quick MeatLiquor-style steaming under a cloche. Having said that, it did hold its shape to the last bite so it is doing something right.

If I have one complaint to make about the "Hot'n'blue fries" (fries with Buffalo sauce and blue cheese on them; Bleecker Burger do them as "Angry Fries") it's that I could really have done with being allowed to order a smaller portion, as this was an unfeasibly vast amount of fries for one person for £4 - I think I managed about a fifth of them before giving up. However, they were very good - the blue cheese element wasn't too funky or too thin, and the fries maintained a good crunch.

And that's pretty much everything you need to know. A short review, this, of an uncomplicated and refreshingly unpretentious little operation, doing a few things very well and for not much money. A final bill of £15 didn't even add on a charge for (friendly and attentive) table service, so I left a few quid anyway. It's all too easy to get burger fatigue from all the myriad of dreadful copycat places that have sprung up in this country over the last few years, but it's always worth making the effort to go to a decent burger joint and remind yourself that there are few things more easily enjoyed than a nice big, bloody pile of loose minced beef in a bun.

8/10

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