Weekly round-up of the national restaurant critics by @OliverThring, 19/07

Welcome to the weekly round-up of national critics’ restaurant reviews by Oliver Thring

Abu Zaad is a ‘beauty’, says Matthew Norman, ‘one of Britain’s tiny handful of Syrian restaurants’. ‘The food is immaculately fresh’: fatoush was ‘superb’ and minced lamb with aubergine and yoghurt ‘delicious and aesthetically pleasing’. This is a ‘truly great neighbourhood restaurant’.

AA Gill ‘ate almost everything’ at Gauthier Soho, but the food was ‘very neat and polite, and exceedingly bland’. Broad beans ‘tasted of soap’ and a tiny bit of john dory was ‘like a mermaid’s lip’. ‘It all seemed exhausted, small, timid and neat, without being attractive, like eating sighs and sniffles.’

Allan Jenkins is there too with the Observer, finding the place ‘quiet’ and ‘subdued’. A crab dish was ‘fresh if not exciting’ and the famous risotto ‘faultless’. This was ‘three sublime plates of food out of eight with one world-beater for a hefty £70 a head’.

Zoe Williams is at The Elephant in Torquay, which is split into a bistroey place downstairs and a fayn dayning (hat tip: Marina O’Loughlin) room upstairs. Beetroot and goat’s cheese salad (which seems to be on every menu in the land this summer) tasted of ‘Garden!’ though scallops with apple and cucumber was ‘a bit zingy for my liking’. A creme brulee was ‘totally stunning’: this is food with ‘character’.

A bit of a non-review of Terminus Nord by Robert Chalmers. There isn’t much on the food, but a great deal on the restaurant’s shoddy treatment of a 95-year-old woman and her 70-year-old daughter. The signature choucroute ‘looked like an autopsy’.

John Walsh is at Café Luc on the ever-lovely and very foodie Marylebone High Street. ‘The food … was terrific’. A crab tian was ‘a little work of art’, and chicken with champagne and pappardelle (yum) was ‘easily the loveliest chicken dish I’ve tasted in ages’. It all costs a ‘hefty wedge’, though.

Giles Coren pootles to the Magdalen Arms, where ‘the menu is … pure Anchor & Hope’. English octopus was ‘cool and beefy’, asparagus with clarified butter was ‘sweet like Haribo’ (a compliment) and hake with chorizo was ‘cooked perfectly to time’. I was there last week and agree that it’s great.

‘Tempo is a terrific addition to [Curzon] street,’ says Fay Maschler, with an ‘eye-catching’ dining room. Octopus salad with apple, pomegranate and parsley was ‘delectable’, although fritto misto was ‘rather pedestrian’. A tomato salad was also ‘wonderful … the apotheosis of delicious simplicity’. The location is handy for the Curzon cinema.

Marina O’Loughlin is at Viajante: ‘for the foodiest foodies, this is as close as we get to a Holy Grail’. The food is an ‘adventure’: baguettes with chicken skin butter were ‘sensational’ and presentation was ‘painstaking, exquisite’. Nuno Mendes is ‘as crazy a maverick as the best of them’.

Matthew Fort is at the ‘handsome’ Pump House in Bristol. ‘There is fine, judicious cooking going on here’: bath chap was a ‘light delight’ although a red mullet dish was ‘muddled’. The price is ‘not too high’, either.

And a fine blogging scoop from Kavita Favelle, who visited Pierre Koffmann‘s new place on the day after it opened. ‘The space is well lit and the tables liberally spaced’; the food is ‘classic, provincial French’. Snails with girolles tasted ‘fantastic’ and braised beef cheeks were ‘the epitome of a hearty French stew’. Service is ‘seamless, professional [and] friendly’.