I have spent years travelling across Britain and trying thousands of restaurants. Forget Michelin, these are the 16 hidden gems you MUST visit: TOM PARKER BOWLES
I’ve spent the past 25 years travelling up and down the country, entirely in thrall to my ever-expanding gut. I must have been to thousands of different places, ranging from the haute to the humble, in search of quality, value and a very serious lunch. In short, the right place to spend your hard-earned cash. Forget the dull and mediocre, the overpriced and pretentious. The restaurants below are some of the best in the land. Forget Michelin. These are the true shining stars...
Sea Salt + Sole, Aberdeen
As well as haddock and smoked sausage, Sea Salt + Sole’s salt and pepper battered squid is available in season
The walls of Sea Salt + Sole on the edge of Dyce train station, just outside Aberdeen, are plastered with various awards
Sea Salt + Sole is, like most decent chippies, not much to look at: a clean, modern building on the edge of Dyce train station, just outside Aberdeen.
We order a large haddock supper from smiling, immaculate staff, and tear it apart with our fingers, the flesh falling into thick alabaster flakes. It’s incandescently fresh, still scented with the sea and artfully steamed within that burnished shell.
Below the haddock, chips, lots of them, soaked in salt and vinegar, fat, with just the right ratio of crunch and squelch. Curry sauce is suitably sweet and viscous.
This dinner is, quite simply, one of the finest things I’ve eaten for years. And every bit the equal to Rick Stein’s magnificent tranche of turbot. Albeit at about a quarter of the price.
- About £9 per head. Sea Salt + Sole, Station Road, Dyce, Aberdeen
The Devonshire, Picadilly, W1
Iberico ribs grilled over wood embers offer two bites of tight-textured, sweetly piggy joy
The downstairs pub is a snug old-fashioned boozer where you can find some of the best Guinness in the land
Situated in an old Jamie’s Italian, just behind Piccadilly, the downstairs pub is all floral carpets, hidden snugs and £2 sausages on a stick. A proper, old-fashioned boozer, the place for a swift pint or a serious session, with some of the best Guinness you’ll find in the land.
Iberico ribs offer two bites of tight-textured, sweetly piggy joy, while both rib-eye steak and lamb chops are hewn from superior beasts, lovingly charred, satisfyingly chewy and cooked just the right side of rare.
By contrast, beef-cheek and Guinness-suet pudding is a symphony of savoury, soft, exalted nursery food, and far too good to share.
This may be chop-house grub, but with Ashley Palmer-Watts, former head chef of the Fat Duck, at the helm, dishes have an extra level of finesse.
- About £45 per head. The Devonshire, 17 Denman Street, London W1
Squisito, Lewes, East Sussex
Gnocchi from Squisito with poached duck egg and pesto
This restaurant is very much a family affair. Chefs and co-owners Chris Chater and Harry Fields man the stoves, while Sally Murphy, in charge of wine and front of house, is married to Harry. There’s a warmth here, an unfussy charm that’s impossible to resist.
A house negroni to start (£5, in the same Pyrex glass, and at the same price, as those pioneered by the late, great Russell Norman), bracingly bitter. Then a plumply fatty home-made Italian sausage, gently spiced. And fat arancini, crisp and well fried, filled with nduja and oozing mozzarella. God, this is civilised.
Prices are eminently reasonable, and the place has real heart. It may describe itself as ‘unauthentically Italian’. But really, it’s just authentically good.
- About £25 per head. Squisito, The Needlemakers, Lewes, East Sussex
Arlington, Arlington Street, SW1
'Great restaurants are not just about food, but a mystical mix of so much more,' says Tom
Upmarket, ever-reliable comfort food, this restaurant's menu has something for everyone.
You can settle in for a marathon lunch or nip in for shepherd’s pie (immaculate) and a cup of coffee for under £25. I’ve done both. All the classics are there, from crispy duck and watercress salad to steak tartare, the hand-chopped beef slick with raw egg yolk, eaten with fistfuls of hot French fries.
Great restaurants are not just about the food, but a mystical mix of so much more. All the millions in the world can’t buy true heart and soul. For me, Arlington is more than a mere restaurant. It’s like coming home.
- About £35 per head. Arlington, 20 Arlington Street, London SW1
Oma, Borough Market, SE1
Oma's dishes combine Greek island simplicity with Levantine boldness
In the wrong hands, a menu that melds Greece with Mexico, Italy, France, China and Israel could have all the appeal of a speed date with Medusa. But Nick Molyviatis (formerly of Kiln) and Jorge Paredes (who used to run Sabor) know what they’re doing – the cooking is nothing short of inspired. Like labneh, all pale, lactic cool, topped with a crimson mess of salt cod XO sauce, subtly fishy and softly spicy.
This is a kitchen that can move from pastry perfection to cool, piscine elegance with effortless ease. Chalkstream trout tartare, pert and pure, is mixed with tomatoes, jalapeño and a joyously sharp citrus dressing. Seabass crudo, splendidly fresh, is topped with jalapeño granita.
A charred squid skewer tastes of long, languid Greek island lunches, eaten with the sand between one’s feet. Bliss.
I don’t think you’ll find food like this anywhere else on earth. Ye gods! Restaurateur David Carter has done it again.
- About £50 per head. Oma, 2-4 Bedale Street, SE1
Dove, Kensington Park Road, W11
Tomatoes with sour cream and chilli oil have a big and bold flavour, but never overwhelming
Orasay was chef Jackson Boxer’s Notting Hill paean to Great British fish. And very good it was, too. Now it has been replaced with Dove, serving ‘elevated comfort food’, the sort of tucker, according to Boxer, that you always want to eat, but can’t be arsed to cook at home.
There’s deep-fried lasagne for a start, a small, crisp square of truffle-scented succour, all pert pasta and oozing taleggio. What’s not to love? A contender for dish of the year, and we’re barely out of January. Not so much elevated as exalted.
Even a tomato salad – which in the depths of winter is surely the very definition of hope over experience – delights, the firm fruits slicked in sour cream and crisp chilli oil. It’s clever, fragrant and quietly joyous, delivering, just like every other dish, on both taste and texture.
Boxer works the room enthusiastically in his occasional breaks from shaking the pans downstairs, while service is as warm and friendly as it always was. It’s sad to see Orasay go. But this Dove has wings.
- About £35 per head. Dove, 31 Kensington Park Road, London W11
Noto, Edinburgh
At Noto, says Tom, ‘There’s an innate understating of Japanese technique'
Noto is a small, unassuming restaurant in the backstreets of Edinburgh’s New Town. Chef and owner Stuart Ralston, who was born a few miles down the road in Glenrothes, trained in New York under the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. And Noto, which is one of his small but critically lauded group, is inspired by his time living and working there. ‘We make delicious food’, goes the blurb on the website. He’s not wrong.
The menu is short and to the point, with a strong Japanese accent. Crab – white meat, fresh-picked and gloriously pure – is returned to the shell and drowned in a mess of butter.
Dill, so often a vicious bully of a herb, is used with admirable restraint: loyal backing vocals to the true star. You need the bread (excellent) to wipe the thing clean.
Service is lovely, prices decent and the wine list excellent. Noto is a gem.
- About £35 per head. Noto, 47A Thistle Street, Edinburgh
Canteen, 310 Portobello Road, W10
Canteen turns out a pizzetta of leeks, pancetta and molten taleggio on a parchment-thin crust
Canteen quietly opened on the site of the old Pizza East at the top of the Portobello Road. It’s large and cavernous, a mixture of industrial and homey, all marble-topped tables, slatted wooden benches and steel cabinets filled with tinned tomatoes, cheese and cured legs of pig. At the back, an open kitchen, with a vast wood-fired oven, and a few seats facing the action.
Head chef Jess Filbey trained at The River Cafe, as did her sous, Harry Hills. You see the influence in a beautiful pizzetta, the crust as thin and crisp as parchment, topped with soft leeks, crisp pancetta and molten taleggio – gone in a few joyous bites. Immediately we order another. The pasta is fresh, and some of the best I’ve tasted in London.
Notting Hill is blighted with a mass of mediocre Italians. Canteen, though, is River Cafe level. Albeit at half the price.
- About £40 a head. Canteen, 310 Portobello Road, London W10; @canteen.310
La Follia, Petersfield
La Follia is cluttered in the best possible ‘higgeldy-piggeldy rustic’ way
There’s an essential simplicity to La Follia, a small Italian café in South Harting, West Sussex. Not so much the room, which is cluttered in the best possible way. No, the simplicity lies in the food, where the emphasis is on good ingredients, simply served.
You won’t find bowls of pasta, veal saltimbocca or tagliata, just a short, sweet menu of cicchetti (taking their inspiration from all over Italy, rather than just Venice), various sandwiches and toasties, as well as dolci, or sweet things, all homemade save the cornetti, which are imported from Milan.
But it’s the sandwiches that really shine. Focaccia is baked just down the road, by Anna O’Kelly, a friend of owner Mariana Newton, who also runs front of house. Dear god, it’s good: soft, spongy, drenched in olive oil and scattered with sea salt.
I’m not, as you may imagine, alone in my love. The locals know a good thing when they taste it, and La Follia is perennially packed. Book early, or prepare to wait.
- About £22 per head. La Follia, 2 Newts Folly, The Square, South Harting
Laghi, Birmingham
Mortadella tonnato, one of the starters on offer at the Birmingham gem
Laghi’s is small and understated. Pig’s-head fritters first, fat fingers of soft, sweet jowl encased in a crisp panko shell. Then barbecued queenie scallops, pert and just opaque, in a buttery, gently spiced espelette sauce, each mollusc topped with a neat pile of tomato concassé.
Toasted pine nuts add texture, just as a fistful of pangrattato, or fried breadcrumbs, provides crunch in a dish of sliced beetroot, subtly acidic, topped with a blob of proper burrata, indecently fresh and lasciviously creamy.
Both dishes share a precision of taste and technique. Traditional Italian, by way of modern Brum.
Mamma Mia! None of the pastas costs more than £11.50. And the rigatoni is £9.50 a bowl. Which offers astonishing value for cooking of this quality. Yet again, Birmingham impresses.
- About £25 per head. Laghi’s, 22-24 Islington Row, Edgbaston, Birmingham
Rambutan, Borough Market, SE1
Sticky chicken pongal rice with saffron, coconut milk and cinnamon
With its open kitchen, joyous clatter and essential whiff of curry leaves, Rambutan certainly has a pure Sri Lankan soul. We start with apple acharu, a kind of pickle, crisp and clean, with a pronounced chilli punch.
There’s deep-fried roti, exquisitely flaky, with anchovy katta sambol, rich, intense and gloriously spicy. God, I love sambols, the relishes that are the lifeblood of Sri Lankan food. They add zest and zing, worked on a mirisgala (grinding stone) or pounded in a pestle and mortar.
Gunda dosas, deep-fried balls of lentil batter, are dipped in a cool pool of coriander sambol, sharp with lime and heavy on the garlic and ginger. Crisp fried chicken sits on sweetish, lustily buttered white toast, with pol sambol (a classic using coconut and chilli), dry and hot.
This is joyous, big-hearted cooking, a tropical blast of warm Sri Lankan bliss on a bitterly cold south London afternoon.
- About £35 per head. Rambutan, 10 Stoney Street, London SE1
Erst, Manchester
Tom praises Erst's flatbread and grilled mutton chops, as well as its Onglet tartare
Erst is one of those rare places where everything comes together to create a dinner of quietly understated magic. There’s a purity here, of technique and flavour, too. Take the flatbread. I’m not sure where this ubiquitous trend started. Probably with the Phoenicians. You can’t move these days without being assaulted by some artisan-topped, fiercely grilled dough. But here it comes soaked in beef fat, tasting like those bits at the bottom of the roasting pan after cooking the Sunday joint: puffy, charred and bovinely brilliant.
Five Cantabrian anchovies, sweetly intense – the galácticos of cured fish – wallow in a limpid pool of golden olive oil. Onglet tartare is roughly chopped and bathed in a slick of raw yolk and bone marrow. It’s big and bold and elegantly brutal, like Oliver Reed, in a dinner jacket, mud-wrestling with the Minotaur.
Throw in a grilled mutton chop, almost Dickensian in its old-fashioned heft – cooked pink and delicately stained with turmeric – as well as service that’s sweet and warm as Manchester pudding, and you have a restaurant that’s utterly glorious for a group. But even better for one.
- About £30 per head. Erst, 9 Murray Street, Ancoats, Manchester
Pomus, Margate
From France to Japan, the menu is broad, while service at the popular restaurant is warm
At Margate’s Pomus, the view is not over the North Sea – which is sparkling on this most sunny of autumn afternoons – rather the local Poundland. But going by the rule that the quality of the food is usually in inverse proportion to the beauty of the view, things are most certainly looking up.
There’s a skewer of chicken hearts, plump, pert and well spiced, sitting atop a crisp, cool pile of celeriac remoulade. And rounds of tongue, softly robust, lurking under a mound of parsley and watercress salad, sharp with a mustardy dressing and crunchy with homemade pickles.
For our main, ‘fish of the day’, a mighty lemon sole on the bone, exquisitely fresh and exquisitely cooked. It arrives topped with mussels in the shell, and surrounded by an elegant beurre blanc, threaded through with samphire. Pudding is rum-poached apricots, soft, sweet and boozy, and another bottle of excellent (and excellently priced) Pecorino.
Service is as warm as the early afternoon sun, the whole place splendidly laid-back. Empty when we arrive, the restaurant quickly fills up.
- About £30 per head. Pomus, 9 The Centre, Margate, Kent
Noah’s, Bristol
Noah’s, which overlooks Bristol’s Cumberland Basin, was formerly a greasy spoon called Popeye’s Diner, which was also the location for Sid’s Café in Only Fools and Horses. Peckham by way of Spike Island. Now it is a light, bright space with views of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the old B Bond tobacco warehouse, an Edwardian study in sturdy red brick.
And on my visit, with Briz very much in the driz, the place is rammed, the vast majority tempted in by the siren call of the Lock Keeper’s Lunch, which is cod and chips (or mussels or fishcakes), plus a cup of tea, for £12.95. For cooking this good, that’s one hell of a deal.
We order salt cod croquettes, topped with a blob of aïoli, sitting in a pool of tomato vinaigrette. The frying is immaculate, the filling soft and bracingly saline. Then smoked sardines, buried under a pile of chopped tomato, sharp, warm and gently sweet, on charred toast. A British comfort staple, given a resoundingly modern flourish.
The only slip is a whole Cornish sole, which is a touch overcooked. Not disastrously so, but standards at Noah’s are so high that you notice even the tiniest slide from spot on. This is a seafood place to savour.
- About £30 per head. Noah’s, 1 Brunel Lock Road, Bristol
Sardines on toast is one of the British comfort staples with a modern flourish on the menu
Clay’s Kitchen & Bar, Reading
At Clay’s, Tom finds a room ‘drenched in light’ and food that’s ‘thrilling’
At lunch, Clay's has a small plates menu, including butter chicken croquettes, two bites of oozing, gently spiced bliss. And raj kachori: crisp chickpea shells stuffed with red onion, chilli and tomato, at once cool, crunchy, sharp and cleansing.
Plus doh khlieh, a northeastern cold pork salad (and a new one for me), bursting with acidity, with more slivers of red onion and bushels of green herbs, a sort of vibrant reveille for the tastebuds.
Then, because I’m a greedy sod, and the Syamalas are lovely people, I’m allowed a taste of the evening à la carte menu. Lamb chops, charred and succulent, with a bracing chilli punch.
We leave, sated but happy, laden down with leftovers. This is cooking to make the senses sing and heart flutter with greedy delight.
- About £35 per head. Clay’s Kitchen & Bar, 22-24 Prospect Street, Caversham, Berkshire
Mountain, Picadilly
Situated on Beak Street in London's Soho, Mountain is ‘sprawling, softly industrial and joyously noisy’, says Tom
Mountain, the new restaurant from Tomos Parry, is all about fire. Of course it is. Show me a place where they aren’t searing everything from prawn cocktails to spotted dick over hand-hewn, copper-coppiced, sustainably sourced binchotan charcoal, and I’ll show you a Pret.
But Mountain is different. Parry didn’t start the fire (it was always burning), but he certainly helped spark a raging London culinary trend, doing wonderful things to a Basque-meets- Wales menu of whole turbot, butter and potatoes at Brat in Shoreditch.
Sobrasada – spiced pork with a low chilli growl – made in Majorca, comes grilled, sitting in a gleaming pool of its own fat, topped by a pert, pickled guindilla chilli. Eat with a billowing pillow of flatbread, puffed up like an ad exec’s ego (albeit a whole lot more appetising), and slathered with homemade butter.
Meanwhile, raw scallops (hand-dived in Cornwall by a man called Fraser) are sliced paper-thin and mixed with delicate wisps of monkfish, all swimming in a peppery, punchy Sicilian olive oil. Mountain is not cheap, but it is spectacularly good. An instant London classic, from a prodigiously talented chef.
- About £60 per head. Mountain, 16-18 Beak Street, London W1
