From Richmond to Smithfield

Saturday, August 17th , 2024

Cloth is a quite new restaurant near the old Smithfield Market. The modern British menu read well enough, and the cooking was generally reasonable, but at the end of the day it seemed like a pleasant rather than particularly dazzling experience, with particularly poor acoustics thrown in. 

The Dysart is one of my favourite restaurants, with Ken Culhane’s polished cooking getting steadily more precise and refined with each visit. It outshines almost every multi-starred restaurant in the city and yet the prices here are quite moderate given the high quality of ingredients and the considerable technical skill on display.

Hakkasan Mayfair is one of the most consistent restaurants in London, which is pretty remarkable given its considerable scale. The service is slick, the menu is appealing and the execution of the dishes is very good indeed. You pay a price for this of course, but the perpetually busy dining room shows that the formula is correct.