What the experts recommend

Flank at the Cow 95-97 Dyke Road, Brighton (01273-772370)

Flank’s menu is at once beguiling and bizarre, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. “Spiced beef shin donut – pan stock – peanut”; “Kentucky fried artichoke – pickle cress mayo”; “Dr Pepper sticky bourbon cake”. It all reads like “pure food lust” fashioned from randomly generated syllables. Does such ambition pay off? Yes and no. Several of the “snacks and bites” are thrilling. Sweet and sticky chicken wings are “crusted powerfully with cracked black pepper and deliver a mighty kick”. A “pressed pork loaf” is two bricks of a “gloriously spiced and seasoned terrine, spun through with leeks accompanied by their own crunchy, lactic pickles”. Applewoodsmoked cheese croquettes and “crispy Kentucky-fried pigs’ ears” are all also excellent. Alas, the mains didn’t work. Beef short rib had spent 24 hours in a water bath before being barbecued, lending it an unappealing “jellified” quality. Still, there’s enough exciting cooking going on here to suggest great things ahead. Meal for two, £50-£70.

Rochelle Canteen Arnold Circus, London E2 (020-7729 5677)

I had been avoiding this place, says Marina O’loughlin in The Guardian. Margot Henderson’s hip-as-hell restaurant, in the historic Boundary Estate, serves breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea to Shoreditch creative types. With straw hats on the wall, and deckchairs outside, the canteen “comes on like a shack”, but the tables are Alvar Aalto, the chairs Ercol. In short, it’s all so “studied-urban-bucolic”, it would normally bring “my inner chippy northern cow bristling and spitting to the surface”. Yet I was “seduced” by the serious but unfussy cooking. Salad of roast lamb was “wonderfully tender, rosemary-fragranced meat and perky leaves slicked with the umami hum of green herbs and anchovy”. Salt cod fritters were as light as marshmallow, with a touch of dill, a generous bowl of ochre and “brazenly garlicky” aioli. And Welsh rarebit was as “dark and sticky as cheesy treacle from its hefty glugs of Guinness”. I loved it. About

£35 a head for three courses.