What the experts recommend

Umezushi Unit 4, Mirabel Street, Manchester (0871-811 8877)

The sushi at Umezushi “really is very good indeed, and, at the price, a bit of a miracle”, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. This tiny Manchester restaurant is not in the most attractive of locations: Mirabel Street, below Victoria station, is “a pretty name for a bit of industrial rough trade, all grimy blackened brick and knackered lock-up”. Once inside, however, it’s lovely – “all deeply varnished blond wood and calm”. And fantastic food. A “tight knot of slippery wakame” (seaweed) provides a “huge savoury-sour whack” of flavour. Sashimi of sweet scallop and tuna are laid prettily across shredded mooli. The best of the excellent nigiri is scorched sea bream, “the hastily applied heat encouraging the lubricious oils to run”. Glazed and grilled eel are delicious, as are slices of Wagyu beef, and Taiwanese braised pork. “You get the message by now. Umezushi is a bit of a diamond in the rough; a hidden temple to the worship of good things. Go there.” Meal for two from £40.

Horn Please 91 Basement, Berkeley Street, Glasgow (0141-573 3021)

The dishes at Horn Please (the name refers to a sign painted on the back of many Indian trucks) range from “the ravishing to the bewildering”, says Marina O’loughlin in The Guardian. If you pick the former, you are in for a hell of a time. Firmly in that camp is duck breast, its fat rendered off, flesh tender and juicy, skin crisp, the sauce a riff on murgh makhani (butter chicken) with a back note of heat from chilli and ginger. Fine, too, are crisp crab cakes topped with scarlet sweet chilli and straining with potato and perky crab meat. Less successful are limp parathas and a frankly strange take on haggis. One dish that manages to be both bewildering and ravishing, however, is a bread pakora (a favourite Mumbai street snack) which arrives on a slate, a “puffy, bronze bruiser”, half-meat, halffish, with a sticky tamarind dip and a hectic cocktail of spices. “Is it delicate, nuanced, considered? No chance. Do we wolf it like animals? Hell, yes.” Around £35 a head, plus drinks and service.

Berber & Q Shawarma Bar 46 Exmouth Market, London EC1 (020-7837 1726)

Berber & Q is a “Turkish-ish barbecue/ kebab phenomenon” in east London which I have never visited because it doesn’t take reservations and “Haggerston is a long way for an old man to go to queue”, says Giles Coren in The Times. Now, though, they’ve opened a sister Shawarma Bar in Exmouth Market – a location that has any number of tasty alternatives if you can’t get in there, and agreeable bars to while away the wait if you can. And this is food worth waiting for: “fiery, ballsy, and unbelievably delicious”. For our meat mains, we went for a “pile of raucous shawarma lamb and half a chicken off the rotisserie, throbbing with juice and heat”. Yet the real glory of this place “lies in the abundance of ancillary things plonked down in saucers to make the meat sing”. A fantastic vegetarian mezze; herbs and sumac; tomato and lemon juice, “tumbling in fine tahini”; a “wonderful range of pickles, a dish of rice and lentils and crunchy fried onion called mejadra” – we ate the lot. Around £100 for three people, with “excellent cocktails and beer”.