What the experts recommend

Leroy 18 Phipp Street, Shoreditch, London EC2 (020-7739 4443)

I’ve got no time for Michelin-bothering earnestness, says Grace Dent in The Guardian. “No, give me a dark, noisy, naughty wine bar with a pleasing menu any day”, one like Leroy – from the owners of Ellory, a Michelin-starred gaff that closed a few months ago. “Any restaurant that purposefully combusts and begins again with a name like a drunken memory is good by me” – especially when it’s “much, much better” than the original. Smoked trout is a “world class plate of smoked magic” with a pickled red onion salad. Beetroot salad with hazelnuts is so delicious I “demolish it like a large greedy squirrel”. A plate of white asparagus, roasted simply in butter, and “titivated” with a dipping egg yolk, is “sublime”. A “filthily good” bowl of lamb sweetbread comes with an earthy nettle sauce, and tender, spiced purple broccoli comes with a rich, curried oil and a “cleansing whoosh” of ricotta. “This is what restaurants should be like.” About £30-£35 a head, plus drinks.

Restaurant 22 22 Chesterton Road, Cambridge (01223-351880)

This delightful, bright, airy restaurant was relaunched this spring under preposterously young new owners (including Gordon Ramsay-trained twentysomething chef Sam Carter) and it’s a cracker, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. We went for the great value five-course tasting menu (à la carte is also available) and were thrilled (mostly). Salmon rillettes came with “cool and juicy” gooseberry and kaffir lime. Shallot and thyme brioche was beautiful, as was “dark and cakey” Guinness bread. A dish of Isle of Wight tomatoes with pecorino sardo (Sardinian sheep’s milk cheese) was followed by wild turbot with pink grapefruit and celeriac. Both were perfectly fine without “scorching themselves onto my memory” – unlike the next course, of Blythburgh pork, black pudding, wild garlic and onion. “I know I’m a pork bore (boar?), but this really was terrific: sumptuously tender, sizzlingly intense.” Tasting menu £35; £12 extra for a “very fine” course of five cheeses.