Raise a glass to best in class of 2023 (and a few we didn't love)

In a turbulent year, eating out meant uncomplicated familiarity. It was 12 months of soul-warming highs, says our chief restaurant critic, despite the odd disappointment

- Jimi Famurewa

IT'S pretty uncanny. This time last year, the new place that London's dyspeptic food-obsessives were all scrabbling to get into was Bouchon Racine - a long-awaited, semi-mythical pub dining room founded by a supergroup of popular hospitality veterans (chef Henry Harris, GM Dave Strauss) and oriented around extraordinarily vivid, unashamedly old-fashioned cooking. This year, the spot causing unseemly scrums and pleading table-request WhatsApps is The Devonshire - a long-awaited, semi-mythical pub dining room founded by a supergroup of popular hospitality veterans (landlord Oisin Rogers, restaurateur Charlie Carroll, chef Ashley Palmer Watts) and... well, you can see where I'm going with this, can't you? It feels, in the context of the past 12 months in London dining, like an apposite piece of bookending. Or, if you were being less kind, industry acid reflux.

Because for all that the city's restaurant landscape in 2023 was coloured by significant, painful losses - the announced closures of Le Gavroche and The India Club; the deep wound of Polpo founder Russell Norman's untimely death - it has also felt like a year defined by nostalgia, repetition and the collective embrace of a kind of lulling, uncomplicated familiarity. Sequels, spin-offs and empire-expansion projects from anointed international chefs have reigned supreme. There has been no Big Mamma-style, ambitious new player arriving to upend the market. Roast chicken, steak, smashburgers and escargot-heavy Francophillia have been the most recurrent culinary motifs. In an era where the eye-widening expensiveness of eating out has, perhaps outside the richest bubbles, turned it into a rarer treat, it makes sense that restaurant owners and diners alike would retreat towards the reliable, roadtested and risk-free; towards cones of frites, caviar supplements and establishments all pitched as "love letters" to the same bygone ages that are always being revived.