The more observant among you, and my regular readers out there, might well wonder if the title of this week’s review is a mistake. Because I reviewed Gees, one of Oxford’s most venerable restaurants, in May last year. Normally when I re-review a restaurant it’s some time after my original visit, and I’ve never returned to any Oxford restaurants on duty. Why would I, when I’ve only really added the city to my patch in the last couple of years?

Besides, if you are a regular reader you may well remember that when I went to Gees I didn’t like it much. I loved the room, but nearly everything I ate betrayed its promise and was tricksy for the sake of it. That meant a negroni that didn’t taste like a negroni, a tonnato that wasn’t a tonnato, an affogato that wasn’t an affogato and a £200 bill for two that wasn’t a bargain. And there was salad, lots of salad. So much of it, in fact – many dishes padded out with the stuff – that I wondered whether I’d accidentally wandered into England’s most expensive salad bar.

So why on earth would I go back there at all, let alone so soon after that?

Well, to explain that I have to give the context, do the thing that makes these reviews so long/detailed/enjoyable/unbearable (delete as applicable). Because in May, Gees announced that it had appointed a new head chef and would reopen in June with a brand new menu following a refurbishment, their second in four years. The head chef in question – and this is what made it noteworthy – was none other than Nick Galer.

Galer is an interesting figure with a varied CV. He worked under Heston Blumenthal at the Crown in Bray, but came to my attention during his eight years at Goring’s The Miller Of Mansfield. I reviewed it in 2019 and absolutely loved it, although not all my repeat visits there were quite as successful. And then he left when the pubco, Stonegate, decided to raise the rent by an eye-watering amount, because making perfectly good businesses economically unviable seems to be the only thing Stonegate is good at.

Galer then took over the kitchen at a nearby golf club following a refurbishment – lucky golfers, I’d say – before finding a more permanent gig in 2024 taking over the Pot Kiln in Frilsham, which too had decided to reopen after a refurb. Yes, another refurb: something about Galer, it seems, really makes business owners want to spruce up the place.

The Pot Kiln decided to take a new approach with Galer at the helm, reinventing itself as a sort of Basque roadside grill. I reviewed it last March and I found a lot to like, although it felt like there was friction between some of Galer’s finer, fiddlier instincts and the kind of robust and generous cooking I expected given the concept. There was plenty of good food, though, and I expected that, with time, Galer and the Pot Kiln could iron that out.

But the owners of the pub seemed to think differently, because in March of this year they announced that they were junking the whole Basque thing and going back to pub food – the kind you could find just down the road at the Royal Oak in Yattendon, owned by the same people, or indeed countless other pubs in West Berkshire.

So no wonder Galer decided to jump ship, but him rematerialising at Gees was still the kind of plot twist that made you sit up and take notice. Because when I reviewed Gees and found it so disappointing, the comments I saw in the Oxford subreddit suggested I was far from alone. Phrases like “underwhelming” or “super average for the price” were bandied around, and the overall impression was that the restaurant had been an underachiever for some time.

So the scene was set: Gees is a restaurant that has never quite found its chef, and Galer is a chef who’s never quite found his home. Had they finally found each other?

Gees’ dining room has always been a properly handsome space, a Grade 2 listed late Victorian glasshouse with a real wow factor. And the changes the restaurant has made with its newest refurb only improve matters. The little terrace along the side of the glasshouse, for example, is now under cover, although I’m not sure why you’d choose to eat there rather than the main dining room.

But the most significant change is the dining room itself. The restaurant has put in a central section made up of very attractive curved, interconnecting banquettes, which gives everything a lovely flow and breaks up what was previously a huge room. It’s a clever enhancement: I liked the room before, but this really does feel like the missing piece. It was a dreary, rainy day outside – very much one of the first days of autumn – but the place was warm, snug and welcoming. It’s also worth saying that I was there on a Tuesday lunchtime but Gee’s was nicely busy: by the time I left, in the middle of the afternoon, some tables were on their second set of occupants.

Part of that popularity, I suspect, was down to a couple of factors, one being the buzz of a new chef a few months into the assignment. But also, Gees is proper all-day dining: it is open from 9 until late every single day of the week, and even serves brunch if you’re that way inclined. All that is a rarity in north Oxford where independent restaurants tend to either only open in the evening some days, not open at all, or both.

And the menu reflected that, because it read brilliantly. Gees is not offering cuisine linked to a particular country or even region, so is broadly Modern European but with flourishes beyond that: so alongside your pizzette and pasta, your grilled squid and venison loin you can also find salmon sashimi, tandoori quail and pork belly in bak kut teh, a Malaysian meat broth. I thought it was very clever stuff – it could easily have come across as a mess, but didn’t – with touches, to my mind, of Covent Garden’s Town, one of London’s biggest openings of 2025. When I showed it to Zoë later, she said it and the dining room struck her as an upmarket version of Bill’s: it was more of a compliment than it sounds.

Making choices, over a properly enjoyable pre-prandial Bramble (light on the advertised basil but none the worse for that) was very difficult indeed. But a choice to share three starters and maximise the options reaped serious dividends. First of all, the dish I couldn’t not order: haggis pakora were properly elevated, the tempura almost impossibly ethereal but the contents within just as robust as you’d hope, the whole thing balanced in a pyramid on a moat of decidedly Mediterranean minted yoghurt.

When I went to Glasgow earlier in the year this was the kind of dish I expected to find, and thus inevitably eat, but it eluded me. To instead discover it here, in genteel North Oxford, was a very pleasant surprise.

Every bit as delightful was one of Gees’ two pizzette, with Alsace bacon and caramelised onions. I had my reservations about this when it turned up, expecting the crust to be puffier, but it thoroughly proved me wrong: the base was joyous and light, roughened with semolina flour or the like, and the batons of bacon, golden slivers of allium and cheese harmonised superbly.

I wondered whether this might be a very current take on tartiflette for the calorie-conscious, but it was probably still too indulgent for that. If I wanted any illustration of the problems weight loss jabs present for restaurants, I got it at lunch: a lady at the next table ordered a pizzette as her main course – they really aren’t big – and ended up giving more than half of it to her grown-up kids.

To complete the pan-European globetrotting of the starters, the final one was more quintessentially British. Three pieces of bone marrow, topped generously with parsley crumb, came in a little cairn with a couple of pieces of sourdough toast. If this was my least favourite of the introductory plates, it was only by a whisker: I would have liked the marrow slightly more smooshable, but it tasted terrific.

Just as necessary, though, was the beautiful salad on the side: parsley, shallot and capers, everything you needed to counterpoint the marrow, which had the richness ill-informed people tend to mislabel as unctuous. This dish served as the best single illustration of how Gees had changed, from why is there so much salad with everything? to this is the perfect salad for this dish.

By this point a bottle of very good German riesling – dry but not aggressively so, with the faintest hint of effervescence – had been opened and I was watching the parade of dishes I could have tried make their way to other tables. The grilled squid and salmon sashimi looked especially good, and I realised I could easily have constructed a completely different meal here, shuffled the pack another way. And yet, in that moment, I wouldn’t have swapped anything I’d eaten for something I hadn’t ordered: no mean feat in a restaurant with such a wide and tempting menu: I took many things from my meal at Gees, but gladly FOMO wasn’t one of them.

I was drawn to many of the mains on Gees’ menu but in the end I went for something relatively basic, because the variety of it intrigued me. Gees serves a trio of sliders with a portion of beef fat chips, and they had sufficient range that I was curious about how well they’d be executed. The answer, in short, was ‘very’.

First up, a venison burger which managed to avoid the dry, crumbliness that meat can sometimes impart to a patty. Instead this had an impeccable crust and pleasing pinkness, all things savoury offset with red onion and a lozenge of foie gras. Every bit as good in a completely different way was Gees’ lamb slider, with a base of tzatziki so singing with mint that it was positively verdant: a ribbon of pickled cucumber on top was an outstanding figurative cherry.

Finally, chicken thigh – again with an impressively light crunchy coating – was served with kimchi and mayo. I think it was the least successful of the three, but again a bronze medal was nothing to be ashamed of when you looked at what else was on the podium. Honest Burgers has been doing a special recently where you can have three of their sliders with rosemary fries for something like £16: this, with three sliders properly gussied up and a helping of thick, crunchy beef fat chips, was £27.50. It felt like the upgrade was worth the money.

This dish didn’t really need anything else, but I’d ordered the zucchini fritti anyway because I find them hard to resist on a menu. Credit to Gees for using both yellow and green courgettes here, but I wanted to like these better than I did. They were limp, the coating patchy, and although they delivered a salty hit the taste couldn’t overcome the texture. They could have done with a dip, and if I’d thought I might have shelled out for some aioli but even so the courgettes were so wan that it would have been like, to borrow an old phrase, playing snooker with a rope.

I didn’t get to try a forkful of my dining companion’s main on this occasion, but the ribeye was beautifully cooked – still pink but with plenty of caramelisation, served with a bronzed banana shallot, more of those beef fat chips and a chimichurri with just enough spikiness to sharpen the focus. I’m told the runner beans, in a black pepper butter, were excellent too.

Gees’ dessert menu is a model of restraint: four desserts, an ice cream of the day made on the premises or a cheeseboard. But my companion and I were both drawn to one, the chocolate mousse, and so we ordered a couple of those along with some Moscato d’Asti, a gorgeous little treat at £6 a glass.

Now, when Bitten Oxford reviewed the revamped Gees – their second comped visit in under a year – they had some reservations about the chocolate mousse. “It wasn’t quite the right consistency, it needed to be a bit more airy” was their conclusion. Well, they may have got their food for free but they weren’t entirely barking up the wrong tree. Because it is not a mousse and I have no idea why it’s billed as one on the dessert menu.

What it is, in fact, is a chocolate cremeux. And not just any chocolate cremeux but, pretty much, the outrageously good chocolate cremeux I first had at the Miller Of Mansfield over seven years ago. It is a Nick Galer classic, right down to the superb sesame tuile delicately laid on top of it, and to eat it again after far too long made me very happy indeed. It was like being reunited with a good friend after far too long apart, and ruefully discovering that the years had been kinder to them than they were to you.

I also found discovering that thread of continuity strangely comforting: Galer’s career has taken many twists and turns since he opened the Miller Of Mansfield 12 years ago, and he’s wound up in all kinds of places serving all kinds of dishes and cuisines. And yet here, for me at least, is where I came in, where I first encountered and loved his food. It tied my whole meal up with a neat little bow, as the best desserts do, but this one had an extra bit of resonance just for me. Is it possible to be moved by a dessert? I hope the answer is yes, because otherwise I might care about this kind of thing more than is healthy.

Having almost tied my review up in a neat little bow too, I just need to add that the bill for all that came to £285. That includes a 15% service charge – that’s inflation for you – which was annoying enough to note but not sufficiently annoying that I wanted to pay less. Service was the kind of excellent that shouldn’t need that kind of quasi-mandatory recompense, but maybe in North Oxford it does. Either way I felt like New Gees was a significantly better use of money than Old Gees, which tells its own story. All that was left to do was bimble round the shops, stop for a pint in the Rose & Crown, one of my favourite pubs in the world, and catch the train home.

I don’t want to jinx it by saying this, but I hope that Nick Galer and Gees are at the beginning of a very long and beautiful friendship, now that they’ve found one another. If you ate at Gees without knowing any of the context or the backstory you would have a very good meal, and I suspect the group you went with would all find something to eat and enjoy in a menu which has been assembled with precision and intelligence to appeal to almost everybody, vegans excepted. This is where Zoë’s comparison with Bill’s is a good one, and it’s nice to see an independent restaurant stepping up to excel at what chain restaurants do annoyingly well.

But if you know any of the history – as an Oxford resident, a lover of Oxford or someone who has followed the trajectory of Nick Galer’s career – this is an even happier ending than that. Oxford has got its flagship restaurant back, Gees has got its mojo back and Galer is back where he belongs, in a kitchen belonging to a place that has invested in him. And for the rest of us, we get a very reliable place to eat in Oxford, in one of the most attractive dining rooms I can think of. With a bit of luck, Gees could become the institution it always should have been.

I hope I don’t have to re-review Gees for years and years. But I plan to go back – off duty, thankfully – many, many times.

Gees – 8.7
61-63 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE
01865 553540

https://www.geesrestaurant.co.uk

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