Les Deux Salons

A terrific evening at Les Deux Salons on our first visit, classic French brasserie style without Grand Epoch. Our service was excellent from a New Zealand lady who really knew what she was doing. Food was super in quality and choice. My companion had the bacon and snail pie, pronounced excellent plus a main of rabbit casseroled with vegetables. I had a less adventurous green bean salad with smoked duck followed by steak frites all beautifully executed.
This restaurant is superbly run and managed a tour de force in scale up from L'Arbutus and Wild Honey.
Hurrah, a dependable, relaxed, good food, affordable Central London restaurant, not many can live up to this description. Our meal with 4 250ml carafes and coffee came to £110 not cheap but great value.

A nice central location that is more the preserve of the local offices rather than the tourist set.

As a consequence service is extremely fast, as for those of us that are retired and have time on our hands possibly a little too quick.

Food was very good though, my snail and bacon pie was delicious, very rich and very garlicy.

I was less adventurous with my main, but a good burger cooked well.

Lunch was a £122 with the drinks bill being slightly under half of that amount.

Fantastic service on an extremely busy pre-theatre evening. Would definitely go again.

I first visited this restaurant last Christmas and was really impressed, great food, great service and a most enjoyable experience. Came back for dinner last week and things have clearly gone horribly wrong ! Maybe it was an off night but, whilst the food remains good, the service and environment has really deteriorated. We had a pre dinner drink in the bar and had to wait to be seated for over half an hour despite booking a week ahead. Three of us were then led to a table at the end of a banquette that was clearly only meant for two, a real squash. However we were better off than others who could only get out from their tables by physically moving the furniture, really not acceptable in this kind of establishment. Appreciate they are trying to maximise covers in a difficult trading time but it is not a good customer experience. As a result service was hit and miss as the staff struggled to cope with all the tables. A real shame as the food is great and a decent restaurant like this is really needed in this area.

Les Deux Salons does not merit the “Best for Romance” listing. It's on the tourist trail, which I guess you can't fault it for, but it shows. It's basically an expensive Cafe Rouge, with “mood lighting” to cast the room in a sickly, low-energy-lightbulb pallor. Plus on this occasion they lost our reservation so just shoved us at the bar, forgot to bring our wine, and added extra items to the bill. Probably good for lunch, but not good for a dinner date – would not return.

I love Wild Honey and Arbutus and was looking forward to taking my fiancee for a nice dinner at LDS.

We never made it past the drinks. It was shockingly noisy .
The only positive note we could take from are night at LDS is very well presented American/Italian bartender.

Such a world away from the care and attention that the owners have put into Wild Honey and Arbutus.
The staff, however pleasant, are clearly not enjoying their time at LDS. Their stress is obvious when Will Smith (owner) is around. When he is not on the floor they seem to relax and become themselves.

The experience is so bad it's actually put me off Wild Honey and Arbutus, why they would ever want to sully their good name with this nonsense is beyond me. AVOID AT ALL COSTS

Les Deux Salons
40-42 William IV Street
London WC2N 4DE

Tel: 020 7420 2050

An autumn day in London is I think something to cherish, especially this particular day, as it was so wonderfully mild. The leaves were fluttering around in the breeze with the sun catching the lighter ones creating a constantly changing astral portrait of Trafalgar Square. It almost seemed a shame to carry out our plans. We wanted to visit the Glamour of the Gods exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery – Hollywood portraits from the John Kobal Foundation. And as enticing as the weather was we had to go, it was the last day.
Now to do this justice we wanted to be fed and watered, but not so stuffed that we couldn’t move with ease around the gallery. So I was delighted to find out that only recently Les Deux Salons had started to provide a brunch menu and it was only just around the corner form the exhibition.
We arrived chatting about the stars of the silver screen we would see later, Clarke Gable, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford nothing quite beats the glamour of that age in cinema captured in glorious black and white. This was going to be a great afternoon I could tell, the cameras were still rolling.
The staff at Les Deux Salons could give lessons in courtesy to any restaurant in London. Everybody but everybody was just delightful. The restaurant in on two levels, we were seated downstairs on a very welcoming green leather banquette. It has a lush feel to it, a sort of relaxed swish about it. Effortless, stylish – behaves like it’s been there for years all at once.
But the history of Les Deux Salons is quite a short one, set up by the brains and flair behind the Michelin starred Arbutus and Wild Honey only a year ago, this I think is their most flexible venture yet. It offers a brunch menu, a lunch menu, afternoon tea (with tiered cake stands and everything!) and of course evening dining as well.
The first thing to say about our visit was I had the most delectable freshly squeezed orange juice I’ve had in a long time. I’m certain that it had spent no longer than 30 seconds out of the orange before it hit my lips, simply just the best way to start brunch on a warm day. With movie stars clearly still in our minds we kicked off with some traditional fare and had a ‘James Stewart’ Eggs Benedict, trusty and reliable and a ‘Gloria Swanson’ of a French Toast – “I’m ready for my close up now” we looked at it and then we devoured it. Both were good and yolk was lovely and runny and the ham strong in the ‘James Stewart’. I was surprised though, not to see croissant on the menu – a ‘Bardot’ brunch staple I would have thought? But there are plenty of other contenders we didn’t try, like a Full English or Belgium Waffles. Now along came a ‘Marlon Brando’ of a Cheese Burger, bristling with pent up youthful rage or should that be just the right amount of salad and nice and pink inside? He was good, it was very good. There were chips in a silver cup as well, these were OK but a touch pale and didn’t have the ‘wild one’ crunch I like. But they did taste of chips. A ‘James Cagney’ of a Sunday Roast provided roguish roast potatoes and some stellar beef and other roasted vegetables that were like ‘angles with dirty faces’ all full of taste and criminality.
I was beginning to wonder if we needed to go to see the movie stars at all – they were appearing on our plates quicker than ‘a streetcar named desire’.
The next stage in this assured production was a delightfully cutting ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ of a Glazed Lemon Tart with Creme Chantilly. Striking, sharp, splendidly crisp bottom with a slight wobble, yes everything you could possibly want from Elizabeth Taylor on a plate. This was just brilliant, I loved every mouthful of it. Three cheeky ‘Marx brothers’ joined us in the form of warm lemon curd filled Doughnuts with a ‘night at the opera’ Coffee mouse. They made us smile.
The cinematic experience of Les Deux Salons might seem a bit far-fetched, but this is a place that just oozes class and style, just like the bygone era of film we were about to see. By the time you read this, the Glamour exhibition will be over, but take some solace in the quote from Metro – Goldwyn – Mayer: they promised “more stars than there are in heaven”. There might be the odd ‘B’ movie, but most of them are sure-fire blockbusters, you can see them on a plate at Les Deux Salons. The cost of this glamour was £60 for two.

It is almost a year since Le Deux Salons launched itself onto the London restaurant scene, trumpeted as a little piece of Paris in London, a ‘Grand Brasserie’ in Covent Garden, ecstatic praise was given for its innovative menu, electric atmosphere and it felt, at the time at least that Anthony Demetre and Will Smith had plugged a gap that desperately needed to be filled in the London restaurant scene.

I revisited Deux Salons on Sunday afternoon with a friend who recalled I had originally recommended the restaurant to him earlier in the year as part of one of his romantic pursuits, which had been successful. He had revisited several times subsequently for similar reasons but unfortunately those visits had not been as fruitful. The quality of the cooking had, however been consistent and we were both looking forward to a great lunch.

It was perhaps telling that we both ignored the main dishes (Burger/Steak/Chop/Chicken) and ordered the Roast Saddle of Welsh Lamb, the ‘plat de jour’. That seemed befitting of a Sunday. He ordered the Fish Soup (probably the best use of Fish on a Sunday) and I had the Steak Tartare.

The main event arrived and looked suspiciously bad. It had the appearance of a boil in the bag canon of Lamb and was served with hard peas. The only texture to be found on this soggy plate were some amazing crispy roast potatoes. We actually enquired if the meat had been vacuum cooked in a water bath because perhaps we were the fools but apparently not, somehow this meat had seen dry heat – but to use the adjective ‘Roast’ to describe it was ambitious.

Desserts of Lemon Tart and Mille-Feuille were good, as were our starters but I couldn’t help thinking there was nothing to really celebrate on the menu, or indeed to distinguish it too far from Côte – that gap appears to be narrowing and this 150 seater restaurant was only ‘une salon’ and at 10% capacity at that time. It makes you wonder.

Despite everything I will return and try again, but not on a Sunday afternoon and not until the reintroduction of their fantastic Cassoulet or something similarly exciting I can’t just as easily find served up at a chain.

The recently opened Les Deux Salons, sister restaurant to London favourites, Wild Honey and Arbutus is already bursting at the seams with contented customers. Not easy to get a table, with weekend tables being virtually impossible you need to book a long time in advance or know the right person! Of French Brasserie style, Les Deux Salons is more authentic than most, offering French cuisine, style and service from the moment you walk through the door.

A very masculine vibe greets you on arrival with dark wood panelling, deep red velvet on the furniture and a stained glass skylight which brings in natural light from outside making you feel as though you’ve stepped into a cigar club in France. The bar is situated in the downstairs restaurant area and serves an array of wine (unlike most restaurants, all the wine is available by glass, carafe or bottle) alongside a wide variety of other beverages. Our table was situated downstairs but a lucky few were seated on the upper floor which offers a much more private dining experience and is open most days for both lunch and dinner. You are able to request a table in the gallery area when booking if you wish.

After an aperitif of Clementine infused Bellini’s, myself and my colleague perused the French inspired menu, and with the help of our extremely friendly and helpful waiter who was clearly knowledgeable on the entirety of the menu and wine list and was happy to recommend a variety of dishes, we ordered. Our starters arrived promptly, ravioli of rosé veal, fresh goat’s curd and cavolo nero was a perfect size for a starter. It left me wanting more, the meat was tender with a sweet flavour and the ravioli parcels were cooked and presented perfectly. My colleague went for the autumn wild mushrooms and Clarence Court poached egg on toast which was in one word…superb!

Main courses of young chicken with lemon and garlic and roast rabbit were excellent examples of the way in which Les Deux Salons has taken on a ‘no frills fine dining’ approach whilst still preparing successful dishes that leave you wanting more. The rabbit was particularly good, stuffed with forcemeat, rolled in to parcels and served with sliced chorizo and wilted spinach. To accompany our food we had two excellent glasses of wine, the French Vin de Pays which accompanied the veal brilliantly and for my colleague also a French, although white, a 2009 Grenache Viognier.

With such high expectations of a French restaurant to produce wonderful desserts, we were not let down, we shared a bitter chocolate mousse, and the intense bitter flavour of the cocoa was complimented by a creamy but not overwhelming chocolate mousse, an excellent finish. Coffees were offered but we politely declined and left comfortably full and satisfied.

Overall a successful meal, the wait staff served with knowledge and impeccable manners and our food was good. Les Deux Salons is situated in a perfect location for a pre or post theatre meal. Set menus are also available therefore making the restaurant an excellent and affordable restaurant choice in London’s West End.

Les Deux Salons is rapidly becoming one of my favourite places to eat, not least because of the charming service. What started out as a very quiet Tuesday evening (only two other tables occupied at 6.45pm) rapidly became buzzy and energised as the restaurant filled up.

I started with a very well-made martini (dry, with a twist) and my friend with a margarita. She had my idea of food hell, a tomato and fennel salad (which she loved) and I had buttery and rich foie gras terrine, with a generous pile of toasted baguettines; then I had roast cod with peas, pea shoots, pancetta and cream (and chips – to cut the richness, you understand) and she had glazed duck and some of my chips. A carafe of wine each – viognier for me and rioja for her – and I do love the way that Les DS, and its sister restaurant Arbutus have almost all wines available by the carafe, solving the perennial white/red problem, when you don't want to sink a bottle each (it being a school night, you see) Then coffee and port for her and a rosewater and raspberry macaroon (which was a highlight, I have to say, being just sweet, tart, fragrant and melting enough) for me.

Add to that a smiling, charming waiter and maitre'd and you have a very enjoyable evening. Especially for a Tuesday.

I've eaten here twice now, both at lunchtime. The venue is buzzy yet spacious (think Dean Street Townhouse with more room to manoeuvre) and there are some great tables for groups of 4/5, particularly upstairs.

The food is great. A really good mix of lighter and more hefty dishes (pork belly etc) so something to suit everyone. The dauphinoise potatoes are really good.

My only critisism would be re. the service. Not awful by any means, but a little distracted and unattentive both times. I had to prompt the waiter over having waited about 10/15 minutes to order. That said, he was very engaging once we'd got his attention. Very helpful too with the wine though suspiciously pushy with the daily special…

All in all a great place for a relaxed business meet or lunch/dinner with friends. Definitely worth a visit.

Avoid. Shoddy, slapdash service: disinterested, disengaged & hugely disappointing. Les Deux Salons is authentically Parisian in terms of its complacement, soul-sapping service. This so-laidback-it's-insulting approach means I can't comment upon this establishment's culinary delivery. I booked a table mid-week for 2.15pm. I arrived on time and was seated immediately. I chose my order within minutes, but wasn't asked for it. I was able to order an aperitif at 2.25, and it arrived around five minutes later, but my ‘waiter’ moved on so quickly I wasn't able to place my food order. By 2.40, I had finished my drink but was yet to be asked for my order. The ‘waiting’ staff milled around, clinking crockery and chattering to each other, but nicely avoiding any customer eye contact. After waiting 25 minutes for service, I managed to attract attention and finally placed my food order. I was then told that my choice was unavailable, although this fact hadn't been pointed out when I was seated and handed the not overly-extended menu. I decided to leave, but not before I was asked to pay for my aperitif. There are thousands of restaurants in London more worthy of my, and your, custom. Forget, even if I can't forgive, this one.

We've eaten here 3-4 times since Oct 10, most recently late Jan 11. The menu is relatively short and simple. The food is French brasserie / bistro style comfort food – some very conventional (eg cassoulet), others with an English twist (eg Hereford snail & bacon pie). Nothing to get too excited about, but decent reliable stuff. Aimed at a very different market to Wild Honey.

We normally pay £30-£33 pp for 2 courses, inc service, exc drinks, which is reasonable value. The wine list is sufficient, and includes some reasonable less expensive bottles in the £30 range.

Like any good informal brasserie / bistro, the dining room has a very pleasant and relaxed, with a buzzy atmosphere. Always busy, even on a Tues night. The building, interior furnishing and décor are perfectly suited to such a brasserie.

We've always found service to be efficient and friendly. However, we recently noticed another table complaining about wait times, so they're perhaps pushing the covers vs kitchen capacity to the edge ? Its certainly a busy place.

Overall, a good addition in a surprisingly poorly served area (as Terroir discovered). Particularly convenient for pre and post theatre, given its proximity to St Martins Lane and The Strand.

If you have been to either Arbutus or Milk and Honey then the menu will be very familiar and so will the quality of the product. If you want family favourites cooked incredibly well, then I think you will be hard pressed to find better in London. The room is fabulous, you would never know it used to a Pitcher and Piano, much bigger than either of their other restaurants. Great atmostphere, buzzy and informal. Have always found their service matches the quality of the food, i probably caught them on an off day, two hours for two people for lunch is half an hour too long in my book. The kind of place you can take your oldest relative or friend and the love of your life.

I am so impressed by Deux Salons that I could probably harp on endlessly about it's virtues, though I shall spare you the pain of having to listen to my musings. It's arrival has been somewhat muted, but perhaps the best things should remain a secret.

I love the entrance of the restaurant, very grand in a townhouse sort of way, but the menu is really the main draw. Unusually, it is one of the restaurants that literally has something to offer everyone… whether your preference be for bold or subtle flavouring, there are a myriad of dishes for you to choose from. Provenance is quite visibly a priority here and every ingredient is well sourced, including eggs from Clarence Court and Elwy Valley Lamb. Comfort food is available in abundance and my starter of onion tart with goat's cheese was delicious, not too sickly sweet and the pastry was perfection. My main course of salted belly pork with lentils was just what the doctor ordered, the belly meat meltingly sticky and tender with deliciously warming and wholesome lentils. I could die a very happy girl after such a meal.

Desserts are a very classic affair, with Paris Brest, Creme Brulee and Iles Flotantes all present on the menu. Not really my cup of tea, although I do love a good Creme Brulee, after such a hearty starter and main, why ruin the mea by eating more than necessary.

I would DEFINITELY go back to Les Deux Salons and I am currently trying to find the right occasion to do exactly this! Wonderful French cuisine, slow cooked, well sourced and quite reasonably priced too. Parfait!

The third in the family from Anthony Demetre, the chef behind low key Michelin starred joints Wild Honey and Arbutus, was always going to get my interest. I've had some great meals at the other two and was excited to hear about the plans for a larger, more classically French bistro just off St Martin's Lane. Like one of my other big current favourites, the Dean Street Townhouse, Les Deux Salons is housed in a former Pitcher and Piano and my god, is it an improvement. While they may not have the deep pockets of Caprice Holdings, the team behind Les Deux Salons have done a great job turning the large, cavernous space into an elegant French bistro. Deep red banquettes, blacks and whites and elegant brasses go with the formality of the linen table cloths and the bustling smart floor team. It's a big room, with further covers on the mezzanine level, and they'll have to go some to fill it on every service, but on this showing, I think they're in with a fighting chance, even if the mezzanine level isn't open often.

It's a classic bistro menu, with a large nod to their Josper Grill (an ultra hot Spanish machine drooled over by chefs nationwide) and a Gallic sneer towards the vegetarians – a couple of salads and a solitary (though very fine) pasta dish complete the meat free line up. A particularly fine looking bavette (or flank steak) arrives on the next table, joining a Scottish beefburger that comes in at £12 and pretty much guarantees my return visit. We go for the very good value £15 set menu and slip in the orecchiette pasta as a shared course after the starter. It's almost a step too far.

The white bean and smoked duck soup I start with is OK, but to be honest, it's nothing special. I can't taste the duck at all and the bean is a little chalky. The Vole's chunky country terrine is a much better option, full of flavoursome nuggets of melting fat. Fresh orecchiette pasta comes in a creamy sauce with artichokes, pecorino, kale and pine nuts and is exceptional. Well cooked, well seasoned and with individual flavours that really shine through. Simple but very well thought through. Even more simpler is the braised shoulder of venison served with a parsnip puree that follows as my main. It's a big portion of gamey melting meat served with a smooth puree and a rich jus. The meat was obviously on the go before I was this morning, and has been caramelised around the edges with the Josper. It's sweet and meltingly tender. I feel thoroughly sated.

The chocolate fondant was acceptable, good even, but almost too much after the previous courses. It wasn't too memorable, but I did spy a Rhum Baba on an adjacent table with my name on it for next time.

There has been a plethora of recent openings of French style brasseries in London, from the very good (Luc's and Pierre Koffman) to the unispired (Bar Boulud); Les Deux Salons falls emphatically into the former grouping. The room (or rather, as the name suggests, rooms) are authenticly big, high-ceilinged, brasserie affairs, with the obligatory banquettes and booths; all vaguely red and dark woods.

We arrived after the theatre and had a booth upstairs. This is the quieter of the two rooms, although with a good view of the more crowded room downstairs. We were swiftly seated and menus produced, along with some nice French bread. The food is traditional brasserie fare, but with a mixture of English dishes (cottage pie and a Barnsley chop, for instance) thrown in.

The first thing to mention is the wine list: a terrific one. Not the tome of classic old world wines, with the occaisional Grange thrown in as a nod to the new world, but a single page on the back of the menu. A mixture of old and new, with carafes as well as bottles, and nothing over a ton.

Starters were uniformly lovely: onion tart was sweet and came with a crumbly goats cheese, a textural counterbalance to the crisp pastry of the tart; the wild mushrooms on toast presented some fine examples of the fungus, topped by a beautifully poached egg; and the lamb sweetbreads the outstanding dish. This latter came in a little vol-au-vent case. That's not fair: vol-au-vent is very Abigail's Party and cheese and pineapple on sticks, this was a bouchée à la reine. Whatever you call it, it was lovely: the pastry of the vol/bouchée might have been a little undercooked, but the sweetbreads were cooked to perfection; nut brown on the outside, gently cooked through and lightly coated in a cream suace. I would go back just for these alone

Mains too started well with a perfectly pink Barnsley chop and a top notch cottage pie: this latter coming in its own pot. Andouillette too came in a separate dish: a frying pan with the juices from the cooking in it. This led me to believe that this was the pan in which it had been cooked but no, the pan was cold. Why would you take a hot dish and put it in a cold pan? Yes, presentationally it was great, but all it did was serve to cool the AAAAA too quickly, which, if it did have the advertised mustard sauce with it, was so weak and un-mustardy, that I had to get some extra to jazz it up. Andouillette is THE classic braseerie dish. It should be piping hot and come with a mustard sauce that tastes of the ground up seeds.

Deserts were, alas, a bit mixed: we were warned off the ice cream by our excellent waitress so settled for a floating island, a Paris Brest and the chocolate mousse. The mousse was light and creamy, but adorned with an unnecessary layer of apple. The Paris Brest was not as exciting as it sounds, being a choux pastry doughnut, filled with a praline cream (we were with Americans, so this made them feel very at home); all perfectly fine, but nothing to make you go wow. The floating island, however, was just wrong: the island was a lightly poached egg white (as it should be), but moulded into shape in a ramkin rather than into a quenelle, and, worst of all, flecked with a crunchy red sugary substance. OK, the custard was lovely, but there should be a big puddle of the stuff on which the egg floats in a large plate, not a smear, adhering the egg to the tiny dish.

I have eaten at Arbutus on a number of occasions and always found it enjoyable. I have not (yet) tried Wild Honey (although I did have my hair cut there once: no, it is not some sort of hair dresser/restaurant combo, but it did used to be an up market barbers). Les Deux Salons is very different from them both. It is not Soho frenetic or Mayfair posh, it is Covent Garden French: this may seem an odd comment, but, with the excellent Terroirs bistro almost opposite, William IV Street in Covent Garden has two of the finest (cheaper) French restaurants in London. And cheap(er) it is: there were four of us, we had three courses each, three bottles of wine between us and coffee all for under £60 a head, including service. Recommended, but I'd skip the desert next time and maybe try the cheese.

The room is nice, the staff are pleasant (but all too used to apologising for the wait between courses) and the food is ok. But the wait for food is unacceptable
They have had plenty of time to sort out teething problems but seem more interested in cramming in the punters than sorting out some fundamental problems in the kitchen.

I love the look and feel of this restaurant, it's glamourous without being pretentious (Dean Street take note)!

The menu looked like it was designed around all my personal food heavens and I was not disappointed. Snail and bacon pie as a starter is a must, although make sure you go hungry as it's a big portion! Warm onion tart with figs and goats cheese was exactly as you'd expect.

For mains we had pork belly with puy lentils and the bavette which was delicious but I still prefer the one at Terroirs. I like the presentation of mini le creuset pots and pans, very cute.

For pudding we shared the lemon tart which was the nicest I've ever had *I've had a lot*…

At the moment it's clear they're having some early teething problems with staff which is why our service was very patchy but that certainly won't stop me going back, I'm sure they'll have them ironed out soon.

Great value for money – 2 courses, 2 carraffes and a bottle for £100.

Could be my new favourite.

A welcome newcomer – Les Deux Salons takes on the much-tried French brasserie formula and delivers extremely well on (nearly) all fronts. A grand room, welcoming service, and outstanding food. Special mention to the lamb sweetbreads (sublime) and the ox cheek main course (meltingly tender).

Food alone deserves a 10, but unfortunately the wine was a slight let down. The approach – namely a shorter list with all wines available in 250ml carafes – is to be applauded. However the whites were served at near room temperature, the rhone red too young, and they'd run out of the St Emilion. This alone probably won't stop me returning – but they need to work on this, particularly with Terroirs just down the road.

On the whole a thoroughly enjoyable evening. I hope they can maintain high cooking standard when they're packed to the rafters…