Richard's Reviews

Russell Norman is opening restaurants at a rate that is thicker and faster than an Irish sprinter. The latest, the fifth in the last year and half or so, is in Covent Garden, next door to the terrific Opera Tavern and opposite Shrek. The musical, not Wayne Rooney.

So does the fact that he has opened up five restaurants make this a mini-chain? Well, four of the five do have a bit of a theme, with a bar as the central point. They all serve small tasting plates and cocktails and all employ more tattoos and lower riding jeans than is strictly necessary. The music is rock/blue grass/country, and noisy, but only two could be said to be sisters. The others are all very different: the sisters (the original, Polpo, and the penultimate, Da Polpo) share an almost identical menu and look interchangeable. Polpetto is similar in menu, but very different in restaurant layout; crammed into the first floor of a pub, with no bar in sight, other than the one downstairs in the (separately owned) pub. Spuntino is American influenced and Mishkin’s, the latest of the quintet, is Jewish deli inspired.

In fact, it is very different in feel and style from any of the others. It has that US diner feel, with booths on one side of the room and a counter as you walk in. This is where the action is, so we forewent our reserved seating and sat at the counter/bar.

The menu is, if I am honest; odd. It starts with a series of sandwiches. These are big, and are heavy on the salt beef, but there are plenty of sandwich bars around here where you can get a salt beef on rye that doesn’t cost this much. So we passed on these, and instead settled for a nice bowl of duck scratchings whilst we sank our cocktail and spent time studying the menu.

The cocktail was lovely: gin based (as all are – there being a full bar of lovely gins, from Hendricks, through Sipsmith and Juniper, to Tesco’s Value), which came in a jug sprouting a crop of mint that would keep a mojito maker happy for a month, and with a couple of jam… More

Now I hate Jamie Oliver as much as the next person, but, whilst every time those grating Sainsbury commercials come on I just want to take something large and heavy and batter him around the head, he does have a great brand. This brand comes from actually being able to cook, plus being a great marketer. It is just a shame that the latter is now more important than the former.

Much like the boy himself, Barbecoa seems to divide opinion very neatly between really hate and really love. I wouldn’t put myself in the really love this restaurant category, but it is no where near as bad as, having read some of the reviews below, I thought it was going to be. Maybe they have upped the game since opening, but I actually kind of like this place. Not so much that I wouldn’t still batter the living crap out of the annoying little tic, but I’d eat at the restaurant again.

Many years ago my office used to be on the site of what now looks like the stealth boat from Tomorrow Never Dies. Our canteen, which was on the ground floor, directly under what is now Barbecoa, was nothing to write home about, but I did once have an office that shared the same magnificent view over St Pauls. And this is a great selling point: big wide windows, terrific view. Shame that the room is L shaped and we were at a table with a view of the table with a view of the table that had the view of St Pauls.

The place is cavernous, double height industrial chic; all bare metal, brick and air conditioning ducts. The kitchen is open (or at least glassed off), with views over the barbeque pit and the grill.

We just had mains, and they were all rather tasty: the Lamb skewer was a couple of kebabs, some so-so mushrooms, and a big slick of what was advertised as ‘wet polenta’, but I’d never have guessed. It was very pleasant. Even if I had wanted the special, which had run out by the time I’d ordered it. Never mind, lamb kebab is never a bad choice, and this was solid chunks of Baa Baa, pink on the inside, charred on the… More

Bright Courtyard stands on the sight of the not at all lamented West 55, a hotchpotch of a restaurant that mixed too many styles with absolutely zero substance. Bright Courtyard advertises itself as a Club, maybe to keep up with the Royal China Club directly opposite, but there is nothing clubby about the operation, which is housed in a glass fronted modern reincarnation of the horrendous sixties M&S head quarters on Baker Street. Like West 55 before it, it is a bit of a hotchpotch – lots of Cantonese, mixed in with sashimi. Why sashimi? And, if there is a valid answer to this, why no sushi? The Japanese were last seriously in China in 1945, and then only in Guangdong in the immediate vicinity of Hong Kong, so can hardly have left a legacy of sashimi.

We only went here is the Royal China couldn’t seat us for an hour, and maybe this will be BCC’s saving grace: given its situation, it will get the cast-off crowd from across the road.

The food is perfectly ok, but no better than the Royal China or a dozen or more places in China Town, and certainly nowhere near as good as Ba Shan. It says something when the standout dish was pea sprouts and garlic, but that really was a lovely dish. But thirteen quid? For a side dish? That is just rude.

Service was perfectly ok, although, whether by accident or design, the wine that I had asked for was replaced by another bottle. Ok, a nice bottle, and my fault for not questioning, but when the bill came, it seems that the cheap bottle that I had thought I was getting had morphed into a stupidly expensive one. In fact, when the bill came, I thought that there had been some mistake: a couple of starters and mains, the aforementioned pea sprout side dish and a bottle of wine in a Chinese anywhere in the world should not come to this much. Or, if it does, it had better be at one of the fancy Michelin three star places in Hong Kong.

I really had wanted to like this place, not least as its forerunner was so poor, and any competition to Royal… More

At the risk of putting the tweeters/twits/tw@s (what is the collective noun for somebody who thinks anyone cares what they say in 140 characters or less?) at @hardenbites# to sleep, here's a review from a lawyer, not paid for at all, let alone by the word.

The Rib Room sounds like some feminist gathering place, which is an odd choice for a male lawyer to go, seeing as how our profession is so notoriously sexist. Yes, yes, we all know that senior partners prattle on about how much women add to the profession, with them plugging away to develop a plan to help boost female partner numbers, whilst firing them all. So I went there with a female partner from a Magic Circle firm, before it was too late.

Top Restaurants In Posh Hotels seem to be either cool (Heston) or arrived at through a tart’s boudoir (Alain Ducasse). The Rib Room falls most emphatically into the latter. I know it is the Christmas season (or Holiday Season as our Septic Friends would wrongly have it), but do you really need this over abundance of expensive watches/shoes/bling lining the corridor leading to the restaurant, or the myriad dangly gilded baubles hanging from the ceiling? Come on; is it a hotel or a shopping mall in Dubai?

Once in the restaurant, however, the mood changes. The room is old school; a sunken bar surrounded by brown slate-lined walls and green leather banquets. It feels like the whole has been transported from a Manhattan men’s club. And it is all very masculine: no waitresses, only waiters; nothing prim and proper or soft here, the place is hard edged, screaming Business Deals; the only single people being Business Men, intent on stocking up on protein before The Big Deal.

The menu reveals a different side, however. That side being 1970’s Britain: prawn cocktail; yes. Steak and chips; oh yes. Black Forest Gateaux; yes, yes, oh yes. I kid you not. The menu could have come from a ‘70’s dinner party. I had to see what my parents had been so enthralled by all those decades back. I really… More

Like most of us, I hate to admit when I am wrong. However, as the exam-board found with too many of the answers on my A level maths paper, I was, it seems, possibly not as correct as I could have been about Scott’s.

I'd wanted to go for ages; the glamour, the elvers, the top-hatted doorman, the possibility of a real celebrity. Instead, when I went a few years back, I hated it. All braying hedge fund managers, bragging about the size of their tigs, with their x-ray wives face-lifted to with in an inch of their lives, grins frozen to their perma tanned visgogs by botox. Now I don't know if the recession has found its way to Mayfair yet (nearly 30 notes for a slice of turbot suggests maybe not), but this time, they'd all gone, to be replaced by Russians. Lots of Russians.

Yes, there was still a sufficiently loud amount of braying going on; this time from the peroxide crew, presumably fuelling themselves for a busy night ahead, but the atmosphere had changed dramatically in the intervening recession.

The room reminds me of the Ivy: heavy wood panelling, that air of money, lots of uncles out with their nieces. Service too has the comically inept level that the Ivy has perfected so well. Not bad in the rude sense, just not good for a place charging the aforementioned 30 notes for a slice of fish. Sides extra. How can you end up with two knives and no fork when the food arrives? How can all the waiting staff suddenly disappear from view when you realise what has happened?

To finish the analogy with the Ivy, the food is never going to be the main point here: it is perfectly fine, but, with few honourable exceptions, never really rises above this.

The menu is split into caviar, crustacean, starters, fish and meat. Oh, and sides, as the mains come with nothing other than the fish or meat mentioned. I always like to try something new, so started with cod tongues. The tongue is a misused part of any animal, seemingly regarded as a nothing cut. Whilst of course I realise that a cod… More

Duck Soup has clearly been taking lessons from the Russell Norman school of design. Whereas Polpo et al look as though a lot of money has been spent on making it look as though nothing has been spent on getting that shabby chic look perfect, however, this looks like the real thing. No money has been spent on decor. The walls are white painted brick because they couldn’t afford plaster. Or coloured paint. The wiring is bare as chasing it into the walls would be pointless; there being no plaster.

Nor, it would seem, has any money been spent on staff who are able to take down bookings. Or execute orders. Don’t get me wrong, the waiting staff weren’t rude. Far from it; they were uniformly friendly and cheery. They just weren’t very good at waiting tables.

I'd called a day before and booked for six. The one table that seats this number was booked, so we were sat at the counter. Much better, I was told, than stuck at a table away from the action. With such a large number, I'd been assured that we'd get the corner of the bar, so that we could all sit around in a U shape and talk to each other; easily able to share the plates.

I might have been given the assurance, but nothing had been noted in the booking. The corner seats were all taken, so in a line we were sat; neither end being able to talk to the other, conversation stilted, unable to share anything. I was hardly best pleased.

It is never good to start at a restaurant in a bad mood. To come back from here, you need everything to be perfect. So I ordered a few nibbles to while away the time until we had all gathered. The fried courgettes arrived and were magnificent. So magnificent that we ordered more. Like the olives and cheese that I had ordered with the first set of courgettes, this second batch never did materialise.

When everyone was lined up, we ordered the real meal. In fact, we ordered one of everything. The shortish menu had five starters and three mains. There were six of us, all the dishes sounded good, so… More

Scotland; home to the deep fried Mars bar, cross-dressing men and other soft, southern stereotypes and prejudices. Ok, the national dish is a stuffed sheep's stomach filled with innards and barley (to which the national poet wrote an incomprehensible address), but is that really so much worse than blood sausage? Boudin noir, morcilla and the like may sound exotic (ok, black pudding maybe accurate, but doesn't have the same ring) and are staples of far more refined cuisine, but are essentially just pig's blood and pig fat. Andouillette (which has its own association in France) is pig's intestine, the best of which are supposed still to have a whiff of the farmyard about them. We don’t mock the French for this, so why mock the Scots for haggis?

So lay off Scottish cooking; there are a number of excellent restaurants in Edinburgh and, whilst the Altnaharrie Inn may be long gone, Nick Nairn and others are still pushing forward the boundaries of modern Scottish cooking. Even Sweary Ramsey was once Scottish, before he went all sweary Hollywood and started hanging out with his new BFF, Becks. (I hasten to add that this review is written immediately before the game against England in the Rugby World Cup. Should we lose that by eight or more points, all bets are off. Be as rude as you like about the Scots and their spud heavy cooking).

Alas, Tigerlilly is not one of those pushing anything, other than sweet brightly coloured cocktails on sweet brightly coloured young girls.

On a gloriously sunny, September day in Edinburgh (yes I know what you're thinking, but it really was. OK, it was windy too, if that makes you feel better), two old men found themselves in the totally trendy, totally happening TL; more out of place than a funny joke on Family Guy.

The room is enormous, housed in a Georgian townhouse on George Street, one of the most buzzy streets in town. The bar and the restaurant sort of merge into one loud space, with booths along one side, which is where we found… More

Arriving late on a Friday evening, getting a quiet table for two in Theatreland was always going to be tricky. Opera Tavern offered us the bar, but stools and blearing music sent us upstairs to the restaurant. And the two tables of a dozen people each who, judging by the empty plates and numerous bottles adorning each table, had been there for a wee while.

Stuck between a rock and a loud place, we settled on animated conversation over the music. After all, tapas is about sharing. What better way to share every dish on the menu than to get a big crowd together. Although the tables are pretty close together, other than the two big tables, upstairs was pretty empty, so we got two table together, so that we could both sit on the banquette, facing out at the revelry, and allowing us to converse better.

Irony is writ loud and large at OT: from the pig’s trotter door handles, through the Jamon leg beer pump to scotch eggs and pork scratchings on the menu. The latter masquerades as crispy pigs ears but, by any other name, is as fine a deep fried, salty pork skin as you will find. The scotch eggs too were fine, although one was extremely salty and the other not. In both cases, the egg was just cooked with the yolk still runny and the Ibérico pork a tad better than your usual head cheese affair. What made them Italian, I am unsure.

In fact, the odd croquette and crispy squid aside, the tapas are pretty different from the run of the mill Spanish joint; even the croquette was a mushroom, rather than the more common ham, variety. Mini burgers (or large sliders maybe) came with that excellent Ibérico pork again, topped out with foie gras. To complete the porcine theme, we had the grilled Ibérico pressa – shoulder of the self same pig, with capers and lemon.

The wine list is good, solidly Iberian, with a few Italians thrown in, and is split by style. We had a medium bodied Verdjo from Rueda, and very fine it was too.

Service is friendly and unhurried, plates coming as done, as they… More