Richard's Reviews

There aren't too many great fish restaurants in London and, whilst this is a perfectly acceptable place to while away a few hours with a pint of prawns and a muscadet, it isn't, in truth, even one of the best fish restaurants in Soho (thank you Wright Brothers).

We went for a late lunch on Saturday, and the place was packed. This is perfectly fine if you're in the mood to share a table, but the grumpy couple next to us looked most affronted that their bags would have to get down from the high chairs and sit at their feet, so that we could use the chairs for their intended purpose. We moved to a window seat when one became free before our order was taken. And the window seats are the ones to go for, affording a view over the joys of Soho traffic, some interesting Thai massage shops and being directly opposite Cox, Cakes and Cookies (despite this being Soho, I am pretty sure that only the latter two of these are on sale).

Service is slow, which is fine for whiling, but did mean that more of the afternoon was lost to a second bottle than we had really meant to lose. Not that they got anything wrong, they just didn’t get it right quick enough.

The cover charge brings olives and bread, which was perfectly ok. The calamari was also fine, had a bit of a tang to it, but wasn’t anything to write home about. The liver pate was a better than average example, although it did fox our French waitress.

Mains continued in the perfectly acceptable, nothing to cause a song-and-dance routine to spontaneously break out trend: roasted langoustines at nearly a fiver each were a bit of an ask (and the chips that came with them were really not worthy of the name). Pan fried scallops with fennel was probably the dish of the day, the scallops being nice and firm and the combination the sweet scallops with the tart of the fennel was a hit. Zucchini “frites”, alas, were soggy. Even a liberal dousing of sodium chloride couldn’t revive them.

So overall what to make of R&A: whilst I have always found… More

Split over three floors, with a courtyard out the back, the best place to sit is in the basement out front. The best place to sit when you are in the basement is at the counter. In fact, there are two: one has a view of the (unhurried) cooking, the other (equally calm) of the man shucking oysters. Now I know we were having a late lunch on Saturday, and the place was hardly humming, but you get the impression that the chefs do not do flapping.

Oysters are the raison d'être of Wright Brothers: the specials board lists a half-dozen different varieties, including ones from the owners plot in Devon. I suppose, therefore, that it was a bit sacrilegious not to try them, but they had fish soup and I'm a sucker for a good fish soup. This one was very fishy: that may be what you'd expect, but this was a rough and ready soup, thick with fish, rather than a more refined, saffron infused one of French brasserie fair. And none the worst for it either; piping hot and replete with the necessary rouille & Gruyère to float on the thin slices of crispy French bread. A lovely amalgam of tastes and textures.

The menu doesn't split between mains and starters, but the other starter priced dish that we had was a fine whitebait and tartar sauce. Prices are interesting here: we avoided the oysters and the “build your own” plateau de fruits de mer, and we came out pretty well (less than the indicated cost above, quite easily). I can, however, see how, if you start with a half-dozen oysters and move on from there, things could get very messy on the bill front pretty quickly.

The main sized dishes came from the daily specials board: a gorgeous fish stew, with chunks of fish, mussels, squid and cockles, in a tomatoey/fish broth and a fish pie. This later was a serious hot-pot of salmon, covered with crusty, cheese-topped mashed spud. Comfort food for a cold January lunchtime at its very best. All the food was beautifully fresh, was presented in a plain, unfussy manner and came with no added frills or… More

What an excellent operation in the middle of the desolation that exists between London and Tower Bridges. OK, the mayor's headlamp building is here, as is EY's London offices at More London, but it is hardly an up market address for such an up market operation.

Let me get the niggles out the way first, as they are few and I don't want them to detract from the rest: they had run out of roast goose. How can you do this? It is in season (and the season is short) and you'd have thought that, goose being so popular, they'd have enough. This was lunchtime too, so woe betide anyone coming that evening who wanted any. I can just about forgive this, but running out of choclates (more of which, below) is unforgiveable: they are always in season, you must know how popular they are and should have enough for a convention of chocoholics. Not even to have enough for a table of six is so, so wrong.

OK, I have got that off my chest, and now to the good part: this is a sensational restaurant. Not grand, not trendy, not some big named chef with a fancily designed dining room, just a couple of rooms, with some plain tables and a menu that had me wishing I could stay here for a week. The style is British provenance, with French inspired dishes: so the duck may have come from Aylsebury, but the idea of “confit” is totally French.

I could happily have had all of the starters, and all of the mains (if they hadn't run out of the goose). Instead, I opted for snails and bone marrow to start: big, plump, garlicy snails, their chewiness offset by the melting bone marow, all atop some crunchy sour dough toast. Perfect for a winter's lucnh. Others round the table cooed over the smoled eel with remoulade, the smoked anchovy and the generous helping of proscuittio. All stunning, all washed down with a lovely Chablis.

Next up mains, and no respite from the exquisite assault on the tastebuds: confit duck was beautifully rich, coming with a crunchy potato tart that accompanied the Chateau Musar perfectly… More

Dotori is a gem amongst the dross that surrounds Finsbury Park Tube. Now don't get me wrong, I've been coming to this part of the Seven Sisters Road for many decades to feed another of my obsessions, played down the road at Highbury and now New Highbury, but this is the sort of area where a pound shop is seen as up market. A lovely little wet fish shop lasted about six months, before being replaced by another tat shop, selling goods that have been pre-designed to fall apart half way through the first usage.

Set opposite the smoking tent for the Twelve Pins Pub (think the barn of a place from Once Were Warriors, but without the pathos), Dotori is a tiny place, that is always packed to the rafters. The reason is immediately clear: the food is terrific. A mixture of Japanese and Korean, with a sushi chef out front, and a band of Korean chefs out back.

Now I don't know my bibimbap from my bulgogi, but I do know excellent food. And the bibimbap here was excellent: on a cold December night, with the prospect of watching another nerve-wracking performance, full of skill and trickery, followed by over-ellaboration and being crap at the back, it was good to have something filling and hot (both heat and spice) inside.

We started out going Korean: sticky rice sticks, a vegetable pancake and some lovely deep fried oysters, which came with a nice hot chilli sauce and were sweet and spicy together. In fact, we ordered a lot of chilli-sauced food: chilli vegetable and squid, the aforementioned bibimbap (for those of you, like me, who didn't know what this is, it is a big hot bowl of rice, veg and, in our case, beef, together with a raw egg, that is mixed up at the table with chilli sauce, the super-hot bowl cooking everything together) and a tofu and kimchi dish. All were fantastically good, but the best was probably the Japanese dish that we had: we had gone totally Korean, but saw the mixed tempura and had to have it. Light batter, a plate growning with prawns and veg. Delicious… More

My follower on these pages (thank you mum) will realise that I am on something of a personal quest to fine the perfect French bistro in London. Cigalon, whilst far from perfect, is an excellent addition to the mini-revival of the French bistro in London.

Not so much French, as Provençal, this small restaurant sits atop a fun little wine bar. The room is lovely light and airy, with a big skylight running most of the length of the room, although was half empty when we went. The kitchen is at one end of the room, open to the world. Down the middle are a series of semi-circular banquettes, and these are the nice ones to go for. Service is friendly and warm, although when we were there, the atmosphere was a little thin: we had been moved away from a table of nine, as the staff were worried about the noise that should eminate from such a large group. Maybe they were all accountants from the nearby Deloittes office, but even they couldn't raise the buzz above the piped-in sound of cicadas that, I assume, is supposed to remind you of a sunny day in the hills above Aix.

We started with a lovely fresh vegetable soup with pistou and a slowly braised beef in cannelloni. The former was light and fresh, the latter unctuous and satisfying, a lovely treat on a cold, miserable November day. Mains too held up well – the pied et paquettes (tripe and trotters), was the finest example that I have ever had: far, far better than many actually tried in the heart of Provence. The loin of pork too was well cooked, coming with a smear of green and an artichoke. OK, this doesn't strike me as a “smear” kind of restaurant, but what the heck, they can have their one nod to a modern trend.

The wine list is, as you would expect, heavy on Provence and prices are good. We had a lovely white from Chateau Carnogue: a very picturesque vineyard that featured heavily in Ridley Scott's A Good Year. Truly dreadful film; truly lovely wines.

And just to prove that every day is a school day, I found out that the… More

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… More

Sunday brunch should be leisurly, of that there is no doubt. However, it doesn't take an hour to make an omlette and eggs florentine, especially when the next table arrives half an hour after you've ordered and then gets served first (well, they got two of their four dishes first, then one after we had got ours, then the last as the first pair were finishing up, so it wasn't just us who didn't like the service).

When it arrived, the food was pretty fair, brunchtime food. The omlette was a little over cooked (it had perhaps been sitting under a heating lamp for a while), but the eggs florentine was lovely; eggs beautifully poached, tart spinach and slathered in a wonderfully tangy hollandaise.

We got a free glass of wine as a apology, which was nice, but getting the timing right would have been nicer.

The restaurant is more like a deli that has tables, sort of like Bills Produce Store in Brighton, but on a much smaller scale, and without the fishfinger butties.

I have eaten at Hix on a number of occasions, both at the counter and at tables, and both for lunch and dinner. Our latest trip was a late dinner. The restaurant was packed to the rafters. The space is such that this works pretty well: high ceilings and a big room, with tables, whilst close on the banquette side of the room, not so close that you find yourself in your neighbour's food. There is a bar downstairs too, which is more intimate, and which has twiglets as a bar snack, so can't be all bad.

The decor is enlivened by a series of mobiles: fish in glass, bits of wall, for example, which are all very cheery and conversation inducing. I'm not sure that I'd want to sit under the one that has a collection of bricks hanging from it though. It reminded me of Quo Vadis under the MPW regieme, so it comes as no surprise to find that they are Damien Hirsts.

Service is friendly, if a little dotty some times: our waiter brought bread, but then wandered off before we could order. The wine arrived after the food, having been sitting on the end of the bar. But lots can be forgiven when the waiting staff are so friendly (ok, the front of house lady was suitably haughty, and the cloakroom attendant engrossed in his book, but the actually waiting staff were very pleasant).

I'd misread the menu, reading marrow as bone marrow: having politely told me of my error, our waiter asked if I'd like bone marrow anyway as, although not on the starter menu, they had it and the kitchen could rustle me up some. It was lovely; scooped out and done with breadcrumbs, parsley and lots of garlic.

Alas, I had also wanted to try the squeaker (baby grouse) that we'd seen on the menu a few days before, but the (clearly short) season was already over, so had to settle for the full grown version. And very nice it was too; not too gamey, nicely pink and accompanied by an unctiously rich jus, some perfectly adequate bread sauce and (a twist on the classic game chip) some parsnip chips; a less deep fried, and… More