Someone who loves their food's Reviews

The decor is modern yet a bit too dark for my liking. For some strange reason, it made me feel like I was in a submarine or under the sea and, with hindsight, I should have taken that as a hint as to what to choose from the menu. There is a fairly big a la carte menu (for a fine dining restaurant) as well as a six-course tasting menu; both of which are excellent value for money (a la carte = £29 for two courses and approx. £35 for three courses, tasting = approx £45). I chose thinly sliced veal to start, sea bass for main course and cheese to finish, and my sister chose tempura soft shell crab, followed by suckling pig and then pear and almond tart. We shared a portion of spinach and a portion chips. Clearly, Mr Nadra is a demon at cooking fish and if I was to go again to this restaurant, I would stick to fish for both the starter and the main; his fish dishes really are in a different league to his meat dishes. One slightly frustrating issue was that most of the dishes were served at temperatures which were way too hot to eat; it seemed as if the plates had been put under the hot plate for a long time and which would perhaps also explain why the suckling pig was overcooked. My only other complaint was that the spinach was so laced in garlic that it was pretty much inedible. Cheese and pudding selections were good. Overall, not a bad place to go for a sophisticated supper in Chiswick but, I'm afraid, there are other restaurants in Chiswick which I will be returning to much more quickly than Restaurant Michael Nadra.

The atmosphere in this restaurant is fairly good albeit it's fairly dark and dingy downstairs but the biggest let down is the food. Everything tastes of oil, is big and chunky, is dumped on the plates and doesn't remotely remind me of Spain. It seems like little, if any, care has been taken when prepping and cooking the food. You are made to feel like ordering and completing your meal is a race in which you have no choice but to participate. I can imagine it could be a venue for a fun night for a hen night when you don't really care what you are eating so long as it is reasonably priced and at a central location but I think I will pass.

To my mind, tapas is fun food which is perfect for eating at a bar, and the bar area at the Opera Tavern is a great example of where this works brilliantly. They do have a more sedate restaurant upstairs for which they take bookings but it doesn't have half the atmosphere of the downstairs area. Downstairs, where no bookings are taken, is much more vibrant with some tables but the best seats are the stools at the bar. I have to say that I enjoyed all of the dishes we ate but the burgers with foie gras, which really did melt in your mouth, was the stand out dish. It is fairly noisy and so I would not recommend this for a night out with your parents but it is perfect for a pre/post theatre supper or a Friday night on the town with one or two friends (just not big groups as you will not get a table).

It is rather like visiting someone's house where you have to ring the bell to enter, dine in their sitting room and come across their secret liking for camp art in the loos, all of which I found somewhat pretentious and rather odd. Service was chaotic and every waiter seemed to wait on every table without communicating with each other about what stage of the meal the guests were at. This meant that we were served our first three courses within an hour, then had to wait an hour for the fourth course and then, having waited 45 minutes after our pudding plates had been cleared away for someone to offer us tea or coffee (which they never did), I got bored and asked for the bill. Some of the food such as the lamb and the truffle risotto was very good and tasty. However, some of the food was at best luke warm, the scallops were tasteless and the mango pudding was akin to mango puree made for a baby with a coconut ice-cream bomb you could buy in the supermarket. The saving grace and real asset of this restaurant is the sommelier. We asked him to suggest a wine for each dish and not only did he came up trumps, I would go as far as to say that he rescued many of the dishes from being complete disasters. One surprising and very positive thing about the restaurant is the cost; 5 courses plus wines to match each dish and including service was about £100 per head. To be perfectly honest, Mr Gauthier has always been one of my culinary heroes, I know he has an abundance of talent but it just has not come out to shine in this restaurant yet. I really do hope that the issues I came up against are simply teething problems and Mr Gauthier shows Soho what he is really capable of very soon.

What a find! Tucked in the corner behind Borough Market is this understated gem. The menu is fairly limited and so do not visit this restaurant if you are a fussy eater but it does mean that the produce is phenomenally fresh and seasonal. There are no frills and fancy sauces, just food simply but perfectly cooked with a menu produced by someone who has a real talent for balancing ingredients. And as for the service, there are many front of house staff at posh restaurants who could learn a lot from Elliot's staff. We asked for a recommendation of rose wine and the waitress admitted that she was not very familiar with the restaurant's rose wine, which I have to say I found very refereshing and perfectly acceptable. I would always prefer honesty over lies. But the impressive behaviour did not stop there. We, along with the staff, were then given two different rose wines to sample (free of charge) before we chose our favourite, meaning that we got to drink a delicious bottle of rose to our liking and the staff learned something extra about a couple of their wines. No bookings taken and so my top tip would be to get here early; by 7pm the restaurant was busy and humming.

I have to say I tend to agree with Naomi and not the newspaper critics who have been singing the praises of this restaurant. Having read the professionals' reviews, I was so excited about going to this restaurant and I had high expectations but I'm afraid that I have come away thoroughly disappointed with both the restaurant and the critics. There were some glimmers of genius; the savoury take on a jammie dodger, the egg starter with flavour combinations I have not come across before and the blueberry tart with melt in your mouth buttery pastry. However, other dishes, to my mind, either simply did not work or were over or under seasoned. Taking a bite of turbot and coming up against a mouthful of crunchy sea salt was not pleasant and, personally, having a grouse claw complete with fur and claws on the plate for decoration is wrong and at the very least unnecessary. Oh, and a few pointers for service: if you really do want customer feedback, when you ask for it and a customer gives it to you in a very polite and inoffensive manner, please do not come back to confront them (whilst the sous-chef loiters and glares at the customer in the background) with the other half of the grouse to demonstrate to them that their personal opinion and preferences are wrong; please never clear away one guest's plate whilst another guest is still eating; please do not clear away a customer's glass when it still has wine in it; and please fix your loos so that they flush.

These are all perhaps basic errors you would expect, and have some patience with, of an amateur starting out in the restaurant business but certainly not errors I would expect from a chef and a restaurant which are meant to be top of their game and which the critics are in love with.