Words from Yannis

Although Theo Randall at the Intercontinental is what you’d call a fancy restaurant in many ways (the excellent service and the price tag for example), it still remains an Italian restaurant at heart, taking it away from some of the typical characteristics you’d expect. For example, the portions are not tiny fancy-restaurant sized, but rather reasonable quantities; which leads to a very filling meal.

The menu boasts fresh ingredients only (which also means they may run out of some items as they did on our visit), but the freshness shows in the dishes. The buffalo mozzarella and tomato salad was very flavoursome, as were the tagliatelle with mushroom sauce. The seafood risotto was full of tasty prawns, squid and shellfish, while the pigeon with lentils and red cabbage was fantastic. We decided we could just about squeeze desert in, and we were not disappointed by the extremely chocolaty soft chocolate cake and the unusually mealy but delicious cheesecake. There is an extensive list of wines with (unsurprisingly) a focus on Italian ones split by region, and both our choice of white for the meal and the desert wine were excellent.

All in all, this is definitely worth a visit, and although it is special-occasion territory, it still remains close enough to familiar Italian cuisine to give it a bit more of a special character.

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