Words from Yannis

We didn’t have high expectations going into Brasserie Gerard, we were basically looking for a quick, down to earth, dinner. Brasserie Gerard however managed to disappoint us.

We both ordered a medium steak (a rump and a rib-eye) and what arrived was well-done by any standard, let alone by French ones - inexcusable even as an oversight considering there were only 3 tables occupied. Apart from overcooked, it was also a bit rubbery - on the plus side the peppercorn sauce was respectable, and the pepper seasoning on the steak was a good touch (unless you don’t like pepper). The fries were neither great nor awful and the wine (we ordered a large and a small glass and were served in identical glasses, the “large” one full to the brim) was blunt. The service was curteous, but markedly unenthusiastic.

Even more so, the price tag is unjustifiable - we were looking for a French restaurant equivalent of a Pizza Express or Strada, and got a disappointing and pricey version of it: The steaks were £12-£14, and although I appreciate a good steak and I am perfectly happy to pay that price for a really good one, that was most definitely not it. The set menu seemed to be better value at least.

It is perhaps harsh to judge the entire chain based on this experience - the result in each restaurant undoubtedly varies depending on the individual cook, service staff and manager of each restaurant. It seems though that Brasserie Gerard is trying to hit a balance between a cheap eatery and a fancy restaurant and is spectacularly failing, by getting the food wrong and overcharging for the privilege. No wonder it was almost empty on a Friday evening. We won’t be going back in a hurry.

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Fire and Stone is a stylish pizza restaurant that opened fairly recently in Covent Garden, with a second branch in Westfield shopping centre. It feels like it’s the kind of restaurant that will be opening more branches soon and will be becoming one of the big chains that has a presence just about everywhere - but for the time being there’s just two of them, and they seem to be paying attention to their food and service (as the customer survey card on each table might suggest).

The food is certainly interesting - it’s mostly pizzas here, but the available recipes succeed in being original. Spit in categories matching the world’s continents, there’s something for everyone. The Bavaria pizza (German sausage, bacon, cabbage, mozzarella, tomato sauce, sour cream and mustard) was as tasty and full-on as you’d expect from the description, and definitely delivered. The Cairo (roasted red and yellow peppers, aubergines, courgettes, goats cheese, tomato sauce and pine nuts) was very flavoursome and succeeded in showing off the different ingredients.

On the flip side, the bill was somewhat heftier that you might expect. This restaurant is attempting to be a more upmarket pizza restaurant than, say, Pizza Express; this is mirrored in a small separated bar area and corresponding cocktail menu for example. And although the average pizza is not more expensive than its counterpart in Pizza Express, Zizzi or Strada, the bill gets sightly more inflated by all the extras around the pizza.

Still, this is a pleasant restaurant, well suited to the Covent Garden spirit, the food is tasty and original (not an easy task in pizza-land) and the service polite and efficient - so it’s certainly worth a visit. I shall definitely be returning to try the Capetown and the Paris Deluxe pizzas!

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We popped in to the Botanist for a quick meal on a weekday. We were not disappointed by the food - we had a Cote de Boeuf for two that was cooked just right and was delicious, accompanied by two thick and mouthwatering sauces. The service perhaps left something to be desired - the waiter was appalled by the fact that we only wanted the main course, especially after his stark warning that it could take at least half an hour depending on how well done we wanted it, and it was generally a bit challenging to get someone’s attention. This could however be attributed to the fact that this place is much more suited for a leisurely visit, long dinner and a drink or two at the busy bar up front, and we were going much too fast for them through our dinner.

It definitely has potential, and I would gladly go back for second try.

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Cambio de Tercio strikes a difficult balance between having a laid back, hospitable atmosphere of the kind you’d expect from a local Spanish eatery, with modern and elaborate cooking and efficient service you’d expect from a good restaurant.

You can go for starters and mains or just order tapas and we went for the latter, planning to share all tapas amongst the 4 of us. As the menu suggested to order 3-4 dishes per person, we ended up ordering about 15 different tapas (which was most of the menu). This turned out to be a mistake. The food was excellent (I won’t attempt to remember and mention all the dishes, suffice to say that none of them was a disappointment), but mixing several fish dishes with several meat ones, all very tasty but with strong flavours, was overwhelming. We would have been better off with each sticking to a few tapas or just ordering a la carte - and we’ll probably go back and do that as the cooking was indeed very good.

The staff were friendly and seemed to cope with the restaurant being full to the brim, and we got offered (more than one) digestive on the house at the end of the meal from our friendly waiter.

We’ll definitely be visiting this restaurant again, or possibly Tendido Cero across the road, owned by the same people but more of a tapas bar than a restaurant.

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The name, website and staff of Joel Robuchon imply a definite Frenchness about this restaurant, however it’s classified as ‘Modern European’ by Timeout. The decor and style of the restaurant and the dishes justify the description, so does the sitting arrangement (you sit at the bar facing the kitchen, or at tables and stools of the same height around the restaurant, resembling a tapas bar). The style of the menu is also a bit more original - you can order from a traditional menu with starters and mains, but you also get the option to pick a few smaller dishes and eat tapas-style. There is also a 7-course £110 tasting menu, if you’re really hungry.

The food is very good, as you’d expect from such a restaurant. The Iberian ham with toasted tomato bread was delicious, the langoustine fritter was just about the best shellfish I’ve ever tried (and I don’t even like shellfish), hot foie-gras with potatoes was nicely balanced, the veal fillet was excellent and the beef and foie-gras burgers where a bold and successful combination. To finish off, a Calvados warm soufflé was flavoursome but perhaps slightly too eggy for desert, and the chocolate cube was a proper hit of chocolate. Although both the Sicilian red wine we had with our food and the desert wine were fantastic, the actual wine list was on the expensive side, even for a restaurant of this type - in the numerous pages of the wine menu you could only find a handful below £50. Service was efficient and discreet.

Overall, this restaurant has the cooking and the service to justify the price-tag of haute-cuisine, but has a twist of originality that makes it an interesting night out. Definitely recommended.

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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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Gaucho can be summed up in two words: Excellent meat. The waiter comes round the table before you place your order with a big wooden tray holding examples of all their meats: rump, ribeye, sirloin and fillet steaks, churrasco (a thinner and marinated for 48 hours steak) plus some lamb chops. The beef steaks come in 225gr, 300gr or 400gr portions and are simply perfect: tasty, juicy and tender. They’re so good they hardly require any sauces to go with them (the peppercorn sauce being the only tiny let down in this restaurant).

The rest of the food doesn’t disappoint either. On arrival you get bread with butter and a delicious warm cheese-bread bite. Starters are great too, but I usually opt to go straight to a sizable steak, along with some side-orders (these are necessary as the meat doesn’t come with any salad or vegetables). The chips are worth particular mention, as does the dulce de leche cheesecake, if you can find the room for it. Vegetarians are also accounted for, as their menu has expanded lately to include more mains including a couple of veg ones. Still, this remains very much a steakhouse.

The list of wines is extensive and you won’t have any trouble finding a great red wine to match your meal. The restaurant atmosphere and service is also well looked after (most of them have room set aside as a bar), so the place doesn’t lack in ambiance either. 

This restaurant really scores high marks in every department, the steaks are truly outstanding and the place is worth every penny.

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The Maze, one of Gordon Ramsay’s ventures, ticks all the boxes of a fancy restaurant: well cooked elaborate dishes, excellent wine, efficient and unintrusive service, lovely atmosphere. As it has a bar attached to the restaurant with nothing to separate them, there is music played perhaps louder than most restaurants but at reasonable levels for having a conversation over your meal.

The menu however is organised a bit more differently than you’d expect. There is a list of dishes, split into smaller and slightly larger ones, and you are free to order as many as you want, but advised that two smaller and two larger ones is probably the right amount. Something like a gourmet tapas menu. There is also the option to go for the chef’s menu, which consists of 7 dishes (the last 2 of which are deserts) with only a couple of choices in the list to vary your selection. Even though the portions are predictably small, this is a lot of food, but it’s a good chance to sample many dishes. On our visit, the pumpkin soup with pieces of duck was very tasty, a dish of pickled beetroot with cream cheese was deliciously sharp and full of flavour, a quail with warm foie gras was quite pleasing, a dish of hake wrapped in parma ham was marvellous and the lamp accompanied by shepherd’s pie was fantastic (I told you it was a lot of food). The ice cream with fig jam and the floating island were light and sweet, a perfect finish to the meal. The wine list is extensive and they also offer “flights” - three glasses of three different wines to match your meal. The flight suggested by the Sommelier for our meal was excellent and original.

Overall, it’s very much worth a visit for a special occasion dinner.

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Bumpkin has a brasserie on the ground floor and a restaurant on the first floor, but the whole place feels more like a gastropub than anything else. So did the menu on our Sunday lunch visit. There was only bread with liver pate and onion marmelade for starter, an extensive list of different Sunday roasts (beef, pork, lamb, chicken and a fish and a vegeterian option) for a main and a choice of cheese, strawberry tart or chocolate cake for pudding. It’s a very short menu (it would be interesting to see their regular one) but the food tastes very good (so did the brilliant 2005 Rioja).  Especially on a wintery afternoon, it was ideal and left us perfectly satisfied.

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Capenter’s Arms received some very positive reviews from Timeout and we decided to pay it a visit after the Bonfire night fireworks at nearby Ravenscourt Park.

This establishment is classed as a Gastropub, and it was indeed a small and cosy pub converted into a comfortable dining area. There are limited tables, but the outdoor area would add to that in better weather.

However, the similarities and relevance to a traditional pub end there. The service, the menu and the presentation are those of a classy restaurant and bear no resemblance to a pub. You won’t find traditional pub-food dishes on offer, like fish and chips or sausages and mash, or even approximations of them. The daily changing menu on our visit included a starter of hot foie gras with barley which was delightful, and a satisfyingly creamy but light goat’s cheese salad. The list of mains was unusual and adventurous. No beef, no lamb, the only pork dish also contained snails, and there was a dish with haddock and rabbit. Our venison steak with chips and salad was excellent, as was the accompanying Rioja. We rounded off with a rich and tasty pear and pecan tart.

The imaginative dishes are very well cooked, this seems to be one of those places where the cooking skills of the chef are undeniable, no matter how plain or bold your choice of food is. This is as restaurant-like as a Gastropub gets, but it hits all the right notes. With so many summery options in that area, this is definitely a worthwhile one for the colder nights of the year.

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