Zedel abides... 'that' perfect West End restaurant has arrived - Aug 2012

When I was a young West Ender, a posh night out ended up in the familiar confines of Joe Allen. Slightly dirtier ones usually found you gurning round a four top in Balans or playing pinball up the rickety staircase of Bar Italia. You'd gone very wrong if you wound up in Shuttleworths... I was a little young for the Atlantic, that louche, debauched bacchanal under the old Regent Palace Hotel. It's to that space that we head tonight, now home to the newly launched Brasserie Zedel.

It's not an expensive joint. And that's an understatement. Three courses for three people, coffee, wine and service clocked in at £90, phenomenal value given the quality. If this was a vanity project by new restaurateurs, you'd laugh at the prices and imaginging the rows with accountants, vowing to get as much grub down your neck as you could before they whacked the prices up. It's not though, it's the latest venture by two of the biggest restaurant thoroughbreds this country has produced, Chris Corbin and Jeremy King. If the brains behind The Wolesley and The Ivy think that this is the way the industry should price, prepare for the cutting of some prices or the sharpening of some knives...

Bright, airy, tall and gilded. Even though you're in a basement, the whole experience is like being thrust into an Art Deco inspired cruise ship for the night. You could dress up to match if you want to but if you don't really want I can't see that anyone would mind.

The menu reads like a 'Best of France - Bourgouis edition' cookbook from the 70's, in a really good way. Hefty, non sharing, mains are generally under a tenner, soups are less than three quid and other starters swirl the heady heights of a fiver. Substantial plated salads and big slabs of pâté are consumed with gusto while I chow down on escargot as garlically exotic as you remember from that first school trip to France as a 12 year old.

Steak hache is made on site, a triumphantly large patty of the trimmings from proper cuts of beef, a tartare burger if you will. It was a little too solid in the construction but really well flavoured, coming with an inclusive metal cone of proper French fries (another pet hate of expensive places, the sides that should go with the dish should NOT be added chargable extras) and lashings of pepercorn sauce for £8.75.

If the profiteroles were a tad over baked, it only served to highlight that these weren't perfectly pre-prepared, plumped generic pap but homemade and fresh from the subterranean bakery that had been responsible for an excellent (free) bread basket earlier.

Arriving in London today, you couldn't ask for a better catch all recommendation than Zedel, it's there for groups of friends, good for serious foodies glomming at the novelty value, perfect for a classy date and suitable for clients and parents without any of them thinking you're skimping.

I hate to end the review by keeping coming back to it, but i still can't understand why they're charging so little for this food. Sure it's what you'd expect to pay in a provincial French brasserie but this is a newly and expensively renovated spot on Picadilly Circus. They must really hate their accountant, or the rest of the industry...

La Bodega Negra - Mexi-can! Aug 2012

On a sultry Soho night, the office Joes and Olympic trippers trooping down Old Compton hardly notice Kate Moss extinguish her cigarette and stalk back into the sex shop. Is it that regular round here to see a supermodel (retired) in a sex shop? Given the in crowd's current predilection for hip Mexican La Bodega Negra, hidden behind the porny facade, it's probably not that unusual dahling.

Following Kate down the staircase to this modish modern Mexican is a crowd definitely more Chelsea than Soho, beautiful blonde embassy types squired by ex Bullingdon Clubbers. This isn't entirely a bad thing. They bray less when they're out of their comfort zone and here just provide a slightly well-to-do wallpaper. The rest of the decor veers from New York Underground cool (distressed brickwork, exposed piping) to second toughest in the infants (the artfully carved cardboard clad VIP room currently occupied by La Moss and the cool kids looks like it was assembled by class 5b). Not that any of this matters, because the 'atmospheric' lighting stops you seeing much of it, or the food, or your fellow guests.

The sevice was disarmingly friendly, with the exception of snappy, fraught bartenders, but occasionally bordered on slightly hapless - We went through three separate clean plates each for our shared starters (one of which didn't arrive until prompted and felt missed) and had our table turned on a ten minute notice in the same breath as being offered desserts. We were offered a space in the barrio chic bar to finish up before being moved on from there for another booking. All minor points, but given the ease you can spend £50-£60 a head without booze, these are things that need not to happen...

The tacos, a bellweather dish in any Mexican restaurant, were pretty good in the main. Street food purists (and most Americans) might baulk at £6-£8 for a pair of the soft shelled snacks, each a two bite pop, but both lamb with a deeply savoury 'drunken' salsa and pork with grilled pineapple were excellent. A prawn number was superbly flavoured if a little too subtle for the likes of Kate's smoke raddled palate. Better than Wahaca? Almost certainly. But at three times the price you'd hope so.

Mains were larger than expected. Given the average waist size of the crowd, I was expecting to sample a range of (very) small plates, but the mains were all plus size, verging on the American.

The Author and I shared an excellent lamb barbecoa, slow roasted meat falling off the bone, cooked till tender in a rich, chocolatey sauce and served in an enormous chafing dish that occupied the table like a meat filled Olympic flame. It's not easy to split one of those up in the half light of the restaurant but we struggled manfully through it. There were some great flavours coming through in the deep rich cooking technique, and my only criticism could be that it left me with barely enough room to finish my (slightly hurried) dessert. Sides are extra, expensive and necessary, the big hunk of lamb came with nothing itself, a bit of a squizz for a £40 shared dish.

The Publisher gamefully went for the sea bass that AA Gill had described as like "antibiotics growing on a pantyliner". The red and green adobe topping was tasty if more muted than described, but the fish was perfectly well cooked and not noticeably like a Bodyform. Like much else, it was a deeply enjoyable dish that I'd order in future. With a surfeit of meat on the table, Dr Vole went for a slightly disappointing mushroom and tortilla salad. She enjoyed the flavours and contrasting textures but it added nothing to my understanding of Mexican cuisine, and was pretty much the only option if you didn't want meat or fish.

I'm not sure how Mexican it is, but they've half-inched the Scandinavian inspired 'Frozen Berries with White Chocolate Sauce' from Le Caprice. I didn't notice any specifically Latino twist to it though it was as delicious as it has ever been. Dr Vole's Chocolate Fondant had the slightest spike of chilli and a quite superb Mole infused ice cream. That one is definitely worth returning for.

Cocktails were excellent and I was impressed by the food on show, though I'm not sure it quite matches the pricing. This is rustic food in the main, with a variety of rich spicy sauces masking a number of usually cheaper cuts. The premium is for the atmosphere, and the bar, and on a buzzy Friday night, I didn't have a problem with that, though I might do on a slower Tuesday service.


CAVEAT - I should note that after previously having a previously planned evening here right royally norsed up, we were treated as guests and had our meal, and a very nice bottle of champagne, comped. So that was nice of them. Given that it was to make up for a customer services problem, and not because I was writing this, I wasn't initially going to mention it, but full disclosure hey.

Antico on Bermondsey Street - Aug 2012

Thank God for Gregg Wallace's Kitchen. If it wasn't for the failing, empty echoing temple to celebrity 'chef'dom under the Bermondsey Square Hotel you might be forgiven for thinking that all you needed for restaurant success was an SE1 postcode.

Bermondsey Street has, with the aforementioned exception, become a real hub for local foodies in recent years. One can only hope that the minions soon to be besuitedly beetling away in the nearby Shard don't notice, it's busy enough already round here.

On a night where I needed to prove my restaurant picking credentials to a discerning guest, the street didn't let me down. You have to have pretty big balls to open a new Italian a few doors down from local legend Zucca and hot newcomer Pizarro, but luckily there are cojones aplenty here.

Initially I'm not overly keen on the space. Tables are fairly crowded and the leather clad seating is not conducive to comfortable dining on a warm summer's night. The less said about a windowless downstairs bar that reminded me of a suburban swinger's playroom the better. Thank goodness you're not here for the room.

Starters were simple and faultless. Firm and creamy mozzarella paired well with heritage tomatoes and basil infused artichoke hearts, my guest's crab vanished in similar short order and there were another 4 or 5 I could have happily scoffed.

Soft, succulent and fully flavoured lamb shoulder is one of the best dishes of its type I've experienced. Juicy fat rendered perfectly into thick pink lozenges of flavour and succulence. Sitting proud on a thick bed of silken almost creamy caponata, a rich Italian peasant aubergine and olive stew, the two parts of the dish were made for each other. Roasted baby potatoes sat alongside, outside skin puckered from the oven heat, inside softness soaking the incredible juices up. As Gregg might say wistfully peering over the road from his empty dining room, "Lamb. Doesn't. Get. Better. Than. This". Elsewhere on the menu there are a handful of homemade pastas, each with a seasonal accompaniment and further hits from a very busy grill. Given the focus on flesh, this is somewhere I'll be revisiting in the autumn, though maybe not with veggie guests.

The wine list is consise, interesting and reasonably priced. You can drop a ton plus on a Barolo if you must, but there's plenty around £30. £32 for a Primitivo is certainly more than you'd pay in Puglia, but is a snip compared to a similar quality bottle of the same stuff in Locanda Locatelli.

While it may not be so pretty, it certainly holds its own among starry neighbours and along with them seems to have no problems pulling them through the doors. Keen pricing for simple tasty food that people want to eat, whatever the weather. Maybe Gregg needs to take some tips.

   

Guiseppes - the Italian of your parent's first date - July 2012

No Shard watcher am I. Resolutely unimpressed by the see through penis substitute despite the raving of friends. I am also unhappy watching the area change beyond recognition as the monied classes roll in. Don't get me wrong, the sympathetic gentrification of Bermondsey Street, led by local businesses such as Wolff & Tay, Pizarro and the Garrison is a 'good thing', but the tourist focussed homogenisation of places like Borough Market drives me mad.

Guiseppes, hidden away in a basement and accessed through a doorway in an alley under the shadow of the monolith (though that covers a pretty broad area to be fair), is resolutely old school. Guttering candles, faded Italian travel prints, roses on dark wobbling wood tables and an Italian troubadour most nights. This is the local Italian your parents remember.

Other than a glass of Montepulciano you could strip limescale with and some thankfully unproffered neon limoncello, it seems unadventurous but pretty decent. At less than a tenner for most mains it's reasonably priced too.

We scarfed bruschetta with zingy flavoursome tomatoes and a bundle of supermarket bagged salad followed swiftly by two big plates of passable pasta and sauce. There's nothing exceptional on the menu and barring a few specials on a chalkboard, no seasonal changes to a parade of old favourites. You won't find any of the art and guile of Zucca, Tinello, L'Anima or any of the modern Italians but given the £20 a head (inc drinks and service) price tag, we weren't too bothered. It's not that kind of place.

So Guiseppes. It's where you'd eat if your quick pint at the George spans into 2 or 3, you can't get a table at Brindisa but don't fancy wandering to Bermondsey Street.

And it's in a basement. Gentrify that. I dare you...