Best and Worst London Restaurants of 2013
Best London restaurants of 2013
The London Edition, 10 Berners Street, W1T
“When it comes to dining rooms, Berners is London’s new definition of ‘wow’: triple-height ceilings, intricate plasterwork, enormous chandeliers, walls festooned with hundreds of paintings and a long, liver-enlargening cocktail bar down the far side.”
Worst London restaurants of 2013
26 Smithfield Street London EC1A 9LB
“The service was, by no slender meaning of the word, atrocious. It was a masterclass in things that should never happen during a £140 dinner. We begged each tiny step of the meal: to place orders, for forks to consume it with, through to viewing the dessert menu… Our table was booked for 9.15pm; pudding arrived at around 11.30pm. I attempted to pay the bill, but had now become invisible.”
2 Exmouth Market, EC1R 4PX
“It’s peasant food, y’know, like peasants eat? Well, they do if they’re those lovely clever Continental kitchen-savvy peasants who Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein inevitably meet whenever they hop off a plane in Brindisi and begin bumming the leg off some poor skint sap down a vennel in Puglia rubbing stale bread with bargain-bin tomatoes.”
25a Warren Street, W1T
On the evening I visited I was too busy feeding my face so quickly that I had to double-check in the car on the way home that I hadn’t lost an acrylic nail during a mouthful of violet aubergine stuffed with pomegranate.
118 Piccadilly, W1J
“Do not be ashamed to order the patatas bravas, they are not spuds in sauce by another name; at Coya they are crispy smashed baby potatoes in huancaína sauce and have been added to my ever-growing ‘death-row dinner’ menu.”
41 Conduit St, W1S
“Brasserie Chavot is the ideal little black book place to take chic out-of-towners who want a central location dining vibe. It’s somewhere for parents who crave attentive, highly charming, hands-on service and all the little dining bells and whistles that make a dinner feel like a special occasion.”
63-69 Canonbury Road, N1
“I loved the rich, decadent short rib bourguignon, eaten while picking at lamb stovies (a meat and potato dish that I haven’t set eyes on since I lived in Scotland). The ox cheek — smoky and tender — arrived with cauliflower cheese and was polished off rapidly.”
The Quality Chop House
“I popped in for a small, abstemious ‘OK, guys, I’ll give you another chance after all these years, isn’t this big of me?’ lunch, and ended up eating three courses, drinking two glasses of fine Pinot Noir and needing an afternoon nap with my ankles raised, so they must be doing some things correctly.”
“This was one of those dinners where sensible conversation trailed away as my guest and I sat murmuring about jus, fennel and the freshness of the produce, passing back each plate scraped clean like savages who hadn’t been fed since Christmas.”
“This is one of those boozers one can turn up to for lunch on a quick emergency mission to catch up with a friend and then simply lose yourself in a hidden corner of North London and graze in finery at all day. They do oysters and caviar for crying out loud.”
“The coq au vin at Casse-Croûte is a rich, dark, decadent mess of bird, shallot and fungi, and arrives with one tiny white potato as a cursory nod to hard carbs.”
42 Albemarle St, W1S
“The large, meaty chargrilled lasooni wild tiger prawns with red pepper chutney are incredible, but arrive as a portion of three, so be prepared with some passive-aggressive manoeuvres to win the extra one.”
Worst London restaurants of 2013
26 Smithfield Street London EC1A 9LB
“The service was, by no slender meaning of the word, atrocious. It was a masterclass in things that should never happen during a £140 dinner. We begged each tiny step of the meal: to place orders, for forks to consume it with, through to viewing the dessert menu… Our table was booked for 9.15pm; pudding arrived at around 11.30pm. I attempted to pay the bill, but had now become invisible.”
2 Exmouth Market, EC1R 4PX
“It’s peasant food, y’know, like peasants eat? Well, they do if they’re those lovely clever Continental kitchen-savvy peasants who Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein inevitably meet whenever they hop off a plane in Brindisi and begin bumming the leg off some poor skint sap down a vennel in Puglia rubbing stale bread with bargain-bin tomatoes.”
11-13 Frith Street, W1D 4RB
“It must be common for diners to have no idea what the concept of Nikkei-Japanese dining is, or what the menu, which divides into ‘chicharronia’, ‘cocine client’, ‘Nikkei’, ‘anticucheria’ and the more obvious ‘sushi’, is offering, so it will be a comfort for them to arrive and realise the waiting staff — of which there are approximately 789 — don’t either.”
33 Dean St, W1D 4PW
“Off to the new Brazilian joint Galeto on Dean Street to sample ‘Rio’s famous sexy chicken’. A bold claim… There is nothing sexy about chicken. Not even the naughty ones on The Muppets who wore false eyelashes. Faced with a dead chicken, I tend to smear it in butter, shove a lemon up its bottom and stick it in an oven at 200C as quickly as possible. I do not feel an urge to rub its undercarriage on my décolletage moaning, ‘Oh, je t’aime… moi non plus’.”
4 Mill Street, W1S 2AZ
“All efforts to chat with your dining companion will consistently be scuppered by a waiter bearing two more spoons of Bushtucker-trial gloop representing the chef’s nervous breakdown. This is not dinner. It’s edible immersive art catering to a no-repeat clientele of affluent tourists and bloggers on freebies.”
Burlington House, W1J 0BD
“If a restaurant is like an orchestra with a lot of people doing very important, different things brilliantly to make something wonderful happen, then The Keeper’s House is like listening to Les Dawson clank through Roll Out the Barrel.”
70 Wilton Road, SW1V 1DE
“We were allotted six rather large flabby dim sum. ‘They taste like Marks & Spencer’s sausagemeat,’ I mumbled sadly. Two of the Xiao long bao were covered in a citrus foam. I do not have room in this column to fully vent my thoughts on foam. But, in brief… can you all stop it.”
The Crypt, St Matthews Church, Effra Rd, SW2 1JF
Grace was unable to write a full review of Gremio de Brixton, as she was unwilling to re-live the trauma wrought by her visit. However she did send us this line: “Refused to pay for the food as none was served for hours and what appeared was still frozen. Began to think I was in a BBC3 hidden camera spoof to film my reaction.”
2 Greek St, W1D 4NB
“At one point, the Gay Hussar was de rigueur, but now it is the opposite and, sadly, a restaurant can’t pay its bills with the love of folk who think it’s really charming that it hasn’t been turned into a Starbucks yet, but never want to eat cumbersome plates of veal goulash beside a dusty library of political biographies.”
2nd Floor, 16-19 Canada Square, E14 5ER
“The perfectly pleasant Romney Marsh lamb chop appeared with a ‘salad’ of borlotti and broad beans that looked like two cans roughly mixed together with a fork. Restaurant owners, my rule of thumb is that if even I can cook more imaginatively and with greater finesse than you, you’re in trouble.”
