Can you believe it’s the best part of a decade since I reviewed anywhere in Henley? I didn’t realise that until I sat down to write this review, and I was so surprised that I thought it was a mistake. But no, there it was: June 2016, a visit to the Little Angel, just over Henley Bridge from the not-so-little Angel On The Bridge with its popular riverside terrace. I quite liked the place, and ate there again a couple of years later at a friend’s wedding reception, but even so I’ve not written up a Henley restaurant or café for nearly ten years.
Was it a lack of options, general neglect or just one of those things? I’m not entirely sure, but I do remember keeping a vague eye on Henley and although a couple of new places have sprung up since my last trip on duty none of them had tempted me quite enough: the Hart Street Tavern is meant to be decent, but I seem to recall that it’s run by the same team as the Bottle & Glass, so I wasn’t in a mad rush to scarper to Henley to check it out. And there’s Shellfish Cow, I suppose, a sister restaurant to Wallingford’s surf and turf specialists, but again I just wasn’t sufficiently curious. A dodgy pun doesn’t necessarily make for a great restaurant.
I remember taking a solo trip to Henley almost exactly a year ago. I must have been influenced by my public transport-loving wife, because I did it mostly to try out the brand new Aqua, Reading Buses’ number 28 which now runs frequently from Friar Street to Bell Street, winding through Playhatch and Shiplake, picking you up from Berkshire and dropping you off in Oxfordshire, a world away.
Once there, I’d found myself completely at a loss as to where to lunch.
My finger was nowhere near the pulse, so all I really knew was that I didn’t fancy going back to anywhere I’d reviewed in the past. I could have gone to Geo Café, of course, on the off-chance that my friend Keti, the owner, was there but I felt like I should show some sense of adventure. A wander round Henley, which was still as pretty as ever, suggested that most of the options were starters-mains-desserts places rather than spots for a light lunch.
I was almost stumped, and I ended up in a café slash deli just down from the Town Hall, opposite where Henley used to have an utterly preposterous Harrods café, a place which simultaneously managed to seem posh and lower the tone, the way new money can.
Although the Harrods café closed some time ago, my lunch venue was clearly its spiritual successor. I had a solitary crumpet, the diameter of a coffee cup, topped with some smoked salmon and a poached egg. For fun, I put the picture on social media and asked people to play The Price Is Right: it cost me an eye-watering £12, and at least half of the guesses I got thought it would come to even more than that. It was middling, the coffee was worse. Afterwards I strolled to Geo Café and, over far better coffee, resolved that a sense of adventure was overrated.
But Henley’s scene isn’t as stagnant as you might think. Echoes, an outpost of Phantom Brewing, has opened there and does very good beer, served by an enthusiastic team. Flyte, a bar offering a combination of tacos and cocktails, opens next month. Last March Dominic Chapman, the Michelin starred chef formerly of the Royal Oak at Paley Street and the Beehive at White Waltham opened his eponymous restaurant in the Relais hotel at the bottom of Hart Street. Little by little, things are starting to change in Henley.
And then there’s the Duke, a curious beast, a pub which opened in January where Mexican restaurant Pachangas used to be. It started trading at the beginning of the year, and an article in the Henley Standard made all the right noises about everything being cooked over fire, an emphasis on small plates and all that other stuff everybody says.
At first all went well, and they paid for a London blogger to come up and review what looked like a surprisingly stingy selection of dishes from the menu. He enthused, giving it an 8/10 which probably would have been a 6 or a 7 if the food hadn’t been free, but since then the menu seemed to have drifted closer and closer to the mainstream, and then last week the pub abruptly announced on social media that it was shutting until further notice “to rebuild our team”, which suggests that all is not going swimmingly.
Neither the Duke nor Restaurant Dominic Chapman has troubled the guide books or restaurant inspectors, which made it even more of a curveball when last month Michelin added sixteen venues to its guide and one of them was in Henley. Out of nowhere, seemingly, they had listed the Three Tuns, the pub on the market place next to superlative Henley butcher Gabriel Machin. Part-owned by the butcher, too, as it was a joint venture between Machin’s owner Barry Wagner and Nigel Sutcliffe, who runs the also-listed Oarsman in Marlow.
The intent was to take advantage of that fantastic produce, to be a sort of chophouse in the Oxfordshire town. As for the Three Tuns’ success this year, meteoric only just does it justice: it reopened in May, and in September it was listed by Michelin. Nobody knows exactly what brings restaurants to the attention of the inspectors – who still seem to have a blind spot where Clay’s is concerned – but however it happened, being noticed after four months is exceptional going.
When I learned that, I resolved that I needed to get there as soon as possible. But it also gladdened me enormously, because the pub used to be a favourite of mine ten years ago, when it was run by Mark and Sandra Duggan, and I ate there frequently in another life, reviewing it in 2014. The last time I went, just before the Duggans left the pub, was with Zoë, just after we got together. I remember having an exquisite Caesar salad, so good it was bittersweet.
Because I was glad Zoë got to try it before it changed hands, but sad about all the meals we wouldn’t have there. And that listing in Michelin raised my hopes that, much like my blog, it too could have a second era that surpassed its first. So Zoë and I alighted from the Aqua last Saturday and went to investigate, stopping at Echoes on the way for a few pre-prandial pales and a very happy chance encounter with readers Steve and Tracy.
I should add that Zoë insisted, by the way – both on joining me for this one and on taking the bus to get to Henley. Neither of these facts will surprise regular readers.
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Family-run trattoria Ciao Bella is at the top of Lamb’s Conduit Street, not far from the British Museum. These days that street is about as affluent as they come, home to the original branch of restaurant Noble Rot and its offshoot wine shop Shrine To The Vine and to the likes of Honey & Co, La Fromagerie, Aesop, Sunspel and fancy umbrella sellers London Undercover.
It’s brimming with possibility. You can have a latte outside Knockbox Coffee in the sunshine, or sip a pint at the Perseverance, where acclaimed Nunhead pizza traders Dinner For One Hundred operate out of the kitchen. It truly is as likeable as street as you’ll find in the capital.
I’m guessing it wasn’t, though, back in 1983 when Ciao Bella first opened. Yet over forty years later it sits at the head of, but somehow separate from, all that gentrification. Because Ciao Bella is that rare thing, a restaurant beloved by those in the know but rarely talked about by everyone else. Ten years ago, back when Marina O’Loughlin was restaurant critic for the Guardian, she listed it as one of her 50 favourite U.K. restaurants.
“This 30 year old trouper packs ’em in night after night” she said and although – as so often with O’Loughlin – this approval had a touch of the performative about it, you couldn’t say she wasn’t consistent. Last year, writing in the FT about life post-retirement as a restaurant critic, under the headline At last, I can eat in places I actually like she said that she was still dining at Ciao Bella, and had recently lunched there three Fridays running. “Every visit is an event, a celebration” she is on record as saying.
It wasn’t just O’Loughlin, though. When Oisin Rogers, celebrity publican and Topjaw fanboy, published his list of his 55 favourite restaurants last year, surfing the wave of his post-Devonshire popularity, he also found room for Ciao Bella. He described it as the “quintessential family-run trattoria… full of jollity and chaos”.
The impression I got of Ciao Bella, doing my research, is that it will never trouble Michelin or the Good Food Guide but remains on many hospitality insiders’ shortlists. “If you don’t like it, you’re a snob” said one regular, interviewed by the now defunct London edition of Eater a few years ago. There was a similar comment in Harden’s: “anyone who doesn’t love Ciao Bella is mad”. Talk about a sure thing.
That’s not to say that all those rave reviews say that the food is brilliant – or, indeed, that any of them do. But they all suggest that it’s good enough, and that the overall experience of eating there is hugely more than the sum of its parts. They talk about the buzzy dining room, the legendary terrace with its blue canopies and its people-watching possibilities, the live pianist every night, the huge unpretentious portions, the seafood pasta decanted from a bag into your bowl tableside.
I’ve always understood that great restaurants are about so much more than the food – something Reading-based readers might recognise as the Dolce Vita effect – and, with that in mind, I would challenge you to read almost anything in the public domain about Ciao Bella and not at least slightly want to eat there. It all definitely had that effect on me. It had been on my to do list for a really long time, and on the last Saturday in September I zig-zagged up Lamb’s Conduit Street, window-shopping in the sunshine, on my way to a lunch reservation with my old friend Aileen.
The terrace always comes up in reviews of Ciao Bella and on a slightly warmer day I might have fancied eating outside, but I really liked the look of the dining room on the ground floor. It’s an unfussy space, its walls groaning with framed black and white pictures with a heavy reliance on the films of Fellini. There’s Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, almost connecting in the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita. Just along from that is a picture of the director’s wife, Giulietta Massina, in La Strada. It felt like the room in which all those stories I’d read – of long boozy lunches or chaotic evenings with accompaniment on the piano – took place.
So I was disappointed to be led to the sunshine-yellow basement, which was empty when I arrived, and plonked in the corner, at a table where my right elbow felt like it would be knocking against the wall for the entire meal. On my left I had a great view of the men’s toilets. The waiter conspiratorially told me it was a good seat because I could “see all the pretty girls coming in”, which I’m sure he meant in a vaguely twinkly way but which came across as on the borderline between cheesy and due for cancellation. Maybe I looked like an ornithologist, but I don’t think so.
Rooms benefit from people, it has to be said, and it was a better space by the end of our meal when every table was occupied. But it was still a slightly unlovely one, and I felt like I was in some kind of gastronomic overflow car park, in the room put aside for tourists. I’m used to having that experience in, say, Paris, but it was strange to have it happen in London.
In Ciao Bella’s defence, I think I’ve read somewhere that the basement is usually used for private parties but it seemed on that Saturday that the converse might have applied: when we left there was a wedding Routemaster parked outside on the pavement and I suspect a wedding was being celebrated on the ground floor. I can’t blame them for that: if they had the numbers to escape from the canary-coloured cellar they should have seized that opportunity with both hands. But away from daylight and ambience, I couldn’t help wondering what might have been.
By this point Aileen had arrived and we attacked a very serviceable, almost medicinal, negroni apiece. It was, after all, negroni week – or, to give it its full name, ‘Instagram bores going on about negroni week’. Ciao Bella’s was bang on, no whistles or bells, no flourishes, just a route one approach to dropping that soft, orange filter over the rest of the day. I liked it a great deal.
As we tried without success to get round to the menu, Aileen filled me in on what she’d been up to, which included commencing a grand project with a friend to do twenty-six city breaks over the next ten years or so, proceeding in reverse alphabetical order. Never let it be said that Aileen hadn’t found ways to fill her retirement, not that she sounded very retired from all the side hustles she had taken on since leaving her main job. I learned that Zagreb – where else would it have started? – was very nice, although the cathedral isn’t quite finished yet following the earthquake.
I also discovered that Aileen planned to go back there when it was completed, so I tried pointing out that repeat visits would just make her project almost impossible to finish. Apparently it’s Ypres next, but do pop any suggestions for other destinations in the comments. I’m sure Aileen will read them. X will be particularly challenging, I’m guessing: my suggestion was that she could just about stretch it to Aix en Provence on a technicality. Do you think that’s cheating?
Ciao Bella’s menu, on a single outsized sheet of card, was as pleasingly retro as its website. Its contents were, too: this felt like the menu at every neighbourhood Italian since time immemorial, a proper, old-school selection of dishes. It took me back to places from my past – Pepe Sale circa 2009, or my dad’s erstwhile favourite Sasso in Kingsclere. It reminded me, too, that this kind of spot isn’t seen as frequently as it once was: a quote in that Eater article, tellingly, said “what’s nice about Ciao Bella is that it’s still there. One by one, other restaurants like it have been shut down”.
What that meant in practice was that starters were between £6 and £16, pizzas about £15 if you wanted one and pasta priced all over the place, although you could have a smaller portion of pasta for about £12. It meant that mains were between £20 and £30, a price point that used to mean fancy and now just means ‘get used to it’. It meant mozzarella in breadcrumbs, and Parma ham with melon, aubergine parmigiana, veal with lemon sauce or fried scampi. It meant that the modern affectations of Italian food were largely unnoticed by Ciao Bella: burrata appeared on one pizza, ‘nduja on one starter, neither anywhere else.
There was also a small specials menu, and even that made me feel nostalgic for those evenings at Pepe Sale, a lifetime ago, when Marco would materialise at your table and talk you through the options that evening. By this point, however underwhelming that yellow room was, I was disposed to like Ciao Bella a lot. It seemed to be transmitting from a time when life was very much more straightforward, and disappointment less abundant. I guess this must be the dragon Reform voters spend their whole lives unsuccessfully chasing.
But we were in 2025, where disappointment is rarely far away, and it came quickly in the shape of Aileen’s starter. Breadcrumbed mushrooms stuffed with spinach and ricotta weren’t the kind of thing I’d order, mainly because they always felt like a dish you could pick up in the chiller cabinet at M&S, or Iceland for that matter. They came sauceless and strangely burnt in places, plonked on a plate with a lemon wedge in the middle and pointless distraction from the dregs of a bag of Florette, in a presentation that screamed from the rooftops will this do?
“Taste this” said Aileen, in a manner that was a long way from oh my goodness, you have to try this. “It’s sort of wet: it makes me think it’s been frozen.”
I wasn’t sure about that, but it was middling in the extreme, if such a thing is possible. The filling was watery and bland, the layer of mushroom itself very thin.
“And it’s dry, it needs something else – a sauce, or a dip, or something. How does it manage to be wet and dry at the same time?” Aileen wondered out loud. “And what’s the point of those bits of undressed salad?”
So many questions, and so few answers. The late Shirley Conran famously once said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom: I suspect she might have thought it was too short to eat these, too. This cost £11. I was about to say something pithy about that, but putting the price there on the page, unembellished, makes the point.
I fared better, but better’s a relative term. Pappardelle with lamb ragu was on the specials menu and it was good but far from special. The thick ribbons of pasta were decent enough, but cooked past al dente until they were more slump than spring, and the lamb in the ragu battled against an overly sharp note of tomato, as if everything hadn’t had enough time to form a lasting relationship. The diced carrots were too substantial, too, standing out where they should have blended in, a long way from sofrito.
Better really is a relative term, and I couldn’t help looking at this dish in other relative terms, too. If I’d been served this at, say, Tilehurst’s Vesuvio I might have been pleasantly surprised. Something this good at Cozze would have been a miracle. But on Lamb’s Conduit Street, in a restaurant older than my wife that’s lauded by food insiders far and wide? It just felt ordinary.
Everything was a little rushed, too – I know I complain about this fairly often, sometimes at length, but the pacing here felt like the restaurant was trying to get ahead of a rush they knew was coming; perhaps it was another impact of having a wedding celebration upstairs. But it meant that our starters must have come out ten minutes or so after we picked them, when we were barely into our negronis, and that meant that a leisurely lunch, the kind so mythologised at Ciao Bella, was out of the window.
So we downgraded our expectations and picked a half bottle of Aglianico from the wine list. To be fair to Ciao Bella it was perfectly pleasant and far from poor value at £15, and I was delighted to see a few half bottles on the menu. Maybe they are to cater for the kind of lunch we turned out to be having. Our mains turned up about fifteen minutes after the starter plates were taken away, if that. Aileen expressed audible surprise that they were so quick, too taken aback to be completely English about it.
I had chosen an old favourite, and something I rarely see on menus, veal saltimbocca. In keeping with the whole nostalgic theme, I suppose, because back when Dolce Vita was at the height of its powers, something like ten years ago, I could have eaten this dish every Friday night for the rest of my life. Some months, to be honest, it felt like I did.
This did just enough to transport me, if only momentarily. That veal, slight and tender, wrapped in Parma ham and served with that sauce singing with white wine triggered plenty of happy memories. And if there wasn’t quite enough sage perhaps it didn’t matter, just like perhaps it didn’t matter that the accompaniment was five little cubes of potato, some veg which probably didn’t come out of a tin but somehow felt like it had and yet more of that bloody bag of Florette. For a moment, I felt like maybe Ciao Bella had worked its magic at last, and none of that mattered.
But sadly, there was one thing that did matter, and Aileen summed it up when describing her main.
“It’s such a shame this isn’t hot.”
She was absolutely right. It felt like the worst of both worlds, really: if your dish is going to emerge from the kitchen in record time you might complain about being turned but at least your meal should be piping hot. But for it to turn up so quickly and be lukewarm? It just felt like adding insult to injury, as if they’d cooked it at the same time as the starters and then just left it lying around on the pass until the earliest possible moment when it could be carted to the table.
Otherwise Aileen would have been absolutely delighted with her gamberoni, I imagine: plump prawns swimming in a sauce which looked almost identical to the one that came with my saltimbocca but which was clearly chock-a-block with garlic. But what was identical were those five cubes of spud, that mixed veg by numbers, that pointless, perfunctory scattering of salad from a bag. What was identical was that feeling of expecting more.
My dish cost £19.50, Aileen’s was £22.50. Neither was so expensive as to leave you feeling like you’d been mugged, but even so that word, ordinary, hovered in the air again.
Also distinctly ordinary were the courgette fritti, which were very thick batons which left your fingers shining with oil. I’ve had some gorgeous versions of this dish over the years – at Town, or at Battersea’s downright terrific Antica Osteria Bologna. The more I think about it, the more I think that everything I’ve heard about Ciao Bella and how magnificent it is emphatically applies to Antica Osteria Bologna. That is the restaurant people say Ciao Bella is. Ciao Bella, I’m afraid, is not.
We’d partly ordered a half bottle of red because we didn’t see ourselves staying the course at Ciao Bella but the dessert menu came along, and our wine was nearly finished, so we thought that we may as well give the restaurant one last chance to turn things around. It was, ironically, the area where I found Ciao Bella strongest, although the dessert menu does essentially say that only three of the desserts are homemade: possibly their most famous dessert, lemon sorbet served inside an actual lemon, is apparently not.
We ordered two of the three homemade desserts and I would say they were the – best? least disappointing? most acceptable? – things that we ate. My tiramisu wasn’t going to win any awards but it was a classic example of this dish – a thick wodge buried in cocoa, deeply boozy savoiardi biscuits and mascarpone in distinctly agreeable harmony. If everything else had been at the standard of this, I’d have liked the place far more. Still, better to finish on a high I suppose than begin brightly and plummet from there.
Similarly Aileen’s panna cotta, served in the shape of an old-school jelly mould, had a satisfying wobble and was crowned with a nicely done fruit couli. The dessert menu blurb is far too literal where the panna cotta is concerned – not sure “popular creamy white dessert made with sugar, gelatine and vanilla” is really selling it to anybody – but thankfully Ciao Bella is better at making panna cotta than it is at describing it.
The whole dessert experience rather summed Ciao Bella up. At £8.50 and £7.50 apiece these dishes weren’t expensive. But they arrived about five minutes after we ordered them, which is plain silly. I was catching up with a very good friend I hadn’t seen in a year, we’d been chatting so much that it took ages for us to place our order. Absolutely nothing about us, as a table, said “we’re in a hurry”.
It was nice of our waiter – who I do have to say was charming, in that very well-practiced way you might expect of an old stager – to ask if we wanted coffee, but by then we were ready to cough up and seek out somewhere else for the rest of our afternoon. Our bill came to just under £140, including an 11% optional service charge (this very specific uplift, deliberately picked to fall between the traditional 10% and the more common 12.5%, seemed strange). It was hard to feel happy with it or angry with it. It was what it was, as the meal was what it was.
Sitting outside Noble Rot, across the way, afterwards with a very nice bottle of red, making the most of the fact that it was still warm enough to do so, we agreed that the meal at Ciao Bella had been a tricky one. Even though both of us felt our meal could have been far better we didn’t feel aggrieved in the way that we might have done.
I’ve thought and thought about it since, and I’m still not sure entirely why. Of course, I had a lovely lunch with a very precious friend, and we both agreed that it could have happened anywhere and we would have had an excellent time. So there is that, but I can’t give a good rating every time I have lunch with Aileen just because I’m having lunch with Aileen: my credibility can do without that kind of dent.
So what was it? Did some of Ciao Bella’s magic transfer to us, by osmosis from the better, buzzier room upstairs, or slip through the cracks in the ceiling? I really don’t know. Objectively Ciao Bella was deeply average. If you had an Italian restaurant like it in your neighbourhood you might go, and you might go often enough to become a regular. You might form the kind of relationship with it where you overlook off days and look forward to seeing your favourite waiters or ordering your favourite dish.
But it is, as others have said, the kind of restaurant that is slowly dying out in the U.K., replaced by pizza places that only do pizza, pasta places that only do pasta and the abomination that is mid-price casual dining trying to devalue Italian food with all its horrendous Zizzis, Prezzos and Bella Italias. Maybe I just felt a little warm echo of some of the restaurants I’ve loved over the years that are no longer with us, and maybe some of that goodwill reflected on Ciao Bella, although it might not have deserved it.
Yet although it wasn’t my cup of tea, I can imagine it might hold that place in the affections of others, and I do envy them, both what they have and what I’ve lost. It’s funny, sometimes I can read reviews of restaurants in places I will never go, enjoy the writing, know I’ll never go there and feel that reading the review was enough, that it was as close to dining in that restaurant as I need to get. I sort of hope, on some level, that this review serves that purpose for you, even if the meal wasn’t entirely for me.
So if you’re the sentimental sort, you’re in London a lot, and you want to do your bit to prop up an institution, one of the last of its kind, if you’re prepared to overlook some bad tables, some middling dishes and some lukewarm food you might find, after you’ve invested enough time and money, that Ciao Bella is a restaurant you can truly fall in love with. For the rest of us, it might be better just to know that this place exists for its people, that there are places like that out there for everybody, and that in time we will all find ours.
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Zoë and I were in town the Monday before our holiday, we’d finished all our errands and there was time to fit in lunch somewhere before taking the bus home to face the mountain of ironing and packing. Zoë wanted to go to Shed, which I could completely understand, and then it occurred to me – we could try out Notes, the first of the raft of hospitality businesses we’ve been promised on Station Hill, and I could get a review of it under my belt.
It would be easy to envy London-based restaurant reviewers, I think. Just imagine having such a broad canvas, such an embarrassment of riches, every kind of restaurant at every level, from the plush, spenny Mayfair spots A.A. Gill used to frequent to the unsung cash-only middle-of-nowhere places Vittles has made its speciality – and, I suppose, everywhere in between. Like Samuel Johnson almost said, imagine getting tired of the London restaurant scene! How jaded you would have to be.
And yet… I don’t know. I think there are huge consolations to being a gastronomic tourist in the capital. For a start, everyone writes about London restaurants. All the critics, all the Substackers, all the people jabbering to camera in their weird self-parodying voices on TikTok. It would be exhausting to be in that pack of misfits, let alone trying to keep pace with them.
It’s all about the urge to be first – to get to the new place before everybody else, or to get there at the same time but say it better. We have reached the point where various critics have visited, say, Josephine in Marylebone in recent weeks and come down solemnly on either side of the fence, saying it’s great or bobbins, as if they’re handing down Supreme Court judgments. And really, who cares?
Well, if you’re invested in it I’m sure you do but from a distance it feels like the kind of Inside Baseball stuff that only interests a small number of people. There are at least a couple of Substacks specially for those people, too: I imagine if you fancy a very niche printed word take on Gogglebox they’d be catnip to you.
No, I quite like being free of all that. I get it in Reading, that if a new place opens people want to know what it’s like and that makes me want to get there fairly soon after it opens; if you’re hankering for a review of Nua, or Pho 86 or even Take Your Time, the new spot that’s opened where Dolce Vita used to be, don’t worry. I will get to them, I promise.
But to have that feeling amplified to the max, to see all these hot new places and know you only have so many evenings, so much time, so many spare calories, so much money? I don’t envy any of them that, not even the ones whose decisions are made infinitely simpler by choosing the restaurants that bung them cash, free food or both.
Of course, there’s also the FOMO I always associate with big cities. It’s bad enough when I go on holiday to, say, Lisbon, and the infuriating brain that has unhelpfully held me hostage all my adult life – the one I struggle to quieten – looks at all the places on my narrowed-down shortlist before piping up about every single restaurant that didn’t make the cut. What about all of these?
Don’t get me wrong, I loved Lisbon, I ate well there and people tell me my city guide is very useful. But for each list of places I visit there is always an equal and opposite running order of the ones I didn’t choose, all taunting me with the possibility that they might have been even better. I copy-paste them into a new note entitled Next time when I get home, but mainly to try and fool myself.
So I am very comfortable with my relationship with reviewing London restaurants. I get to places I have always wanted to visit – a real mix of the old and new, no real guiding principle behind them except that I fancy them. Often it means things go brilliantly and I make a favourite new discovery, sometimes I’m underwhelmed by somewhere that has been hyped to high heaven (Chick ‘N’ Sours has since closed). But even that is as it should be: if I loved literally everywhere I went in London I’d be no better than Eating With Tod and the world of food doesn’t need another Toby Inskip. It already has one Toby Inskip too many.
All that explains why Monday morning found me outside Flat White on Berwick Street ahead of a lunch reservation in Soho, at the French House. David Schwimmer – all in black, bags under his eyes, baseball-capped, quiet and polite – had just been in there grabbing a coffee and the staff, who were probably discovering him on Netflix for the very first time, were decent enough not to act starstruck. And then someone even more celebrated crossed my path – my friend Graeme, my lunch companion that day, merrily wandering aimlessly through Soho after a morning spent shopping.
So off we walked to the French House together. Our lunch had been a spur of the moment thing: it was the last Bank Holiday before Christmas, and we were both at a loose end. His wife was away camping, mine was at work so we decided to indulge in one of life’s great joys, a leisurely lunch on a day when you’d ordinarily be at work, a Monday stolen back from the cosmos.
The French House is one of London’s great pubs, which means that it’s one of the world’s great pubs, and it’s been a favourite of mine for many years. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat downstairs in among the regular churn of Soho types, tourists and people passing through, drinking Breton cider and chatting away to those I already knew and, often, others I didn’t know from Adam.
I’ve introduced a fair few people to it over the years, too – including Graeme, who had never been – and I never tire of seeing them fall for it the way I have. The acclaimed Devonshire is an attempt to manufacture a classic in the laboratory – and don’t get me wrong, the people in that lab are experts and I’m sure they’ve done an outstanding job. But the French House is the real deal.
I won’t bore you with the trivia – all that stuff about de Gaulle getting drunk there in exile, or Dylan Thomas drinking there, or Lucian Freud. You can read about that anywhere, and my interest on that sunny day was mostly about the dining room upstairs. That too has a storied history, by the way.
Fergus Henderson cooked there over thirty years ago with his wife, before leaving to set up some unsung joint called St John. I ate there nearly fifteen years ago back when it was Polpetto, an offshoot of Russell Norman’s Polpo, just after it opened; celebrated chef Florence Knight was in the kitchen, near the start of her career. Then Polpetto moved elsewhere, and went the way of the rest of the Polpo empire, and that room above the pub lay dormant.
But seven years ago chef Neil Borthwick took it over, offering a pared-back menu of French classics, and I’ve pretty much wanted to eat there ever since. I’ve even booked it a couple of times, and then ended up having to cancel, or choosing to go elsewhere. The thing is, the French House is that unusual thing in this day and age: an almost homework-proof restaurant.
You won’t find a current menu online anywhere, and the restaurant’s website directs you to an Instagram feed with pictures of the latest menu. It last posted in May last year, so all you can get is a vague idea of the sort of things you might eat. So Graeme, a man with a sense of adventure, was the perfect wingman for this one. He also quite fancied lunching at venerable Mayfair pub The Guinea Grill (“it serves meat pies with sides of offal” was his rationale), but agreed that the French House would suit him just fine.
It’s the loveliest dining room, a small and peaceful space above the small and boisterous bar underneath. It has a strange kind of placid calm, all oxblood walls and wood panelling, tasteful black and white prints everywhere paying tribute to the pub’s past. I don’t think it seated more than 16 people and was almost full when we were there, with a second sitting coming along towards the end of our lunch. You could almost be anywhere, but you wouldn’t necessarily think the clamour of Balans, of Bar Italia, of Ronnie Scott’s, Bar Termini and all those branches of Soho House were the other side of those big, handsome windows.
The menu was handwritten and changed daily, another thing the Devonshire probably likes to pretend it invented. Here was a novel experience, my first chance to see an actual French House menu with today’s date on it, let alone one written in 2025. It was a thing of beauty, restrained and limited. Four starters and two mains, bolstered by a blackboard listing specials: two more starters, two more mains and a couple of bigger sharing dishes, a huge pork chop or a cote de bœuf.
When you handwrite a menu every day, I don’t really understand the logic of also having a blackboard, but perhaps the specials were in shorter supply and doing it that way saved them drawing a line through all sixteen menus.
The French House is also, by the way, far from being a prohibitively expensive place to eat. Most of the starters were £12 and the mains, excluding those sharers, were between £28 and £35. But before we were ready to make our choices we had an apéritif, a drink marked on the menu as Today’s Tipple.
I’d never heard of a Pousse Rapière before, but it turned out to be an orange cognac liqueur from Charente mixed with English sparkling wine and it was properly divine, like a Kir royal for ponces. I was very taken with it, and one of the two servers brought the bottle over to show us what was in it. “You can probably buy it in Gerry’s” she said, but sadly the Old Compton Street booze emporium was closed that day.
Although the menu changes every day, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any version of it that didn’t include Graeme’s starter. Sourdough toast came slathered in goat’s curd but then the pièce de résistance, the thing that propelled this dish into the stratosphere, was the entire bulb of confit garlic crowning the whole affair. You just had to ease out a clove – a process which took minimal effort, as far as I could see – smoosh it on your toast and curd and heaven was a forkful away. I always let my dining companion choose first, and Graeme nabbed this. But if he hadn’t, I would have ordered it and this paragraph would have been even more of a paean of praise.
I on the other hand chose from the specials menu and was rewarded with an equally worthy example of the genre known as great things with toast. The French House’s steak tartare was not only one of the best I’ve had but arguably the most classic. This is a dish I’ve enjoyed all over the place – at Marmo in Bristol, in Paris, Bruges and Montpellier, and usually everyone tries to put their spin on it, whether that’s relying on a fudgy, slow-cooked egg, smoking the beef or spiking the whole thing with gochujang.
But I think it’s at the French House that I had this dish at its most textbook. No whistles and bells, no twists or gimmicks. Just gorgeous beef with plenty of capers and, at a guess, finely chopped cornichons, that stupendous alchemy of salt and sharpness that makes this dish, at its best, an unalloyed pleasure. They did a larger version of this dish with frites, too, but I was happy to have the smaller option, streaked with rays of golden sunshine from that broken yolk, a perfect precursor to what lay ahead.
The French House’s wine list is a curious one in that there’s nothing that cheap on it but, simultaneously, a lot that isn’t ridiculously expensive (it also, refreshingly, contains a reasonable number of half bottles). I wish I’d taken a photo but it did seem like a lot of the bottles were £50, and the one we chose, an Alsatian pinot gris, definitely was.
It was by Famille Hugel, as were many of the other options, and for what it’s worth I found it delightful. It felt like a dangerously easy to drink white that could quite happily smudge the sharp edges of an afternoon, and both Graeme and I were more than in the mood for that.
It went superbly, I suspect, with Graeme’s main course which was another masterpiece of simplicity. Three muscular, golden lengths of monkfish tail, mostly off the bone, came resting on a little mat of steamed spinach, served with ribbons of fennel and a glossy purée: the menu suggested it was fennel, too, but Graeme wasn’t so sure about that.
Graeme loved this dish, and rhapsodised about it from start to finish. A bit of a flex, as people younger than me like to say, from someone who had been agitating in favour of a sturdy pie with an offal chaser, but that’s one thing I really like about Graeme: he, more than most people I know, properly contains multitudes.
The words describing my main leapt off the blackboard and onto my lips when the server asked us what we wanted to order. Well, two words did anyway, confit duck. I find it so hard not to order it in restaurants but my lack of imagination is rarely rewarded quite as profoundly as it was at the French House. A huge duck leg came with a bronzed carapace, some of the fat remaining underneath but much of it sacrificed to achieve the happy medium of yielding meat and skin like crackling.
So often confit duck doesn’t quite achieve that balance, or it does but it’s too small, or it doesn’t and it’s too small. Rarely is it as beautiful, and substantial, a wonder as this. I could eat this all the live long day, or perhaps more realistically once a week, but maybe it’s for the best that it’s a far more irregular treat in real life. It came on a rib-sticking pile of lentils shot through with carrot, celery, ambrosial lardons: there might even have been some braised lettuce in there, but that may have been my imagination playing tricks.
This was a complete plate of food in a way many dishes never are, to the point where I didn’t envy the neighbouring table the very attractive portion of frites they took delivery of partway through my eating this. Well, almost: I think I 90% didn’t envy them. 75%, perhaps.
Time spent with a good friend is a bit like a really happy dream, in some respects. When you look back you know you had a wonderful time but you can’t remember the specifics of what you said. So Graeme and I caught up on his house move, our families, the impressive women we’d fluked our way into marrying, his belief that he was still the best Doctor Who we’d never had.
We also shared a firm conviction that summer wasn’t over until it was over, frustrated by the widespread defeatist doom-mongering on social media that it was as good as autumn already. A lunch at the French House felt like a brilliant way to rage against the dying of the light brought about by the impending end of British Summer Time. See? I slipped in a Dylan Thomas reference after all.
I had read everywhere that you had to order the French House’s madeleines, but also that they were baked to order and took fifteen minutes, so I persuaded Graeme that we should order them and another dessert to tide us over while they were prepared. Oh, and a dessert wine to enjoy into the bargain. Again, our server gave us loads of brilliant advice about that section of the drinks menu and we ended up sipping a Petit Prince de Guillevic, which was a bit like a pommeau, made with eau de vie and cider.
It was heavenly, and transported me to the first time I tried pommeau, on a holiday to Normandy with my dad the best part of twenty-five years ago. It also reminded me that I have a bottle of a British equivalent, brought out this year by Herefordshire’s Little Pomona, in my garage and that I really should enjoy it before the clocks go back.
I gave Graeme first choice of desserts, not wanting a repeat of the chocolate mousse incident from three years ago, and he eschewed the chocolate mousse so I felt it was my duty to, well, chew it. It was truly glorious, a dense boozy sphere of the stuff redolent with rum and served with just the right amount of excellent crème fraîche to stop it being too much. By which I mean too much for most people: it was absolutely fine for me, but I loved the crème fraiche all the same.
What had prompted Graeme to risk dessert dissatisfaction and swerve that mousse? He was persuaded by our excellent server to try the dessert on the specials, a raspberry savarin. It was sold to him as a bit like a baba au rhum, only with raspberry liqueur instead of rum. I don’t think that necessarily did the dessert justice.
The thing is, a sponge soaked through with booze feels instinctively like it should be sodden, be heavy. That is, you might think, what you’re pricing in when you order this dish. But this was airier than any rum baba I’ve tried, the sponge almost float-away light, but still with raspberry coulis lurking at its epicentre. But before that you had that indulgent sponge, and raspberries ringing a heap of the lightest Chantilly cream.
This dish is absolutely not the kind of thing I would ever order, but after trying a spoonful of Graeme’s I can tell you that if I ever got the chance to eat a whole one of these I’d grab it swiftly with both hands. Maybe this time Graeme had performed a Jedi mind trick on me? You couldn’t say it was undeserved.
By this point most of the people who had started their lunches at the same time as us had settled up and moved on, which I always consider a little moment of triumph. The dating couple at the next table had ordered exactly the same combination of dishes as we had, him my choices and her Graeme’s. “See, you’re the women in this arrangement” I said to Graeme, enjoying the novelty value because, at least half of the time, I’m not even the man in my own marriage.
Most of the other tables left before us because they’d made the mistake of passing on the madeleines. In a meal full of showstoppers we’d left the very best till last, a board with six warm madeleines, all scalloped edges, dusted with icing sugar and served with a little ramekin of lemon curd that was somehow sunnier than the yolk on my steak tartare, sunnier even than the rays pouring in through the windows into that ravishing dining room.
Dipping those madeleines into the curd, biting, tasting, raving and repeating did something wonderful: it perfected a meal that had been pretty close to perfect anyway. These are worth visiting the French House for in their own right, but I’m not sure that’s saying much, because so was everything else.
After we had finished them Borthwick left the kitchen – so he’d been at the stoves that day – and walked past our table and both Graeme and I thanked him and went bananas about the madeleines in a way that was probably more enthusiastic than it was coherent.
Borthwick very graciously, with an air of someone who’d had this conversation many times, told us that they’d originally been the creation of a Kiwi he worked with in the kitchen who had a real genius for baking. Although he had since quit cooking to bring up his kids the madeleines stayed on the menu, kind of his legacy.
I have no idea what the chap’s name was, but I suspect many London diners owe him a debt of thanks. Eating these madeleines I could sort of understand how Proust got all those novels out of them. Graeme said they had ruined Waitrose madeleines for him, which is in its way equally high praise.
I was sad to ask for our bill and to leave, but I knew that you couldn’t stay in that gorgeous room and eat nothing when other people could make excellent use of those tables, and I was also aware that it was London and that other lovely tables lay downstairs and beyond, and that I could drink Breton cider at the ones downstairs and carry on probing Graeme’s credentials to be the next Doctor Who and the first from Middlesbrough (“lots of planets have a North-East”, he proudly told me later).
Our bill, including a 12.5% service charge, came to just over £226. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that this was as good value as any meal I’ve had on duty this year.
The rest of the day was every bit as agreeable: drinks in the French House, an amble through Trafalgar Square and down to the Embankment for a couple of companionable glasses of wine sat outside Gordon’s, while Graeme gazed lovingly at every single dog at every single neighbouring table. And then we headed back to Paddington for – shamefully – a little booze fuelled sustenance at Market Halls before our journeys home.
But the way to best put that lunch in perspective is to think about the messages I got from Graeme the following day. “There isn’t a single course of that meal I’m not still thinking about” he said. “It was so good.” I’ve thought about it, and he’s right: I reckon I’ve thought of every single course at least once a day since Monday and, in the case of those madeleines, several times a day. And I’ve also thought about Graeme’s order, and how I would have been just as happy if it had been mine. And the things neither of us ordered – the rillette, or the tomato and lovage salad, or those frites: I’m pretty sure I’d adore those too.
Best of all, now that I’ve been to the French House and loved it, the fact that I can’t see a menu online goes from a homework-proofing source of anxiety to a matter of constant wonder and delight. I don’t know what I would get there, but I know that I would like it. Put that way, the prospect of going there again, which I’m sure I will, feels like a piece of magic you rarely get in restaurants these days.
So I am very glad I picked the French House this week and that, free from the need to keep up with the Joneses of the London food media, I was completely at liberty to do so. Because the French House has that indefinable feeling of authenticity that was somehow lacking when I visited the likes of Lapin earlier in the year. It feels like the team behind Lapin have been to, and loved, places like the French House. But it feels like the team behind the French House have been to, and loved, France. That’s it. That’s the difference between good and great in a nutshell.
The French House – 9.4 49 Dean Street, London, W1 5BG 020 74372477
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Late last Saturday morning I was sitting outside Missing Bean on Turl Street with my great friend Jerry, drinking a gorgeous latte in the summer sun, about to tuck into a pain au chocolat with impeccable lamination; I remember thinking that, on a day like that, there felt like no better place to be than Oxford in the sunshine. The train up from Reading had been packed, and we’d stood in the vestibule making conversation with our fellow captives, two young polite Swedes with perfect teeth and an Australian who had fought her way there to the loo and, realising how spacious it was, was tempted to lock herself in there for the rest of the trip.
And when we got to Oxford – well, it was a Saturday in August and the weather was fine, so naturally the city was packed. A curious blend, throngs of tourists swarming round Radcliffe Square, the Bodleian and the Covered Market but also packs of graduands, in their gowns, on their way to the Sheldonian Theatre for their final rite of passage. The Oxford year isn’t like the calendar year and this all happened on the very outskirts of it – one academic year ended, another not quite ready to begin, the city reclaimed by residents before the whole thing started again in October.
Nonetheless, from where we were sitting the view was gorgeous, the food and drink were excellent and the people watching was close to unparalleled. I’d asked Jerry if he was free on the off chance at very short notice and had been delighted that he was, and at this point we were barely an hour into what would turn out to be another effortless nine hour chinwag, punctuated by this walk or that, this spot of shopping or another, lunch, coffee, beer garden, train home. Even at the start of the day, I knew it would be a good one: with Jerry, it always was.
But would it be a good lunch? I’d thought carefully about this, because although I always have a wonderful time with Jerry when he joins me for a review I cannot say, hand on heart, that we usually have a good meal. I’m not saying that he’s a jinx, far from it, but I feel guilty that he’s joined me for some of the most middling meals I’ve had for the blog in the last few years. He was the person I took to Zia Lucia for pizza that was nothing more than pleasant, and then he also came with me to Maidenhead’s Storia for much the same experience.
Then to cap it all, the last time we lunched it was in Oxford – at Gee’s, where £200 got you a lot of disappointment. Because Jerry is so lovely, he never resents us marring our time together with mediocre food, which makes him a far better person than me. But I still feel bad about it, and I decided after that lunch in Gee’s that Jerry, more than anyone who comes out on duty with me, deserved a nice one. But where to take him?
The thing is, places I review for the blog probably fall into three categories. There are the ones I expect in advance will be good: these are more likely to happen in places like Oxford, London or Bristol that support a large and thriving restaurant scene. And then there are the places I merely hope will be good, and that hope can run the whole spectrum from reckless optimism to wishful thinking. Don’t get me wrong: I always hope for the best but sometimes, especially in Reading, that hope can border on the blinkered or forlorn.
Originally I was going to take Jerry to the Chester Arms, out off the Iffley Road, which falls into the first category. It’s famous for one thing and one thing only – its enormous steak platter, which comes groaning with handmade chips, cabbage and streaky bacon and béarnaise sauce, which they have been serving up for over fifteen years. I’ve heard about it so many times but never managed to make it there, but as we were deciding where to go Jerry dropped the bombshell: he’d just had a dental implant, so needed something a little less taxing on the molars. Would I mind if we went somewhere else?
So the subject of this week’s review falls into the rarer third category: places I have been, that I remember liking, where the mixture of hope and expectation is more of a balancing act. You don’t so much expect they’ll be good, you more hope that they’re as good as you remember. And Arbequina, the tapas restaurant down the Cowley Road, definitely falls into that category. It’s been there nine years, very much blazing the trail in that part of Oxford, and after getting a rave review in the Guardian the year after it opened it’s stayed out of the limelight, even though it’s one of only two Oxford restaurants to be mentioned in the Michelin guide.
It’s quietly done its thing. No cookbook, no appearance on Saturday Kitchen or Great British Menu, just keeping going and keeping afloat. Growth has been steady and incremental: first it expanded into the neighbouring unit four years ago and then, earlier this year, it announced that it was crowdfunding to open a second site in Oxford’s Covered Market, The council had approached them with an offer – not something that would ever happen here in Reading – and so far the crowdfunder is just over half the way there, with the restaurant still hoping to open the new site later this year.
So yes, Arbequina has history. And I have history with it too, because I’ve been eating there, on and off, for the last eight years or more. Plenty pre-COVID, when I always adored it, but only once, for some reason, since the pandemic ended. That was three and a half years ago, and it sowed seeds of doubt that maybe Arbequina wasn’t the restaurant it used to be. But I should have checked in on it long before now, and ambling across Magdalen Bridge with Jerry, in good time for our lunch reservation, I found myself getting excited about a reunion with somewhere that used to be one of my favourite places.
It’s in the fun part of the Cowley Road, past the restaurants Florence Pugh’s dad used to own, past Spiced Roots, but just before brilliant café Peloton Espresso, or Truck Records, or – far further up – the turning into the food enclave of Magdalen Road. It’s a lovely site that has kept the old shop fronts from the chemist and watchmaker who used to trade there, the tasteful writing in orange sans serif on the glass the only sign of Arbequina’s name. The room inside is lovely, with unpretentious decor, a handful of tables, both low and high, and a long zinc bar where you can sit and watch all the work in the very small open kitchen.
But it was a Saturday in August, and the awning was out, and neither of us could think of anything finer than sitting out on the pavement watching the Cowley Road live and breathe, so we did exactly that. I ordered a rebujito from their cocktail menu – a drink I grew to love in lockdown but which I had for the first time at Arbequina, rather than in Andulusia – and Jerry joined me. It was fresh and zippy, a harmonious blend of the lemon, mint and that savoury note of fino.
The other thing we had right from the off, while we made up our minds about the rest, was Arbequina’s tortilla. I remembered it well enough to know that you simply had to order it, and I also knew from repeated personal experience that sharing a slice felt like a good idea right up to the point where it turned up and you could only eat half of it. So I insisted that we got a couple, and Jerry agreed – partly because he’s just a very agreeable cove and partly because I sold it as about as kind on his teeth as it’s possible to get.
But ‘kind’ undersells it, because it’s a positively indulgent treat and, however good anything else you eat at Arbequina might be, it always sets the standard for other dishes to beat. I had forgotten, over the last three and a bit years, just how good it is, but it was magnificent: so soft, only just structured on the outside and a glorious mess within.
Egg, potato, onions, thyme – that’s all there is to it, but of course that’s a hopelessly reductive way to describe a masterpiece. Jerry did better, dubbing it sumptuous. Why do I never use that word in reviews? Maybe I was waiting for this dish.
Because you could have tortilla in dozens of places, in Spain and in this country, and not approach the brilliance of this. Every forkful but the last was wonderful, and the last was wonderful yet heartbreaking. But I knew that at least not sharing it meant that last forkful took longer to arrive. It was so sweet, so exquisite that I thought I tasted things in it – maybe nutmeg, maybe cinnamon – that weren’t there.
When Ben, the manager who looked after us that day, took our empty dishes away he explained that there really was nothing else in there. The sweetness came from the onions, which were cooked for a mind-blowing twelve hours. When Jerry heard that he said “I don’t envy your gas bill” and the manager smiled. Jerry had accidentally hit on one of the reasons hospitality is so thankless right now, and he meant no harm by it.
That tortilla under our belts, it was time to take a serious look at the menu and plan our assault on it. Many of the dishes I remembered from previous visits – chicken thighs with romesco, or toast thickly spread with ‘nduja and honey – were no longer there, but the menu still read nicely. Just shy of twenty dishes, most of them at or adjacent to a tenner: only one approaching twenty quid and a last, Iberico tenderloin to share, closer to forty.
It didn’t break into sections, or flow quite the way that the menu at, say, RAGÙ did, but it had plenty of potential and so Jerry and I did what I’d done countless times before – made a list of things we definitely wanted to eat, broke it up into waves and decided to order and graze, little and often. And along with that we had a gorgeous white, an Asturian albariño blend with a certain bracing saline quality: I’d chosen it for no other reason than that I’m on holiday in Asturia soon, and fancied getting a sneak preview.
My verdict? Roll on next month. At £45 it was the most expensive white on a very compact list – four reds and four whites, mostly from Spain, and a bigger selection of natural wines from all over. But the markup was far from harsh, because I reckon it would cost you about £20 retail.
Sometimes things can be delicious because they’re simple, and Arbequina’s chorizo was a classic example. Sliced lengthways and cooked on the plancha until the outsides were caramelised and blackened, it was superlative stuff. Not cooked in wine or cider, not sliced and fancified, just cooked and served. I’d love to know where Arbequina buys it – it’s certainly not Brindisa, because theirs can be a bouncy horror compared to this.
It irked me that they gave you five of them, though, because that’s an especially tricky number to share. Well, with anybody but Jerry, anyway. “Go on, you have the last one” he said. He’s just lovely like that.
Almost as simple, even more beautiful to look at – and perfect for a sunny al fresco afternoon – Arbequina’s watermelon with jamon was a joyous dish. The melon was plump, sweet and vibrant, and very much the star of the show. But where it wasn’t quite as successful as, say, the similar dish I had at RAGÙ recently, was that the supporting players were perhaps hiding their lights under a bushel somewhat. The two bits of jamon folded on top felt slightly meagre, the honey and chilli rather lurked at the bottom of the plate, shunning the limelight.
But to be fair, if you’re comparing this with the dish at RAGÙ it’s only fair to also note that this was £8, and the Bristol restaurant’s version was over 50% more expensive.
Jerry was in no rush – I always forget that he’s not a trencherman like I am – so at this point we asked the manager if we could hold fire, sip our wine and come back to the menu. And he let us do exactly that, keeping us posted on when the kitchen would take last orders so we could have the leisurely lunch we had in mind. Jerry and I had plenty to catch up on, so we nattered about all sorts, only punctuated by Jerry having an almost Tourettes-like reaction to every single electric scooter going past. I love the multitudes people contain: Jerry is possibly the most affable person I know, but he really hates those electric scooters.
The one dish Jerry really wanted from the menu was Arbequina’s take on an Andalusian classic, berenjanas con miel, or fried aubergine with honey. Now, I wouldn’t have ordered this because I’ve never liked it in Spain – usually the aubergine is sliced thin and fried in a crispy batter, and drizzled in a dark sticky molasses that is a million miles from honey. It takes some doing, in my book, to make aubergine a good thing and this dish, whenever I’ve had it abroad, doesn’t pull it off.
But Arbequina’s version takes everything that could be good about that dish and junks the rest. So we got three soft, caramelised wedges of aubergine, drizzled with an ambrosial molasses without any sour, burnt note, the whole thing bathed in a mild whipped feta – almost more yoghurt than feta – and scattered with pomegranate and torn mint. Have I sold it to you? I hope so. Arbequina sold it to me, both literally and metaphorically. One to add to the vanishingly small list of aubergine dishes I actually like, most of which are on the menu at Kungfu Kitchen.
Our last two savoury dishes were, apart from the tortilla, the highlights of the whole thing for me. I am a terrible rubbernecker in restaurants and I kept seeing a dish go past to other tables which looked eminently snackable, a giant heap of fried, crispy, golden things. But I wasn’t sure what it was, and when I asked the manager I couldn’t explain it well enough – I blame the wine – to get him to tell me what the dish was. But then Jerry wanted the prawns, so it turns out we ordered it by accident.
So these, it turns out, are Sanlucar Crystal prawns – little critters, soft shell, fried in a golden coating, dusted with chilli and served with a generous dollop of alioli. Never had them in my life, now fully wondering where they’ve been for the last fifty-one years.
And again the funny thing is that like the aubergine, this wouldn’t normally be in my wheelhouse at all. I don’t like whitebait, can be squeamish about eating things whole. I’m not one of those macho restaurant bloggers who likes to wank on about sucking the head of a prawn – they try to channel Bourdain, but really they’re Swiss Toni – and, with the exception of one meal in Kolae I’ve managed to convince myself that I really don’t want to munch on a prawn’s brains.
So why did I love these so much? I really don’t know, but I did. I keep using the word fresh in this review, or it feels like I do, but that’s what they were – so fresh, so light, so simple, with that spritz of citrus, that whisper-quiet crunch and the ozonic tang of the sea. On the Cowley Road. Now, I love the Cowley Road but I’m not going to pretend for a minute that eating these prawns there was in any way a congruous thing to do.
I hadn’t especially wanted Arbequina’s patatas bravas – I often think they’re a way to needlessly bulk up meals in tapas restaurants – but I was drawn to their more exotic sibling on the menu. And it was another really wise choice: billed as crispy new potatoes with tonnato and salsa verde, it was a real humdinger. The slices of potato, thicker than crisps but very much sharing that lineage, were stellar, a triumph of texture.
The thick slick of tonnato was perfect for dipping and dredging: I didn’t get an enormous amount of tuna from it but I did get plenty of savoury saltiness, so I’m guessing anchovies played a part. And I don’t think salsa verde showed up to this dish at all. In its place, I suppose they had deconstructed it by instead scattering everything with salt, parley and lemon zest. I probably would have preferred a salsa verde, because I love the stuff. But I’d forgotten about the salsa verde when this dish turned up so instead I just thought isn’t adding lemon zest to this clever? They knew better than I did.
By this point we’d been there the best part of an hour and a half, in which time tables had come and gone but the restaurant had kept a happy trickling momentum of customers in the sunshine. The Americans at the table next to us ordered some of that tortilla, and inexplicably left some of it: we decided, on balance, that we didn’t know them well enough to offer to take it off their hands.
We both fancied something from the dessert menu, and I talked Jerry into a red dessert wine which came in a wide, low tumbler and was like nectar. I didn’t catch the name, and my bill doesn’t give the detail, but red dessert wines are always worth a try if you find one, and I suspected it would go better with the chocolate mousse even than a Pedro Ximenez.
Other desserts are available, of course. Arbequina was offering a panna cotta, a Basque cheesecake or the almond-rich wonder that is a Tarta de Santiago. But I think chocolate mousse should be on far more menus than it is, so whenever I see one I order it – and Jerry, being kind to his vulnerable gob, followed suit. It was, as so often, the perfect way to finish a meal.
I’ve had Arbequina’s chocolate mousse plenty of times, often enough to track its evolution. It used to be a dense quenelle of the stuff – drizzled with olive oil, scattered with coarse salt, served with a torta de aciete for good measure. But over time, Arbequina’s version of this dish has changed, become less uncompromising, dropped the olive oil and become, on the outside at least, more conventional.
But don’t be fooled: it might come in a glass, the torta de aciete may have been replaced with a dome of crème fraîche but the mousse is still theirs, and still sublime. The salt now runs through the whole thing rather than just finishing it off, and it works beautifully.
It was the right way to end a lunch that had been unassailable in its rightness. Our bill came to just under £175, including tip, and nothing about it had felt out of kilter or anything short of marvellous. We settled up with glad hearts, and were on our way – the grand total of a couple of doors down to have a post-lunch coffee outside Peloton Espresso.
But then another delightful discovery lay in store – a short walk down the Cowley Road and we came to Rectory Road and the Star, the best Oxford pub I’d never been to and another long overdue discovery. It was like a cross between the best things about the Retreat and the Nag’s Head, with a huge handsome beer garden and Steady Rolling Man on tap.
So we grabbed a table, carried on chattering, beers passed, tables of people – and the people watching opportunities they presented – came and went. We had nowhere to be, and every reason to linger. Really it was the best afternoon, and one of the best things about it was knowing that at last, Jerry had got the excellent meal he deserved. Finally, I got him a nice one.
Much later on, we retraced our steps, walking east to west through Oxford, the sun setting in the distance. The pavement outside Arbequina was even busier, with people about to have one kind of outstanding dinner or another. The Cowley Road was alive, the antithesis to the stuffiness we’d encountered right in the centre. “It’s bit like the Oxford Road isn’t it?” said Jerry as we sloped back towards Magdalen Bridge. And I replied that it’s what the Oxford Road could be like, with better landlords and more imaginative restaurateurs. Still, it’s nice to dream.
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