Tag: Soho

Restaurant review: The French House, Soho

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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

https://www.frenchhousesoho.com

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Restaurant review: Bébé Bob, Soho

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Sometimes I wonder if I’m still true to the newcomer who started out reviewing neighbourhood Sardinian restaurant Pepe Sale all that time ago. Have I managed to keep my finger on the pulse of what Reading diners really want from a meal out, or has my head been turned by all those great meals, all that fine dining, all those plaudits and mentions in the national press? It was something that crossed my mind from time to time, especially as I was sitting in Soho House – my second Soho House of the afternoon – with my friend James, polishing off a carafe of Viognier, ready to scoot across town to Bébé Bob, a restaurant which sells rotisserie chicken at just under forty pounds a head.

If any of you are still reading after that opening paragraph, I feel I should explain: James suggested going to Soho House as he’d got membership a few weeks ago. And the chance to experience life on the other side of those discreet doors, to see how the other half lives – well, how could I resist? So I accompanied him, feeling quite the bumpkin, as he scanned in using the app on his phone and the woman on reception, ultra polite and polished, greeted us by name and explained the facilities, including various roof terraces and the cinema in the basement where they did regular screenings. I tried not to look too “Home Counties hick up in London for the day”, no doubt failing miserably.

Inside everything was ridiculously tasteful, the place filled with the buzz and clamour of a newborn London weekend. I tried to be insouciant, but of course I was meerkatting every time someone went past. Would I see a celebrity? (The answer, by the way, was no.) If anything, the interior was more stylish than some of the people who wandered past, distinctly nouveau, laden down with carriers bearing the logo or one designer or another. I entertained myself trying to guess their story; tech bro; footballer’s agent; lottery-winning fish out of water. What would people have thought James’ and my story was?

But anyway, if I sound sniffy I don’t mean to; it was a fascinating experience, made more fascinating by the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be repeated any time soon. But the chair was comfy, the sunlight flooding in from the roof terrace was welcome, the people watching was Olympic standard and the Viognier was crisp and peachy. I would be a hypocrite if I tried to claim I hadn’t had a wonderful time.

But in the course of writing this I did a bit of research and there were a couple of stories a few months ago saying that Soho House had lost its exclusivity and cachet – one of them in Tatler, no less, saying effectively that they’re admitting all sorts these days. That was in March, but I would say that even if it hadn’t happened by then, the club letting me through the door in April might have signified the moment it truly jumped the shark. The following week I sent James a meme on Instagram describing Soho House as “the Freemasons for influencers”: he didn’t dignify it with a response.

Anyway, I was the one that had chosen Bébe Bob for our dinner reservation, the second half of a one day chicken festival which commenced with disappointing fried chicken at Coqfighter. I thought I was on safer ground with Bébe Bob, an offshoot of Soho’s famous/infamous Bob Bob Ricard specialising in rotisserie chicken almost to the exclusion of everything else. Their website rather spells it out, Any main course the customer wants, as long as it’s chicken or chicken. It also rather splendidly says that Fashionwear is welcome, activewear is not.

Bébé Bob opened last October and has already attracted a raft of plaudits from the people who know about these things. Grace Dent went there at the start of the year and seemed to enjoy herself, even if she called it a “chicken and chips place that thinks it is ‘it'” and made a tired joke about Margo from The Good Life. And restaurant guru Andy Hayler – recently seen enjoying Clay’s Kitchen – visited in March, lavishing the chicken with, by his standards, fulsome praise: “it was a joy (16/20)”, he raved, presumably having a lie down in a darkened room afterwards.

All good omens, then. And I have to say, the interior of Bébé Bob was one of the most gorgeous, luxe spaces I’ve eaten in for as long as I could remember. They claim it’s inspired by the Golden Age, and I can kind of see that. Everything is chic, sleek and deco, plush and subtly lit, and you’ll struggle to find a sharp edge anywhere, from the curvy, velvety chairs to the rounded corners of the wood panelling. Impeccably tasteful, too, especially the art on the walls, Kandinsky squiggles in Mondrian colours. I loved the tiled floor too, reminiscent of Clarice Cliff, although research suggests they inherited that from Folie, the previous restaurant at this site.

But overall, the whole thing was enormous fun, grand but not po-faced, and you got a sense of being on a Cunard liner in the Thirties, going from somewhere glamorous to somewhere equally glamorous. I half expected the captain to announce that we would be docking at Biarritz on the hour, or Poirot to assemble everybody in the salon and reveal the identity of the murderer.

Bébé Bob’s menu does indeed live up to that promise of chicken main courses to the exclusion of all other – and just the two kinds, Vendée for nineteen pounds a pop, or Landais for thirty-nine. The former is “raised outside for most of its life”, which does rather make you wonder about the other less enjoyable parts, while the latter is corn and milk-fed, free-range and given more time and space, apparently developing a deeper flavour as a result. Could it be worth thirty-nine pounds, though?

Grace Dent never found out, because they’d run out when she went, while Andy Hayler, always one to throw money at a problem, ordered the Landais and said it was in a completely different league to anything you could get in this country. Our server, one of a brigade of charming and efficient servers, told us they only had one of the Landais left. We reserved it.

“We were always going to go for the expensive chicken, weren’t we?” said James. We’d spent the afternoon in Soho House drinking cocktails and wine after drinks at the French House. Of course we were.

The menu says that although chicken is the only main on offer, starters are “plentiful”. In reality there were six, one of which was a salad, although I guess I wasn’t counting the three varieties of caviar also available. Starters were between twelve and twenty-two quid and I suppose could have been described as timeless or retro, depending on your perspective: that’s why Grace Dent made that crack about Margo Leadbetter.

James decided to try the prawn cocktail, possibly the archetypal starter from days gone by, and seemed to like it but not love it. The Marie Rose apparently had quite a kick to it, although it wasn’t clear where from: the menu said that cognac was involved but that didn’t explain the heat.

I had been torn between egg mayonnaise and smoked salmon, so I asked our server for advice. He immediately came down on the side of the former. “It’s a lighter dish” he went on to explain. Well, happy days, I thought: it’s been a day of excess already and I had a wedding suit to slim into and only two weeks to do it. We even turned down the offer of bread, that’s how well behaved I was trying to be.

Well, I have to congratulate our server for his gift for understatement, because light doesn’t do it justice. It wasn’t egg mayonnaise as I’m used to, instead being a singly impeccable boiled egg, split open, each half adorned with a firm, salty Cantabrian anchovy. Under that, capers and herbs and a smudge of a delicious, punchy mayonnaise with a hefty hit of Dijon mustard. All very nice, but approaching amuse bouche levels for twelve pounds. I found myself wishing I hadn’t spurned the bread after all.

The thing is, whatever the quibbles about the food you couldn’t knock the location, the surroundings or the sense of occasion. We sipped our way through a very decent bottle of sauvignon blanc from the Loire, which was mentioned in Andy Hayler’s review. It was, in his own effusive words, “Forty-three pounds for a bottle that you can find in the high street for fourteen”. To give you an idea of the wine list, this was easily one of the cheapest wines on there – it was actually forty-four, but that’s inflation for you – and you could easily spend north of sixty quid without even necessarily meaning to.

Service really was lovely, but there was an interesting moment when the servers approached the table next to us with their chicken, ready to serve it with ceremony and solemnity. Our neighbours were American – I’d already clocked that from the accent – but they’d obviously spent too much time in the U.K. I could tell that from their reaction to the arrival of their main course.

“Goodness, that’s very quick chicken” the woman said. This is the kind of thing an English person would say, when what they meant was why the hell are you bringing this out almost immediately after I’ve ordered? I’d expect that in Nando’s, not somewhere like this. Which is, to be fair, the kind of thing I’d expect an American to say when rushed in a British restaurant. When she instead decided to express passive-aggressive surprise I didn’t know whether to be impressed or disappointed; James and I did lean over, after the server had gone, to express our solidarity.

Maybe you only get the delay if you order the fancy pants chicken. That would explain why ours arrived about quarter of an hour after we’d finished our starters – although even that, come to think of it, felt a little bit quick. From the text on the menu nothing about this chicken’s life had been rushed, so it was a pity this part was. It deserved better. But you had to hand it to them for the ceremony – each of us had a breast and a leg reverently placed on our plate, a poultry yin and yang, with the oyster delicately popped in the middle. And finally, thick jus was drizzled from a little jug, anointing the whole lot: I now declare the most expensive chicken you’ll ever eat in your life, open.

I know you want to know what a thirty-nine pound portion of roast chicken tastes like. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s, err, nice. I didn’t get a stunning moment of clarity where I thought “this is why!” The meat was dense, and I’d like to think I perceived the epic intensity of flavour that the experts had picked up on, but I can’t say I could. These chickens are apparently bigger, from all that time spent living the life of Riley, eating corn and drinking milk in their own sweet time, but I can’t say I felt like there was a huge amount of meat. The skin was rather pleasant, but lacked that crispiness that would have made it top tier. I almost wish I’d been able to try both types of chicken side by side: perhaps then I would have realised what all this money bought you, but as it was I wasn’t sure I had.

By way of comparison, the best rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had – so far, at least – is in a renowned Lisbon restaurant called Bonjardim. There they rub the chicken with salt and lemon until the skin is almost like cracking. It’s outstanding stuff – I once went to Lisbon on holiday and ate there twice in one trip – and as it happens the following weekend James was on a short trip to Lisbon so I told him to check Bonjardim out. True to his word he sent me a photo that induced envy and hunger and made me curse my pre-wedding diet. This shat on Bébé Bob was his pithy review, delivered via iMessage. It cost him ten Euros.

It’s especially a shame because the peripherals were all terrific. The chicken jus almost made it all worthwhile, so deep and sticky and savoury. Which of course means there was nowhere near enough of it to go round: if it had been up to me there would have been a huge bowl of the stuff, and then I might gladly have foregone the chicken. I wondered if the chicken jus was specifically Landais chicken jus, not that it would have justified the thirty-nine quid,

Also excellent was the truffled cauliflower cheese – burnished and brilliantly moreish with a good whiff of truffle without being overpowering. It had to be good for nine quid, but it pretty much was. Although to be fair, by that point after a day in Soho I might have been anaesthetised to the point where the cost of things didn’t properly register with me. It’s only money, after all. And I rather liked the potatoes, which were roasted in chicken fat. They looked when they turned up like they might be a little anaemic, carvery-grade stuff, but feeling the golden shell crack under a knife I realised they were the real deal.

It felt like a little bit of a waste not having dessert, but we both felt like we’d dented our wallets enough and the Elizabeth Line was calling to us. In any event, I wouldn’t have called the dessert menu plentiful either, as out of the seven desserts on offer one was a pair of chocolate truffles, a second was a shot of lemon infused vodka and a third was lemon sorbet with – yes, you’ve guessed – a shot of vodka. That gives you four proper desserts, one of which is a brownie: no wonder we passed.

And that’s when we had that ouch moment that comes in some restaurants, the moment when even though all the prices are clearly displayed throughout and you know exactly what you’re ordering, the bill arrived. Our meal for two – a bottle of wine, two starters, two chickens, two sides and some mineral water – came to just over a hundred and ninety pounds, including service. We knew it would be that much, we ordered the holy grail of chicken, nobody mugged us in an alleyway, but still. We also both mentally tracked back many of the meals we’d ordered and loved over the last few years. The vast majority of them cost less than Bébé Bob.

So that was the end of ChickenFest 2024. We hopped on the train and headed back west full of chicken and equally full of questions. Was Bébé Bob a good restaurant, an average one or a bit of a rip-off? Even as I sit down to tap out the final paragraphs on this review I’m still not entirely sure. It’s a great example of how a restaurant is more than the sum of its parts because as theatre, as an experience, I loved Bébé Bob’s silliness. The starters were decent but small, the chicken was decent but too expensive. What does that amount to? What does it all mean?

Well, search me. I imagine ninety-five per cent of you will look at the mark at the bottom and think it doesn’t reflect the meal I had, but I don’t even know what I think of the meal I had, not even now. I’ve rarely been to a restaurant that so unapologetically makes you take it on its own terms. I’m glad I went once – it’s only money – but I can’t imagine I’d ever go again. If you went and had, in the immortal words of Franck Eggelhoffer, the cheaper chicken, you might emerge having spent less and still had a very creditable meal.

But is that the point, and even then would it be enough when you think of all the excellent restaurants a stone’s throw from Golden Square? Maybe not. Bébé Bob, like Soho House, is a peek into another world, a vision of a life where most of the people there have considerably more money than I do. It was fun to visit: I had a blast. But it was even nicer to come home afterwards.

Bébé Bob – 7.0
37 Golden Square, London, W1F 9LB
020 72421000

https://www.bebebob.com

Restaurant review: Coqfighter, Soho

On By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

Last May, in a bit of a departure for the blog, I reviewed two chicken places in London back to back: Portuguese Casa do Frango, just off Regent Street, and fried chicken specialists Chick ‘N’ Sours in Covent Garden. It was a day of excess with my good friend – and chicken obsessive, naturally – James, in what we dubbed ChickenFest, and we resolved at the start of the year to make it an annual event. That’s how we ended up, on a Friday in April, perched at a table in Soho, ready to do it all over again.

We had wound up in Coqfighter, because my research had suggested that it was very much an equivalent of Chick ‘N’ Sours. It started out in Boxpark, both in Croydon and Shoreditch, before opening a bricks and mortar site five years ago – on Beak Street, which is presumably an accident but a happy accident nonetheless. The reviews I’d seen had been complimentary, although more than one was comped, and they led me to expect a more stripped-down menu than at Chick ‘N’ Sours, but one done very well. Coqfighter also boasts an Instagram feed that would make most people ravenous: it certainly had that effect on me.

In the course of writing this review I went back and looked at quite a few reviews from other people, and it’s strange that literally not a single one told you anything about the room. I wonder why that is, because for me it was the wrong side of the line between functional and dysfunctional. The façade was pitch black, and beyond it the front room was very unprepossessing, One wall was gleaming white metro tiles, the other a vague terra cotta, but everything else was black too.

The furniture was also strange: little black tables, each with a couple of low little black backless stools. There was a second room out back, but it was further from the daylight and far dingier, so we decided against it. From Google image searches the tables used to be longer, communal things: that may or may not be your idea of hell, but I just felt far too old for these kind of seats. Where were you meant to put your coat? I never thought a restaurant would make me feel nostalgic about wedging my well-padded posterior into the ubiquitous Tolix chair, but Coqfighter managed it.

Coqfighter’s menu is more Honest Burgers than Chick ‘N’ Sours, all main courses and sides, no starters. Chicken came in all its permutations: burgers, wings, tenders, fried on the bone and a couple of half roast chicken options. Sides, unless they were also made of chicken – which the best sides might well be, come to think of it – consisted of a couple of types of fries, two different kinds of sweetcorn, coleslaw and a cucumber and sesame salad.

Not inspirational stuff, and I certainly didn’t see anything to rival Chick ‘N’ Sours’ profoundly good chicken toasts. But if you like fried chicken, as James and I surely did, there was plenty here to appreciate. Keenly priced, too: the most expensive dishes were twelve pounds or thereabouts, sides roughly a fiver. Coqfighter’s beer is made by Orbit, so we both had a two-thirds of their house lager and a couple of sodas while we made up our mind. The beer, really, was indistinguishable from a good macro lager like the one I’d had at the Moderation a couple of weeks before. The sodas were a surprise hit – James loved his raspberry lemonade and my sour cherry soda, more sweet than sour, was a real delight.

We ran into headwinds when we placed our order, or rather tried to. I’d earmarked a burger, so I ordered that with no problem. But James fancied the Thai style half roast chicken, Coqfighter’s take on gai yang with soy, ginger and lemongrass, only to be told by our server that it wouldn’t be ready for another forty-five minutes. This was at a quarter to one: were we happy to wait? We weren’t, so James went for his second choice, a two piece of drumstick and thigh on the bone with miso butter gravy.

“Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t do that any more. We’re meant to be taking it off the menu.”

I have to say our server was lovely, friendly and attentive and she later told us, when we were settling up, that it was only her second day in the job. And I did feel for her, sent out to have difficult conversations with customers about how one section of the menu wasn’t available at lunchtime while another dish wasn’t available full stop. Nonplussed, James picked his third and fourth choices instead, and although he was ultra polite, as he always is, I could tell he was a little unimpressed.

Still, you can only order from the menu in front of you on the day and you can only review what you’ve ordered. With that in mind, I think I got the best of things with the chicken burger. The texture was spot on, the coating crunchy and crenellated, and I’m always happy to see a sesame seed bun rather than brioche. The menu doesn’t say whether it was thigh or breast but I think it was the former, which would always be my preference. And the plus of it being fairly compact was that you could actually pick it up and eat it without disgracing yourself or having to resort to the infra dig spectacle of using a knife and fork.

Those were the pluses. But the downside of it being compact was that it didn’t resemble any pictures of Coqfighter’s burgers I’d seen, either on their social media or other reviews. Usually the chicken offered a huge amount of elevation and poked out untidily from either side of the bun as if the bun simply couldn’t contain it, the extraneous bits practically asking to be nibbled. No such joy here. I’d chosen the honey ginger buffalo burger, thinking that it combined three of my favourite things in one magical sauce, but the end result was out of kilter, more sweetness than bite. And what was it with the sauce oozing out on to the plate like a perforated egg yolk? It just made it soggier than it should have been.

James’ tenders, which are the kind of thing I always order in places like this, also looked the part but couldn’t convincingly play the part. They were nearly there but not quite, and it was all about the texture. “The seasoning of these is actually spot on” said James, “but they don’t have the crunch. They needed a little longer in the fryer.” I thought James was being fair: my instant reaction, to be honest, was that KFC does these every bit as well,

This is also the point to mention the dips because we went crazy with these and again, they promised so much but didn’t live up to it. So we had a Korean hot sauce which tasted neither hot nor Korean, and a Korean barbecue sauce which was about as Korean as I am. Neither had ever been anywhere near any gochujang, as far as I could tell: is it just the fashion now to dub things Korean when they’re nothing of the sort? Neither of these was any better than the contents of a little plastic cuboid tub from KFC or McDonalds. We also had a sambal mayo which I imagine did both sambal and mayo a disservice, and some kind of ranch thing.

“I’m pretty sure I saw them all coming out plastic bottles” was James’ observation: he had a better view of that than I did. None of them livened up the chips, which were bought in and dreary. I spotted a few grey patches on mine, which made me leave a fair amount of them, but I didn’t feel like I was missing out. Apparently they are “tossed in our house shake”, but their house shake appeared to be some kind of acrid combination of paprika and dust.

James had also gone for the wings, because he believes that chicken on the bone is always the best way to check any restaurant’s chicken. He didn’t mind these, and they were tossed not sauced – he has firmly held beliefs that this is The Only Way – but had the same kind of feedback as me about the honey ginger buffalo sauce, It tried to be three things at once and failed at all of them.

We agreed to compare notes properly on our debrief in the pub, but even from the conversation we had in the restaurant, the expressions and raised eyebrows, I had an inkling we were on the same page. Keen to get on with our day and put any disappointment behind us we settled up: it came to sixty pounds, including tip.

After a wander and a shop, we grabbed a table at the French House and a large bottle of Breton cider and carried out the post mortem. It was mid-afternoon, the time I like the French House best, and the pub was starting to fill with the kind of characters who only seem to exist in the French House at three in the afternoon. Where did they live the rest of the time? I’d missed Soho, it had been far too long.

“The funny thing is, they were doing a lot of Deliveroo” said James. “I think I must have seen eight different riders turn up in the time we’ve been having lunch.” He was right, and at least a couple had been the same rider twice – either that, or it was a glitch in the Matrix.

“In fairness, if you could eat one of those burgers at your desk you’d probably feel like you were winning at life.” I said. I had a momentary flashback to a time many years and a lifetime ago when a colleague and I picked up a family bucket from KFC, took it back to work and ate it at our desks. It was worth the funny looks we got from the people in the lift. Perhaps we should have offered them a drumstick.

“I just think about Bristol,” said James, “and the chicken at Wings Diner. It’s miles better than this.”

“And I know you didn’t rate the branch of Eat The Bird that’s opened in Bristol, but the one in Exeter was also a different level to Coqfighter.”

“I think Chick ‘N’ Sours is better than this, too.”

I took a glug of my cider and weighed up the pros and cons. I thought about that sesame chicken toast, and how nearly a year on I still remembered it.

“I think you’re right.”

So there you have it: on a simplistic level this is Bristol 1, London 0 but to bring it back to Reading – where I live – Coqfighter isn’t good enough to justify a trip to London, not even if you’re a chicken-fixated eccentric on an annual pilgrimage like James and me. It does highlight, though, that Reading is still missing someone who does this really well: that’s why, when I did my guide to how to avoid chains last week, I didn’t propose an alternative to KFC.

There’s good fried chicken at Clay’s, at Soju, at The Bap, but there’s nothing in the genre of Southern fried chicken to write home about (and yes, I’ve tried Popeyes). You only get that when Gurt Wings comes to town, which is about once a month. I think the new Siren tap room is missing a trick not specialising in this: instead they’re leading with burgers, which feels more of a 2014 Big Idea than a 2024 one. Still, I’m sure they know what they’re doing.

Never mind. Just as the best way to cope with the post holiday blues is to book the next one, the best way to handle this disappointment was also to look to the future. So James and I talked it over, over a second bottle of Breton cider, and decided: next year we’re going to widen the scope of ChickenFest to include duck. We’ll call it PoultryFest, we’ve got it all figured out. The thing is, as we wandered through Chinatown I saw some fine specimens in the windows of several restaurants, and I figured it was time to diversify. It’s important, after all, not to get too set in your ways.

Coqfighter – 6.5
75 Beak Street, London W1F 9SS
020 77344001

https://www.coqfighter.com