Bistro du Vin Clerkenwell recently opened in London and will be the first of several restaurants to open up as part of the Hotel du Vin chain. The restaurant is welcoming, with a warm bistro-y feel. The décor is rustic and charming, with chalky grey and bluish tones. The walls are dotted with wine memorabilia, the fireplaces and corner pieces are stacked with decorative bottles and there is a strong use of wood throughout the restaurant. The intention is to provide a neighbourhood retreat, and Bistro du Vin has done this well. Diners have the option of eating at the pewter-topped bar (the longest dining bar in London) that circles the restaurant’s open kitchen, or to dine al fresco under during the warmer summer months. And of course, there is the option of eating at one of the many tables inside the cozy retreat.

We dined as guests of the restaurant and started with a Chase marmalade vodka martini (£10), a specialty of the house, which was damn good. This was followed by a some of the oysters on offer – fine de Claires (£3.50) and Cornish (£2.50) which were both delicious and fresh. But it was the former which won my heart with its robust meatiness.

Oysters

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Bonds Restaurant and Bar opened in 2002 with head chef Barry Tonks taking the helm in 2004. Formerly a bank, the restaurant offers up a blend of American walnut floors, oak fittings and magnificent columns. Classy and chic is what this place is, and its most spectacular feature, a stained glass vault roof, is a sight to behold. Tonks’ CV doesn’t read too badly either, and includes time spent at Michelin starred Chapter One and the now closed Putney Bridge Restaurant with Anthony Demetre. He then became Senior Sous Chef at The Landmark under John Burton-Race, during which time the restaurant earned two Michelin Stars. Finally, as the head chef at McClements, Tonks gained his first Michelin star at the age of 30.

I recently dined at Bonds as part of a bloggers dinner. A hand made ‘native blue’ lobster raviolo was fat and tasty (£16.95). It was too big to be considered elegant, and visually, the dish looked rather dull. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the plumpness of the raviolo as it was generously filled with lobster. It was finished with a heady and creamy Armagnac bisque which worked well with the delicious meaty filling.

‘Native blue’ lobster raviolo

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28-50 Wine Workshop and Kitchen, a wine bar and restaurant, is the brainchild of sommelier Xavier Rousset, one of the men behind the critically acclaimed one Michelin starred Texture which he owns with head chef Agnar Sverrisson and where I had a thrilling meal recently. The restaurant is so named as most of the world’s vineyards, in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, are located within these latitudes. Rousset is a master sommelier with a string of awards to his name including the accolade of winning Ruinart UK Sommelier of the Year at the tender age of 22. It therefore seems fitting that Rousset would open up a wine bar and call it 28-50 Wine Workshop and Kitchen.

I had such a thrilling meal at Texture recently I felt inspired to try 28-50 Wine Workshop and Kitchen. Despite its association with Texture, 28-50 Wine Workshop and Kitchen isn’t a Michelin starred restaurant. Rather what it purports to offer is decent French fare and a range of good wines at reasonable prices. 28-50 Wine Workshop and Kitchen has a choice of 15 red and 15 white wines by the glass, carafe and bottle. But most impressively, the wines by the glass include a 75ml option (from £2.15 to £20 for a 75ml glass), the beauty of which is the opportunity to try oodles of smaller glasses of different wines for less money than what you might otherwise have had to spend.

A foie gras and chicken liver parfait was wonderfully creamy, but it lacked a decent liver flavour and was more texture than taste. The accompanying peach chutney, with its rustic characteristics, worked well with the parfait. Less successful was the accompanying pickles which were so acidic that they were difficult to eat.

Foie gras & chicken liver parfait

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Sauterelle is a D&D restaurant located in The Royal Exchange at Bank. A beautiful, historical courtyard building, the shopping centre is split into several levels. On the ground floor are shops which run along its perimeter with a café/bar in the centre of the courtyard to be found. Sauterelle itself is located on the mezzanine level overlooking the ground floor café and shops. There’s no doubting that the building is impressive, and the restaurant is nicely done, but the blue fabric seating downgrades its look from super-chic to corporate. I was recently invited to preview the Valentine’s Day dinner at Sauterelle, and while I could imagine myself choosing to come here for a business or a shopping lunch with the girls, it’s probably not a venue I would choose for Valentine’s given its location in a shopping centre.

The Valentine’s menu is a three course menu (two choices per course) for £50. An amuse bouche of Yukon gold potato viccisoux (Sauterelle’s spelling, not mine), sourdough croutons and perigord truffle cream was tasty but a little salty. There was a nice flavour coming through from the truffle cream, but you couldn’t taste any crunchiness from the croutons.

Yukon gold potato viccisoux

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One of the things that irritate me about a restaurant is when they publish a menu on their website where the prices aren’t reasonably accurate. As was the case with Northbank, their website menu suggests that the average price of a main is £15.75 (range of £12 to £18.50 – accurate at the time of this post). But on their actual menu, the average main costs £17.50 (range of £13.50 to £21). This works out to be about 11% more. I think it’s rather cheeky for a restaurant to not update their prices with reasonable accuracy as it may mislead a customer into going to the restaurant when they might not have otherwise gone. Ok, it’s only a couple of quid, but its still 11%.

The décor at Northbank is pretty swanky. It looks modern and smart, has quite a masculine feel to it, and boasts of a prime location on the Thames overlooking the Tate Modern. With its location, I imagine that its usual crowd are tourists and city types.

A venison, rabbit and hare terrine with quince jelly and toast (£8) was meaty, well seasoned and very tasty. This was very well done, but the piece we got was stingy. It had been very thinly sliced and could have done with about fifty percent more. Cheeky I say.

Venison, rabbit & hare terrine

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I have to confess that I really wasn’t in the mood for going to Providence. Several days of cruising around Los Angeles like a madwoman, plus the 10 hours that I had spent at Universal Studios prior to arriving at the restaurant had left me exhausted. But I decided to persevere, and boy, was I glad that I did. The first two courses at this restaurant were so stunning, they left me gobsmacked.

But let’s start with the amuse bouches at this 2009 two star Michelin holder. (If you read my Spago blog post, you will know that the Michelin guide, in a cost cutting measure, stopped reviewing the city of Los Angeles in 2010. Therefore, while Providence had two stars in 2009, it technically doesn’t have any at the moment.) The amuse bouches, from left to right, consisted of gin and tonic jelly; a greyhound (grapefruit and vodka) raviolo; and Tasman sea trout tartare with lemon jelly, rice crackers, four spices and brook trout roe. With the citrus-y elements of each, all three had a nice zing to them.

Amuse bouche

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Here begins the first of several write-ups from my flying visit to the States recently. I will do my best to blog these posts ASAP. But you know how it is – with work and a busy schedule, it will probably take me longer than I would like. Please bear with me. In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy the taste of the first instalment – SPAGO.

Spago

With the help of some of my American readers (thanks to you all – you know who you are) I managed to come up with a fantastic shortlist of restaurants to try. Spago Beverly Hills is the Los Angeles flagship restaurant of Wolfgang Puck, that all-conquering Austrian-born celebrity chef to the superstars, who for the last 16 years has catered at the star-studded post Oscar’s Governor’s Ball. With its guest list being 1,500 long, this is no mean feat. (An interesting fact about the Governor’s Ball which I picked up during a tour of the Kodak Theatre, the home of the Academy Awards ceremony: there is always one item on the menu that it shaped like the Oscar’s statuette. This year it was the hand-cut Oscar croutons in the salmon starter – can you imagine making 1,500 of these?)

Puck’s name is indelibly marked everywhere. His empire extends across the US, and covers a range of eateries (casual to fine dining), catering products, supermarket food ranges, cookware, and of course, cook books. So I was sceptical about Spago. Could it possibly live up to all the hype? Would it really be that good? It held two stars in 2009, but was that based purely on the fame of the chef’s name as sometimes Michelin restaurants tend to be? (Note that in a backwards, cost cutting measure for Michelin, the guide stopped reviewing the city of Los Angeles in 2010. Therefore there are no restaurants in LA with stars (Michelin ones, that is) at the moment). I debated long and hard about whether to go to Spago, especially given my time limitations, but in the end I decided to try it. After all, this restaurant embodies everything that is LA.

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The excitement of getting to dine at Bruno Loubet’s latest London reincarnation – Bistrot Bruno Loubet at The Zetter Hotel – was surpassed, for me anyway, by the fact that we got to sit next to Sir Michael Caine during dinner. To be precise, he was actually sitting at the table next to us with his beautiful wife Shakira (you would never believe she’s 63), but he was so close to me I could have easily tapped him on his shoulder. He sounds just like he does on the big screen, all nasally in that charming, endearing kind of way. I pretended to be all cool, like I hadn’t noticed him, but I must admit to secretly gaping at him out of the corner of my eye.

Well it was no surprise that he would get fawned over – he is a huge celebrity after all. But what was surprising was just how useless our assigned waiter was. He took his time to come and take our order. And when he did come, he didn’t have a pen, so he walked off to get one, and then for some reason forgot to come back. What kind of waiter doesn’t have a pen? He also took his time delivering our bread. But that said, some of the other waiters who also served us during the evening were lovely and attentive, so I don’t think it would be fair to say that all of the service was bad.

Bruno Loubet earnt a notable reputation as a chef under the likes of Pierre Koffman and Raymond Blanc in the 1990s, before going on to successfully head up restaurants Bistro Bruno and L’Odeon. He spent much of the Noughties in Australia, but a decade later, and he’s back in London. With his background, it’s unsurprising that Bistrot Bruno Loubet is classically French.

Guinea fowl boudin blanc (£7) was exquisitely light with a mousse-like texture, but it was a touch heavy on the seasoning. The accompanying creamy leek fondue and chervil sauce married beautifully with the gentle guinea fowl flavour. Having once watched a boudin blanc demonstration at Le Cordon Bleu, this is a fairly complex dish to make. This was a wonderful rendition of the Lyonnaise classic.

Guinea fowl boudin blanc

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