The Roux family are the closest thing we have to cooking royalty here in the UK. So the opening of Roux at The Landau, a collaborative effort between father and son Albert and Michel Jnr, was always going to be newsworthy. Housed in the Langham Hotel on Regent Street, the dining room has been elegantly and stylishly refurbished by interior designer David Collins. His client list includes such notable restaurants as J Sheeky, Locanda Locatelli, Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay and Bob Bob Ricard (ok I didn’t like the food at Bob Bob Ricard, but I did like the clever décor). The most memorable aspect about the design was the vaulted passageway that guides you through the restaurant’s treasured wine collection before leading you into the dining room.

Chef de Cuisine is Chris King, Michel’s young protégée who spent five years at Le Gavroche before working at Per Se in New York and then at Roux at Parliament Square as the sous chef.

I dined as a guest of Roux at The Landau. Amuse bouches included a creamy remoulade topped with a soft quail’s egg, spicy chorizo spring rolls and a fragrant beef tartare finished with truffle. These were very tasty.

Amuse bouche

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Vinoteca Marylebone is the sister restaurant of the original Vinoteca wine bar and restaurant in Farringdon. It opened in November last year, but unlike Brawn, the sister restaurant of that other well known wine bar, Terroirs, it has barely registered on the Richter Scale of restaurant openings. I found out about it purely by chance. Thinking I would go to the branch in Farringdon, I stumbled across the details of the Marylebone branch when I went onto the Vinoteca website. Despite the lack of PR fanfare, the restaurant is already doing a thumping trade. It was packed during our visit and justifiable so. Its concept is simple – good, seasonal food, in an ever changing menu, matched with one of the 25 wines that are available by the glass. There are also 280 reasonably priced bottles to choose from.

Vinoteca Marylebone is cosy and intimate. It does not take reservations, but there’s a bar area to drink at while you wait. Due to the lack of carpeting and rugs on the floor, its only drawback was that it was incredibly noisy which made conversation a little difficult. But this can also be construed as fantastically atmospheric.

We started with a heavenly smoked eel with celeriac and apple remoulade and wheaten toast (£8). The eel was delicate, succulent and lightly smoked, and the creaminess of the deftly made remoulade was a perfect match. There was a hint of sweetness in the well-made, flavoursome bread which made this dish all the more appetising. The suggested wine, an Austrian 2009 Kamptal Gruner Veltliner ‘Kies’, Kurt Angerer (£4.50 for 125ml) was a great accompaniment.

Smoked eel

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Is Nobu Berkeley the most uptight and pretentious restaurant in London? Well, judging from my experience, it most certainly deserves to be on the shortlist.

So here are some examples for you:

(1) Handing my coat to the ice maiden at reception invoked nothing but a snooty glare. She said and did nothing other than stand there until the coat lady turned up to take it (I mean, how was I suppose to know that it was someone else’s job?).

(2) It appears that if you sit in the bar area downstairs with a drink, and it runs past your reservation time, another ice maiden will not hesitate to come over and insist you go upstairs to your table. Apparently the restaurant only holds tables for 25 minutes and each sitting is two hours. I may not have been Cheryl Cole, but was it really necessary to exercise such Stalinist muscle when we were spending money at the bar and the restaurant was one-third empty throughout the evening?

So upstairs there were three more beautiful ice maidens behind another reception counter who didn’t appear to be doing very much other than look pretentious and occasionally take people to their tables. To be fair, the waiter that served us was quite friendly, but then he probably wasn’t some struggling model type.

The bar downstairs is the height of sophistication and elegance and justifies its tag as an A-list celebrity hangout joint. The décor in the dining room upstairs was far less striking but was far more stylish than Nobu London on Old Park Lane which I thought looked like it had been fitted out as an expensive canteen.

Nobuyuki “Nobu” Matsuhisa spent three years in Lima and a short stint in Buenos Aires in his twenties, and it was there that he developed his fusion Japanese and South American style. It was therefore unsurprising to see dishes such as seafood ceviche (£10) on the menu. Containing a mixture of lovely fresh prawn, salmon and turbot, there was also a touch of coriander which was beautifully fragrant. However there was too much citrus in the dish which slightly overpowered the delicate flavours of the seafood.

Seafood ceviche

I am a big fan of Atari-ya on James Street. The sushi is super fresh which is to be expected of a business that imports premium grade sashimi fish and supplies high end restaurants such as Nobu and Zuma. Prices at the James Street branch were very reasonable when I last went, especially given the quality. And its proximity to Oxford Street means that it’s an easy diversion when one is out on a shopping expedition.

Atari-ya seems to be branching out. Earlier this year they took over Sushi-Hiro in Ealing Common. There’s now a branch in Swiss Cottage as well which is where I recently visited.

Ohitashi (boiled spinach – £3.50) was topped with bonito flakes and finished with a lovely sauce of dashi and soya sauce.

Ohitashi

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Whenever a restaurant bears the name of Nigel Platts-Martin, you know you will be assured of quality and consistency. With a string of well-known critically acclaimed restaurants, Nigel, a former lawyer turned restaurateur, seems to have that foodie magic that guarantees success. His restaurants include The Square, The Ledbury, Chez Bruce, La Trompette and The Glasshouse, the latter three which he owns with Bruce Poole, chef of Chez Bruce. What is also notable about these three sister restaurants is how reasonably priced they are. Even though all three establishments bear a Michelin star, prices have been kept at are around the £40-£45 mark for three courses.

A recent visit to The Glasshouse (£34.50 for two courses, £39.50 for three courses) saw me start with the grilled mackerel and miso, oyster dressing, shiso leaf and crispy squid. An inspired sounding dish, it did little to live up to expectations. The mackerel was well cooked, but the skin tasted slightly burnt. The miso sauce, a combination of miso, uzu, sake and mirin, had a nice flavour, but was extremely rich, as was the oyster dressing made with oyster sauce, iceberg lettuce, oysters and mayonnaise. The combination of these two heavy tastes overwhelmed the fish, drowning out its natural sweetness. I love shiso, but rather than being used as a garnish, it was buried under the oyster dressing which left this beautiful herb soggy and bereft of the exotic aroma that it usually exudes. Japanese food is about the clarity of flavour and the cleanliness of the palate. Here I found a heavy and muddled dish that didn’t quite live up to its Japanese inspirations. There was good technique here if you analysed each of the components individually, but the dish as a whole was flawed.

But as a saving grace, the wonderful accompanying crispy squid – a mixture of squid, prawns and mushrooms wrapped in nori and a wonderfully crispy, pastry – was divine. I would have happily had ten of these and forgotten the rest.

Grilled mackerel

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As pointed out to me by some readers, Sushi Hiro which has now closed, use to be the Japanese restaurant favoured by chefs Heston Blumenthal and Anthony Demetre of Arbutus. But just a few steps down the road is another Japanese gem, Kiraku. The story goes that Heston only stumbled across Sushi Hiro because he was trying to get a table at Kiraku after being sent there by the head of his experimental kitchen, Kyle Connaughton. Finding the latter full, he wandered down to Sushi Hiro instead.

I haven’t been to Kiraku in a while, but I use to be a bit of a regular there, and time and time again I was hooked by the kaki fry (fried oysters: £8.80) and the saba shio (grilled mackerel: £6.90), so much so, I had to introduce the delights of these two dishes to my friends. They were suitable impressed. The meaty flavour of the giant sized oysters exploding in your mouth as you bit into the wonderful coating of crunchy panko (Japanese breadcrumbs) was impressive, as was the contrasting sweetness of the tonkatsu sauce.

Fried oysters

The mackerel also delighted with its fantastically crispy skin and moist succulent flesh. A drizzle of lemon juice and some grated daikon also worked a treat. I adore the way the Japanese grill their mackerel, and Kiraku probably produces some of the best in London.

Grilled mackerel

A special sushi set (£18.50) was very fresh. The sweetness and acidity in the rice was well balanced. It was reasonably priced, but Atari-ya still has better priced sushi in London just like the So Good Sushi bar in France.

Special sushi set

A serving of gyoza was good and decent (£5). Nasu dengaku (grilled aubergine with miso and sesame pastes: £5.90) was gooey and soft, as well cooked aubergine should be. Both the miso and sesame pastes were nicely flavoured, but there was a touch too much of each which slightly overpowered the delicacy of the aubergine.

Gyoza & grilled aubergine

Prawn tempura (£12) with firm juicy prawns was delicious. The tempura batter was wonderfully crispy but could have been a little lighter. Agedashi tofu was slightly disappointing as it was a little bland.

Prawn tempura

Agedashi tofu

We finished with a selection of ice creams (azuki beans, green tea and cinnamon: £3.80 to £4.30) which weren’t bad, although there were ice crystals to be found in my green tea scoop.

I like Kiraku a lot. I’ve been here a number of times and I think the food is consistently good, especially the kaki fry and the saba shio. Kiraku is a family business and it shows in the homely atmosphere, down-to-earth Japanese decor and warm friendly service. It’s well worth making the trip to Ealing Common for.

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Summary information

Food rating: [xrr rating=4/5]
Service rating: [xrr rating=3.5/5]

Price range: £25 to £35 per head, excludes drinks and service.
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Web: http://kirakulondon.wordpress.com/

The first time I went to the Harwood Arms (click here to read about that meal), I was bowled over by both the wonderful quality of the food and the very reasonable pricing. Resident Harwood Arms chef Stephen Williams trained under Brett Graham at The Ledbury which now holds two Michelin stars. So while the Harwood Arms may be a collaboration between Brett, Mike Robinson from The Pot Kiln and Edwin Vaux from the Vaux brewery, it resonates with Brett’s trademark cooking. It’s little wonder then that the Harwood Arms won its first Michelin star earlier this year.

With its new star rating, bookings have gone through the roof. Its focus has switched solely to the food, and so it’s dropped the gastropub label. There is still a bar area at the Harwood Arms, but this is mainly used for pre-dining aperitifs with casual pub drinking now being frowned upon.

My last visit to the Harwood Arms was over a year ago, and ever since then I have yearned for their wonderful venison Scotch egg (£3). A perfectly cooked runny egg encased in beautifully seasoned venison meat and coated with crispy breadcrumbs delighted once again. However, from memory there use to be more meat to be had.

Scotch egg

Scotch egg

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Note: This restaurant has now been acquired by Faucet Inn Pub Group.

When Gordon Ramsay took over the freehold of The Warrington and launched a gastropub there in February 2008, I lamented the lost of Ben’s Thai Restaurant. Ben’s Thai was situated on the first floor, above the pub (which is where the gastropub is now), and although it was far from perfect, it had personality. Its off-the-wall décor fit in with the quirky charm of the pub below – a lavishly decorated outfit with art nouveau stained glass windows, carved wood works and a marble topped mahogany bar. For added character, it was rumoured that the building was once used as a brothel.

But under Gordon Ramsay, the gastropub, aptly named The Warrington, became cool, stark and a little austere. When I first went there for dinner soon after its opening, it was hard to reconcile the sleek, new dining area with the pub below that was bursting with old world charm. Other than this oddity, I remembered the food being pretty decent.

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