Pierre Koffmann made his permanent return to the London dining scene with his restaurant Koffmann’s at The Berkeley. When Pierre Koffmann appeared during London Restaurant Week 2009 with his pop-up restaurant at Selfridges, Restaurant on the Roof, he became the toast of the town. The ex-three star Michelin chef went into retirement after closing Le Tante Claire in 2004, so his pop-up stint was always going to create some excitement. Restaurant on the Roof was pricey, but it was well worth a visit. The food was very good, and the ambiance was great. And of course there was the opportunity to try his famous pig’s trotter dish.

Koffmann’s at The Berkeley received a fair bit of press during the last couple of weeks as a consequence of Kate Middleton dining there with The Duchess of Cornwall. The restaurant opened last summer, and occupies the space that was previously Gordon Ramsay’s Boxwood Café. The dining room is elegantly furnished and sits on the lower ground floor. As nice as it was, I am not a big fan of this basement eating with no windows. The placement of the toilets is also awkward – you have to up the stairs, go past the reception, and then go down another set of stairs to get to them. Why there is no connecting door between the dining room and the bathrooms is a mystery to me.

A pre-starter of caramelised onions with anchovies and olives on puff pastry was a little salty. The puff pastry wasn’t particularly light.

Caramelised onions with anchovies and olives

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Anthony Demetre made waves when he first opened Arbutus. Offering solid accomplished cooking at reasonable prices, it went on to win a Michelin star. Arbutus was followed by Wild Honey which also garnered a star. With such success, there was little doubt that his latest offering, Les Deux Salons, was also going to cause a buzz in the press and the blogosphere.

Situated on William IV Street, just down the road from Terroirs, Les Deux Salons took over the site of a previous Pitcher and Piano. The entrance to the restaurant is striking, and inside it is just as tasteful, embodying a classic French brassiere feel boasting of leather banquettes, dark wood furnishings and mosaic marbled floors. This was designed to be a crowd pleaser, and it’s hard not to feel drawn to its design. The restaurant contains 150 seats over two floors and encompasses a buzzier, noisier downstairs, and a more intimate upstairs.

We started with a warm sweet onion tart (£6.95) which was tasty and boasted of a lovely flaky pastry. The caramelised onions worked well with the classic combination of crumbled goat’s cheese and beetroot. There were also some pine nuts for a hint of crunch. This was a nice dish but a little dry.

Warm sweet onion tart

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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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Racine seems to have this mystical reputation as being one of the best non-high end French restaurants in London, and it was because of this reputation that my friend J wanted us to go. I have been once before, a long time ago, and while I didn’t think that the food was bad, I didn’t remember it being particularly memorable either. Racine always seems packed whenever I go past it, and so it felt like time to try it again.

So did Racine live up to its reputation? In the décor stakes, I would say yes. The restaurant is cozy and warm, and the ambience sings a buzzing tune. The moment you walk through the door, you get the sense that you have been transported to some hidden romantic hideaway in rural France.

To start, a foie gras ballotine (£12.75) was rich in flavour and wonderfully creamy in texture, but the accompanying brioche was disappointing. Instead of being soft in the centre, it was dry and a little crusty. It also lacked the requisite sweetness.

Foie gras ballotine

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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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Tempo is a recently opened Italian restaurant on Curzon Street, right near the now-defunct Mirabelle. There is a bar upstairs on the first floor, and the ground floor houses the dining room which is contemporary but not flashy. The colour scheme offers up warm, beige-y tones and large paintings splash the walls. This is a pretty and comfortable restaurant, even if the tables are squished together and the seats are small. I guess space is precious in Mayfair.

I liked the menu. Subdivided between cicchetti (small eats), carpaccio, antipasta, pasta and risotto, fish and meats, side dishes and desserts over a compact two page format, it offered a reasonable range of choices without overwhelming the audience. It made me want to try a little bit of everything.

I dined as a guest of the restaurant. From the cicchetti section, an insalata di polpo, seared octopus, pomegranate with apple (£3.75) was lovely. The octopus was tender and and nicely seared, and there was a lovely freshness coming through from the pomegranate and julienned apples which well with the octopus.

Insalata di polpo

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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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