The Riding House Café may call itself a café, but let’s get one thing straight – the modern all-day brasserie is a restaurant in every sense of word. It’s been cleverly split into two with a bar area that houses a long wooden table for casual drop-in diners. The bar then leads into a main dining room with leather chairs and banquettes, sumptuous wood panelling and gorgeous low light pendants which have been brought together with a slightly retro feel. The Riding House Café is gorgeous, and it has to be one of the sexiest restaurants I have seen of late.

And then it has the kind of menu which makes you want to taste everything. There are lots of smallish plates for sharing, satisfying sounding salads and hearty rustic mains. Make no mistake; the clever people behind The Riding House Café took great pains in the design of this outfit. This is the kind of restaurant you want to come to eat at and slink around in.

With such great expectations, we decided on a number of small plates, starting with the chicken liver parfait (£5) with truffle butter, cornichons and served on crostini. The parfait was creamy and tasty, and this would have been a good dish had it not been for the over seasoning.

Chicken liver parfait

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I loved the décor at The Refinery Bar with its elegant industrial take on urban dining. Its use of floor to ceiling glass windows has also helped to create an airy, light and gracious space, and its use of colour and texture added to its comfort. The Refinery Bar is a visually arresting restaurant. Situated on Southwark Street right behind the Tate Modern, it is well positioned to service museum goers.

The Refinery

The menu is varied with a selection of plates for sharing, nibbles, sandwiches, burgers, mains and steaks. There is also a large selection of cocktails to choose from, including a variety of Bloody Mary type cocktails. I went for the Crystal Mary martini (£7.95) which was so fiery from the Tabasco that I found it too harsh on my palate. But this was made good with an excellent Russian rose martini (£6.95). The drink was well balanced and smooth which helped it go down a treat. Also impressive was the large selection of wines on the drinks menu that you could order by the glass and in varying measures.

Crystal Mary martini

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Hawksmoor Spitalfields Restaurant and Bar was the original Hawksmoor, the hugely popular steak restaurant that paved the way for the other Hawksmoor branches in Seven Dials Covent Garden and Guildhall. My first visit to the Hawksmoor at Spitalfields proved to be a good, if slightly inconsistent experience. But when I tried the fabulous lobster roll at the Seven Dials branch, I became a fan of the Hawksmoor brand.

The Spitalfields branch recently launched a bar extension in its basement with 60 covers. Its focus is the bar (rather than food as is case with the restaurant upstairs) and it offers a selection of carefully selected cocktails, some of which date back to the original 2006 Hawksmoor cocktail list. The bar suits the Spitalfields area. It’s cool and chilled, and relies on the use of reclaimed materials to give it a slightly grungy look. There is also a bar menu which is quite distinct to the upstairs dining menu, with more snack-type eats to complement the drinks in the bar. It features a compilation of sandwiches, and more importantly, includes a lobster roll (£15). One cannot order from the main restaurant menu in the bar or vice versa.

It may seem funny that the item I enjoyed the most at a steak restaurant was their lobster, but the one I had at The Hawksmoor Seven Dials was truly glorious. The portion of juicy, tasty lobster was generous, and it was served on a brioche bread roll that was to die for. Finally it had been dressed with an decadent quantity of unctuous butter which turned this into something incredibly satisfying and addictive. Yum. Anyway, the one at Hawksmoor Spitalfields bar.was decent, but a little dry. Also, the brioche wasn’t quite to the standard set by Seven Dials. It only cost £15 rather than the £25 at Seven Dials, but it was also a smaller portion.

Lobster roll

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Corrigan’s Mayfair is currently showcasing a Lost and Forgotten dishes bar menu which celebrates some lost and forgotten British ingredients. Similar to the Spice Menu that I tried at Corrigan’s Mayfair the last time I was there, these dishes lie midway between a starter and main course size, is great for sharing and very affordably priced. You eat at the bar, and three, five, seven and nine dishes cost £25, £35, £45 and £55 respectively.

We tried the entire menu, starting with Lord Lurgan’s Broth which featured on the Spice Menu also. The recipe for this broth is one that Richard Corrigan found in an old cookery book and has long been forgotten. The broth was beautifully clear and intense with flavour, and there was a smokiness coming through from the use of smoked chicken wings in its cooking. The addition of Grade A basmati rice added texture to the dish.

Lord Lurgan’s Broth

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Mele e Pere, the recently opened Italian trattoria on Brewer Street, means “apples and pears”, which goes a long way in explaining the fanciful collection of glass apples and pears in the restaurant’s eye-catching front window. But the window is slightly deceptive as to reach the restaurant one must head downstairs to the basement. Despite this, Mele e Pere has made good use of the basement space as the dining room feels reasonably spacious. It is quirkily decorated, and the lovely contrasting tiles and wooden floors have given the trattoria a relaxed modern feel.

I booked Mele e Pere on a TopTable offer of three courses and a glass of wine dinner special for only £17.50. I usually have some reservations about most TopTable dining offers, after all you get what you pay for. But the man fronting Mele e Pere is Andrea Mantovani, who was previously the head chef at Arbutus, the one-Michelin starred restaurant on Frith Street. His pedigree helped to deal away any hesitation I might have had.

A generous starter of green bean salad with a cottage cheese dressing was delightful. The dressing was rich and creamy and oozed with garlic-y goodness. The beans were well cooked with a bite to them, and the use of crunchy croutons and nutty parmesan shavings added flavour and lots of lovely textural contrasts.

Green bean salad

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In a location where competition amongst restaurants is fierce, the people behind 10 Greek Street (previously from the Wapping Project) have bravely decided to launch their Soho restaurant with a pared-down approach. Far from being overtly chic or stylised, the restaurant’s laid back stance means that there are no table cloths, that bistro menu is listed on the blackboards, and diners are required to pick up their own cutlery from each of the cutlery holders stationed on the tables. But the casual look of the restaurant feels perfectly nice. Its philosophy seems to be that it should be more about the food, a philosophy which I like.

We started with a soup of sweet potato, farrow, wild garlic and pecorino (£5). I had expected a strong aromatic flavour coming through from the garlic, but what we got instead was something rather bland, healthy tasting, but bland.

Soup

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Following on from Part Two…

La Gabinoteca serves food in a tapas style but is far removed from your traditional tapas restaurants. I know I covered tapas places in Part one of my ’72 Hours in Madrid’ blog post, but La Gabinoteca deserves a mention all on its own. It was just that good. Anthony Bourdain featured it in his Madrid episode of No Reservations, but independent research on various food forums reveal that some suggest that it is worthy of the best tapas title in Madrid. I can’t possibly judge that, not having eaten at every tapas place in Madrid, but one does walk away with a feeling of being wowed by an experience that is so inventive, so complex and yet so simple at the same time.

The restaurant is the younger and less formal sibling of Las Tortillas de Gabino, a restaurant which has received a lot of critical acclaim. It is the brainchild of brothers Nino and Santi Redruello whose family of restaurateurs are responsible for La Ancha, a well known restaurant in Madrid.

The décor at La Gabinoteca was interesting to say the least. The restaurant is split into two levels with the more casual-bar dining area being downstairs. There is an eclectic mix of furniture including high chairs; low chairs as well as a ski lift (yes a ski lift). It was fun, quirky and arresting, and gave you lots of interesting décor points to talk about.

The menu is split into four sections: appetisers, meat, fish and desserts and the restaurant recommends you choose at least one from each section.

A dish of patatas bravas with octopus and a spicy salsa (€5.15) was tasty and comforting. The hint of spiciness in the sauce added a kick to the dish.

Patatas bravas & octopus

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Following on from Part One…

CASA SALVADOR

The idea for trying Casa Salvador came from Anthony Bourdain’s TV series called No Reservations. In case you have never heard of this show, Bourdain basically travels to different cities around the world to eat at some of the best food haunts that each of those places have to offer. I digress, but the food Boudain tried in the Hong Kong episode was out of this world, enough to make you salivate. Boy do I want Bourdain’s job!

Anyway, in the Madrid episode Bourdain goes to Casa Salvador. In its heyday, Casa Salvador was the place where bullfighters use to go, and famous celebrities, the likes of which included Ava Gardiner, also went if they wanted a bullfighter. You get the picture. The chef is Pepe who took over the restaurant from his uncle when he was in his teens. Pepe must be at least 60, so that gives you the sense of history surrounding Casa Salvador. There are lots of pictures of bullfighters from a bygone era on the walls, the ones you might find in a museum, and with all the waiters dressed in white jackets, there was an old school feel to the restaurant which I found rather charming.

The signature dish here is ‘rabo’, braised oxtail (€16), which Bourdain lapped up with fervour when he visited Casa Salvador. This dish is quite common place in traditional restaurants in Madrid and I couldn’t think of a better place to try it then at Casa Salvador. The oxtail was tender and beautifully cooked, and the braising sauce was rich and flavoursome. This dish was cooked how ‘mama’ would have probably made it back in her day. The only thing that let it down was that it was a bit too salty.

Oxtail

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