Hardens London Restaurant Guide
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Aaya – From Alan Yau’s brother Gary, a path-breaking restaurant, bringing high-quality Japanese fare (including top-quality sushi) and striking design values to Soho; it’s no bargain, but standards on our early-days visit were uniformly very high.
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L’Anima – For our money, one of the best openings of recent times – this Italian newcomer, behind Broadgate, offers deft cooking (from Francesco Mazzei, ex-St Alban) in a minimalist setting of a design-quality rarely seen in London; in the early days, service was charming too.
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Le Café Anglais – It’s been “much-hyped”, but Rowley Leigh’s large new Art Deco-style brasserie is undoubtedly an “elegant” and “airy” space that’s given “a very necessary culinary boost to Bayswater”; service is often “inept”, though, and realisation of the long and enticing menu is somewhat up-and-down.
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Cha Cha Moon – From Wagamama-creator Alan Yau, a hotly-awaited new oriental ‘format’, of which this elegantly-styled Soho canteen is the first example; at launch prices – £3.50 for every dish, mainly noodles and dim sum – it was a bargain, but it’s not clear how long this pricing will last.
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Dehesa – It’s not just the “lovely” interior which makes this “cool” spin-off from Salt Yard a “fantastic addition” to Soho – its “affordable” and “very enjoyable” Italian/Spanish tapas, and “delicious” wines too, have transplanted very well.
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Hélène Darroze (The Connaught Hotel) – This grand Mayfair dining room, formerly occupied by the Ramsay group’s Angela Hartnett, re-opened as this guide was going to press, with a star Parisian chef at the helm; we did try to bring you a first-week review, but arrived for lunch to find that the hotel had managed to lose our booking…
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Hix Oyster & Chop House – Ex-Caprice supremo Mark Hix’s much-hyped, no-frills Farringdon newcomer – on the former site of Rudland & Stubbs (RIP) – offers sometimes “excellent”, plainly-British cooking; “you’d have thought he’d have got some better staff, though” (and not “stand there all evening gassing to his mates”).
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The Landau (The Langham) – “Liveried, super-attentive staff” are but one part of the formula that makes this “sumptuous” (“glitzy”) new hotel dining room a fine-dining “beacon” in the purlieus of Oxford Circus; Andrew Turner’s menus are certainly on the “fiddly” side, but fans say results are “divine”.
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Maze Grill – “Perfectly-cooked steaks” – with the help of an American broiler that’s unique in this country – have helped this bright, new extension to maze make a “very strong start”, sometimes “patchy” service notwithstanding.
- Texture – An “innovative” Marylebone newcomer, offering “spectacular” contemporary cooking (albeit in a style ridiculed by critics for its “smears and foams”); the dining room makes the most elegant possible use of the difficult space that was formerly Deya (RIP).
