Bossa, Marylebone

I don't know whether it's by design or sheer accident that Bossa, a brand new Brazilian restaurant from chef Alberto Landgraf, has landed right next door to the Brazilian embassy. But it felt very appropriate walking under a giant Brazilian flag up to the front steps of Bossa - who knows, perhaps Vere St is on its way to becoming a new Little Brazil.

Inside, it's smart and comfortable in the modern London style, with a good mix of booths and views of the open kitchen. I can probably be accused of taking interior design for granted - it's not really my area of expertise - but there are clearly a lot of very good restaurant designers working in the city at the moment.

Now, hands up - I've never really tried high-end Brazilian food before. The country itself regularly features on the top fine dining lists and there are 16 Michelin stars in Rio alone, but so far London hasn't been host to too many in the category, the 2-Michelin starred Da Terra being the one notable exception to the rule. There used to be a Japanese-Brazilian fusion place called Sushinho on the Kings Road but I was never too tempted to try it and then it closed. Maybe it was brilliant (there's a long tradition of that style of food, called Nikkei, in South America) but something tells me it wasn't.

Anyway, events began with a very nicely made Caipirinha and Mojito, and some good focaccia and olive oil. The bar is very well appointed at Bossa and staffed by clearly very capable mixerinhos (as I imagine they're called back in Brazil) so I thoroughly recommend making use of their services.

Roasted bone marrow was nice in of itself, with a good flavour and plenty of the good stuff, but I had a bit of an issue with the strange texture of the tapioca pancake things it came with - not a million miles away from like eating cork coasters. But I am nothing if not keen to try new things, and this was certainly different. The cashew dip was good too.

Beef tartare was very nicely seasoned, pickled and spiced and contained a very generous shaving of truffle. We liked the little bits of crunch too - toasted oats perhaps although I couldn't swear to that. It's not a very purist attitude but I always think beef tartare benefits from an element of crunch.

Pork belly was a huge lump of nicely cooked meat with a thick, bubbly rind (as you might expect for £38, but more on the value side of things later) with a satisfying sauce they called 'feijoada broth'. Feijoada is a black bean stew so presumably this was black beans cooked in pork stock, or something like that. Either way, was very nice.

The second main was, we were told, their house speciality. Seafood Moqueca is a stew apparently originating in Bahia and was very decent, with plenty of big chunks of meat and a nice tomato/coconut flavour to the sauce. Whether you think it's worth paying £49 for a fairly small bowl of seafood stew and rice, well, you'll have to decide on that yourself.

OK so, we may as well pause to address the elephant in the room - Bossa is not a cheap place. And I appreciate all of the things that make running a restaurant in London 2023 so ruinously expensive, from energy costs to staff to the price of ingredients, which have all shot up and continue to reach skyward in the last year or so. But even so, at its best Bossa is cooking hearty, unelaborate but enjoyable food - rich stews and big slabs of pork and the like - and to be charging almost exactly for 3 courses what Alex Dilling asks at the Cafe Royal for his food of exquisite beauty and two Michelin star service experience, well it all feels a bit unearned. Alberto Landgraf may have two stars back home, but there's a certain arrogance in assuming you can get away with £90/head for 3 courses in a brand new place.

Anyway, their restaurant, their pricing structure. Of the two desserts, a lineup of sorbets - the first two made from exotic fruits I have no chance of remembering, but the last being strawberry and rhubarb - were the easiest to enjoy, summery and well made.

But I'm afraid I didn't enjoy the other dessert at all - tonka bean flan was a bit like chawanmushi, and that bit of it was fine, but for some reason it was paired with a "jam" made from something called cupuaçu. Apparently it's the national fruit of Brazil, and I hope I don't cause an international incident by saying this, but it was so ludicrously sour it was beyond inedible. Perhaps they'd forgot to put the sugar in that day, or maybe I'm just particularly sensitive to cupuaçu, but I really struggled with this.

Anyway, the cupuaçu dessert was a rare low point of an otherwise decent - if aggressively priced - meal. As this was an invite we didn't see a bill, but with the cocktails and a glass of wine each I work out it would have been about £145 per person with service added. Quite punchy, in other words. Bossa is a good restaurant, but for that price it really needs to be great. And although none of the dishes apart from the açai thing were actively bad, nothing was really two-Michelin-star level either. Perhaps that's not what they're aiming for, but I'm also afraid that if you put 'two-Michelin-star chef' in your press release, that's what people are going to expect. Certainly at those prices.

I hope they take the above in the constructive spirit it's intended. It's hard being less than positive about anywhere in the current climate, but then they aren't a charity, they're a high-end restaurant in the centre of London and all I can do is compare it to other places at that price point in the local area and it just doesn't quite stand up. Still, there's every room to improve, and refine their offering somewhat, and always hope for the future. For now though, I'd wait.

6/10

I was invited to Bossa and didn't see a bill