Bistro Sablé, Islington

Sablé occupies the handsome 1930s public house that, most recently at least, was home to Neil Rankin's Smokehouse. I spent many happy times in Smokehouse back in the day but such are the fickle whims and fashions of London food that, in 2026, low-n-slow American BBQ seems strangely dated. I don't know why this is - they're still very keen on it in America, as far as I can tell.

Anyway the site now offers traditional French bistro food, which as all the restaurant spods out there will tell you, and as popularised by Bouchon Racine and Josephine Bouchon, is what we should all be eating these days - that American BBQ rubbish is so 2018. And despite very clearly being London on the outside, inside they've done their best to soften the hardest edges of the pub decor although this largely consists of setting the lighting so low it's occasionally hard to tell where on earth you are at all. So yes, my photos are rubbish. Sorry.

Things all started brightly enough. A French martini (not really French at all, invented in NYC in the 80s) was nicely presented and though quite heavy on the pineapple was still a very easy drink. Judging by the people crowding around the bar area, in fact, Sablé are quite happy for you to just pop in for a drink without committing to a full meal, something I always appreciate in a place. I was somewhat distraught to learn that thirsty hikers that have been used to popping into uber-gastropub the Sportsman in Kent for a livener before heading on to Whitstable have recently started being told they must have booked a sit-down meal, and can no longer perch on the bar with a pint and a packet of crisps. Which seems as stupid as it is sad.

Back in Islington though, starters launched with this magnificent baked soufflé, confidently risen and powerfully cheesy. Thinking about it now I don't think I've ever had a genuinely disappointing cheese soufflé, which either means they're quite easy to cook (which is possible) or that I have a very low bar for anything involving baked cheese (which is far more likely).

Steak tartare was ordered not so much for the main ingredient as for the accompanying pommes allumettes, because for whatever reason matchstick fries are still a bit of a rarity in London. And it's just as well that the allumettes were as good as they were - greaseless, crunchy, seasoned correctly and with a lovely potato flavour - because the steak itself was quite astringent, the mustard (I assume) dressing rather overpowering the supposedly aged beef. But it was still just about worth paying £13 for those fries.

It was about this point, though, that things at Sablé started to dip off a bit, at least from my point of view. It's not particularly Sablés fault that I had watched a perfect Bouillabaisse being cooked on Culinary Class Wars the week before, and it's unrealistic of me to expect a version made in North London to live up to the standards of an internationally famous cooking show. But even if I'm not an expert in what Bouillabaisse should taste like, thanks to French Papa I know at least what it should look like, and it certainly ain't this weird pile of textureless mystery fish and potato draped in a thick, pallid sauce. It was just weird.

In fairness, some of the other mains did turn out slightly better. Boeuf bourguignon was probably the best of the rest, with chunks of nice moist beef soaked in a thick, salty, savoury sauce. And given that a good boeuf bourguignon is presumably at least as difficult to cook as a bouillabaisse, we need to give them credit for that.

But halibut, though better than the bouillabaisse, was still not great and suffered from more underseasoning, especially in the layer of white beans underneath. And a side of chips - sorry, pommes frites were bland and cardboardy, genuinely pretty unpleasant. And if you're a French bistro and can't get chips right, what are you even for?

I didn't try the rotisserie chicken or a few other bits and pieces of sides and snacks but to be honest, perhaps if they had looked a little more exciting I might have made more of an effort. The chicken is above, looking, well, as you might expect, but the one genuinely lovely bit of chicken I've eaten in the last few months cost fully £12 less per bird. Say no more.

The problem with this kind of food is that it has to be done perfectly, or it all just falls apart. People moan about the prices at the Bouchons (Racine and Josephine) but French bistro food all hinges on excellent ingredients cooked well, and if any element is off, it's a disaster. Tarte tatin - one of my favourite desserts when done well - was all poached apple and very little crunchy caramelised pastry, and as any tatin fancier will tell you, it really should be the other way round. Madeleines were a bit dry but otherwise OK. Save your money and get them fresh out of the oven at St John, is my advice.

So with one or two exceptions, I'm afraid Bistro Sablé is Not Very Good. A bill of £100pp with booze is not unreasonable if the food had been better - and indeed would have been a genuine bargain if it had been somewhere near good - but for that weird gloopy "bouillabaisse" and cardboard fries and the clumsy, flabby tarte tatin it's nowhere near value. The good news is that if this style of food is your thing, there are much better places to try it even if you might have to shell out a few extra quid. As for this particular site in North London, if their heart's not in the French thing I wonder if they might consider trying their hand at American BBQ? I hear it's all the rage over there.

5/10

Dorian, Notting Hill

This time last year, potential sites for an upcoming work lunch had been whittled down to a choice between Lita in Marylebone, or Dorian in Notting Hill. Both places, on the face of it, looked fairly similar - a crowd-pleasing list of modern bistro dishes with an emphasis on premium seafood and seasonal game, and both had received fairly unanimously positive reviews. Purely because Lita was a bit easier to get to, we ended up there, and, well, didn't really enjoy it very much. Good food at blisteringly high prices, served (at their own pace) to a cramped dining room with tables way too small to work in a sharing dishes concept, it left us all pretty underwhelmed. A week after our visit, they received a Michelin star. The inspectors probably had a better table than we did.

Anyway, more recently came an opportunity to see if Dorian could fare any better. And after being shown to a nice big table with plenty of elbow room they were already beating the Other Place on that side of things. God knows it's hard enough to make a living running a restaurant these days - I know this, honestly I do - but the fact is, if you try and make a few extra quid by squeezing shitty tables into your restaurant and you put people in them, they're going to have a shitty time and not come back. See above.

Back to Dorian though and this "Dorian Martini", ice cold and I think involving vodka and sake which worked pretty well. I'm also fully on board with this trend of floating a blob of oil on top of the drink - I think this might have been olive oil but not sure - which adds a nice aesthetic touch.

First bits of food to arrive were these snacks - "steak and sea urchin rosti", ordered enthusiastically by those of us who have tried sea urchin before, and I have to say rather insistently ordered for those of our party who hadn't. Sea urchin, depending on where it's from, can run the full gamut from fresh and buttery and clean to funky and fishy and briny, and these were sort of right in the middle of that scale, so a perfect example for the uninitiated. In this case, the smoky chargrilled beef made an excellent surf and turf combination with the uni and the potato element grounded the whole thing perfectly. There were probably a gazillion other things going on here but the point is the main ingredients were great, and so it all fell into place.

Next to arrive - even before the remainder of the snacks - was a starter of veal sweetbreads and Landes chicken, all with a superb light crisp coating and dressed in what they called "ranch dressing" but which tasted remarkably like a poshed-up version of that gloopy orange chicken sauce you get in cheap takeaways in the US. I don't mean to make this sound like a criticism - I loved it - it's just funny how some flavour associations work in your mind.

After two weeks in southern California I wasn't about to order a taco for my first lunch back but this beef taco with squid was apparently "excellent". Looks pretty as well, doesn't it.

"Skewered rabbit, red prawn and Bordelaise" was easily one of the highlights of the meal, and (spoiler alert) everything that followed was at least very good. Carefully jointed and grilled portions of tender rabbit were skewered alongside plump, sweet prawns and finished with a little bone-in morsel of rabbit which was like nibbling on a tiny chicken wing. If I am ever in the area again, I'm going to see if I can just perch at the bar with a martini and order one of these - it's one of those dishes that's so inventive and cleverly made and enjoyable to eat that it lives in the memory long after the meal itself is over.

Almost as good (and that's still a huge compliment) was this wild duck, roasted to tender pink with a nice dark, salty skin and served with a mushroom and clementine sauce. I liked everything about this dish, including (either by usual practice or because it was being shared between 4 people) the fact it was neatly divided into four and that they'd left the feet on. A bit like bone-in steaks, it may be entirely psychological but I always think game tastes better when they leave the feet on.

Venison - like all the other red meat, grilled to a good dark char - had bags of flavour (not always a given with venison) and came with a little bonus pickled sardine. A lot of the dishes at Dorian are not just rewarding to eat and nicely constructed, they often surprise with some little extra unexpected element or unusual combination - the sea urchin and steak, for example, or the "orange chicken" dressing with the sweetbreads.

We were now into the mains, and there's nothing more Main than a giant plate of bone-in ribeye. I hardly need to do anything other than show you the picture above, but yes it tasted every bit as good as it looked - slightly yellowy, funky aged fat sat next to perfectly cooked beef and all under a thin, crisp, dark crust. The crust was almost the most notable thing about the dish - crunchy and salty and slightly bitter, very much in the Peter Luger's / US style of fierce direct heat and strong textures rather than the increasingly more trendy genteel French butter-basted and pan-roasted. Now I have a lot of time for both approaches, and I imagine that the bitter charcoal hit from this steak wouldn't be to everyone's tastes, but I absolutely loved it. And the rest of the table did, too.

Iberico pork neck with langoustines was the second standout highlight dish of the lunch, and - probably not coincidentally - was another surf and turf arrangement. The pork melted in the mouth like only the very best Iberico can do, and was drenched in a reduced jus so good that the plate was scraped clean. But as well as the giant lango tails with the pork, the side of curried carrots (not pictured, sorry) came with pieces of unbelievably lovely extracted claw meat, so that everyone got to try every bit of the animal. Technically perfect (the lango tails were moist and smoky and popped out of their shells in one satisfying chunk), surprising and generous of flavour, it was another example of the best of this kitchen's abilities. We couldn't stop talking about how good it was, although a bottle of excellent Côtes du Rhône (in remarkably light and delicate glasses) probably helped with that too.

We were having so much fun by this point we never wanted to leave, so obviously attention soon turned to desserts. So after a round of dessert-y drinks (above is a Hazelnut Old Fashioned, a fabulous thing indeed) we have chocolate souffle-tart hybrid thing with Guinness ice cream, a rather esoteric take on a rhum baba which substituted the usual alcohol-soaked sponge for small chunks of rum-flavoured biscuit, a doughnut with peanut butter and quince and through a process of elimination I think that last one is a salted milk ice cream and blue corn nachos. It certainly wasn't either the pistachio ice cream and caviar (£39) or the vanilla ice cream with white truffle (£39) - we may have been on expenses but we still valued our jobs.

I have struggled with something ever since our glorious lunch at Dorian came to an end and we spilled out onto the cold Notting Hill streets last week. Objectively, Dorian and Lita are doing very similar things. Neither are cheap, both have a Michelin star (whatever you might think about the significance of that - it seems to mainly indicate the prices they charge these days) and the menu of seasonal premium British ingredients treated in exciting and intelligent ways looks, on paper at least, like it could have been written by the same team. So why did I feel so unwelcome and cramped at harried at Lita and like we could have spent another 6 hours at Dorian and the staff wouldn't have blinked an eye?

It's all to do with the room and the service, and I suppose those are both two sides of the same issue. At this level, and at these prices, you do not want to feel like the management are trying to squeeze you for every last penny and that your custom is just a means to an end. We managed to spend even more per head at Dorian (£207.50) than Lita (£170.78) but despite this, Dorian was just infinitely better value simply down to the experience we had. Every dish from the kitchen spoke of a group of people enjoying what they do and wanting nothing more than to spread that joy to others, but crucially at Dorian that also extended to the atmosphere and service in the room, and that made all the difference in the world. Get saving, then, is my advice. Because Dorian is worth every penny.

9/10

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Josephine Bouchon, Chelsea

Last week, and for most of the week, there was a tube strike. A more lazy, and let's face it, less greedy me would have probably cancelled any dinner plans until things were back to normal, but reservations at Josephine Bouchon are hard enough to come by at the best of times and I didn't want to let an old friend down that I hadn't seen in years. So, I came up with a plan. I was going to walk the route of the 19 bus all the way from the office in Holborn to the King's Road, and if I ever saw an opportunity to get on a bus I'd take it.

Londoners will know where this story is going. Of course, every bus stop had dozens of people waiting for a tiny handful of spaces on the few buses that did creep around central London at a glacial pace, and I soon realised the chances of getting on any of them was nil. I saw near fist-fights between commuters attempting to skip the queues and jump on the back doors as people got off, I saw drivers screaming at people to keep the entry area clear so they could close the doors and get moving, and I nearly got knocked over by a bus myself as I hopped on and off the pavement on Shaftesbury Avenue trying to avoid the heaving crowds. All of which accompanied by a chorus of constant honks and yells from the members of the non bus-lanes that don't have a great deal of patience even when things are going well.

But once I'd cleared Hyde Park corner and I'd decided to finally completely abandon any hope of getting on a bus, I was able to pick a route through the more serene streets of SW London and it all became rather lovely. The stately old Georgian squares of Belgravia, leafy and autumnal, gave way to the grand Victorian townhouses of Sloane Street, and then the beautiful streets around the back of Fulham Road and before I knew it I was sat at a rather cozy table in Josephine Bouchon nibbling on home made pork scratchings and lovely buttered baguette and I knew the journey would be absolutely worth it.

The menu is unapologetically, unmistakeably, ludicrously French, and all the better for it. French onion soup was a great big bubbling pile of melted cheese and caramelised onions, shot through with glossy, thick beef stock, and is about as good a version as you can get anywhere - including France. I made a complete fool of myself attempting to control the long strings of melted Gruyère as they landed variously on the table, my clothes and my face, and it was so blisteringly hot it took a good 20 minutes before I could comfortably polish it off, but I wouldn't have changed any of it for the world.

Mains were equally French, and equally brilliant. A single veal sweetbread arrived topped with morels soaked in veal jus, before being doused in one of those thick, creamy mushroom sauces that takes about 3 days to make. I couldn't decide which was better (and still can't), the giant sweetbread with a fantastic contrast between the slightly crisp bite of the outside and soft, rich interior, or that incredible sauce with such a depth of flavour and so much going on - in a good, not confused way - that it seemed to morph into something ever more exciting with every taste.

I'm afraid I don't have pictures of the other starter (salade Lyonnaise) or main (côte de veau) and didn't ask for a taste because there's only so bloggery I wanted to act in front of someone I'd not seen for a while, but they looked superb. So there's every chance they were - particularly the veal which was huge and bronzed and nicely pink inside.

With the mains we had ordered dauphinois potatoes, and though they were beautifully done I'm not 100% sure they were worth £18 - the picture makes them look more substantial than they were because this was an awfully shallow dish with only about 2 or 3 layers of potato to it. Still, as I said it tasted great and we had no regrets.

The "problem", such as it is, with French food when it's done this well is that you want to order everything but are soon defeated by the richness of the sauces and the intensity of the ingredients. I had every intention of trying the rum baba or the lemon tart when I first scanned through the menu but by the time the last mouthful of creamy dauphinois potato had disappeared, and the above wonderful thing had been gifted from the kitchen (lamb shoulder, glossy and gamey and on a bed of perfect glazed veg) I'm afraid I had to admit defeat. The bill came to just over £100 per head with plenty of house wine, which probably is a bit unfair on the average because we had ordered two of the most expensive mains. They do a 3 course menu for £30 (at lunch and dinner) so it's possible to not go completely mad.

But the thing is, restaurants like this - and the best of French regional cuisine in general - are at their best when you do order to excess, when you gorge yourself on sweetbreads and lobster and lapin à la moutarde and truffle and desserts and Armagnac and then roll bleary-eyed into a cab wondering if you'll see the morning. Like its sister-restaurant-in-attitude Bouchon Racine, or Otto's in Holborn, sure you can have a portion of smoked salmon with soda bread and a glass of water then go home, but that's not really what they're for.

So if I'm duty bound to take a point off for the prices, I still want to recommend as many people as possible (apart from vegetarians or those with a dairy allergy, that is - this is French food after all) head to Josephine Bouchon. There are very few restaurants even in France doing this kind of thing at this level, and for Londoners to have it on their doorstep should be a source of extreme pride. This little slice of Lyon in SW10 is everything I needed it to be.

9/10

My dining companion was spotted and we were gifted that lamb dish, but otherwise we paid full price. Sorry about the terrible photos - in all the madness of the tube strike I forgot my Big Camera.

Belzan, Liverpool

This was actually my second visit to Belzan. The first, according to my iPhone photo history, was on 8th May 2020, but was a little bit tricky to review as the building was operating as an improvised deli, with boxes of fruit and veg arranged amongst the booths and benches that would normally be hosting paying customers. Like so many restaurants during the first national Covid lockdown Belzan had pivoted to, well, just about anything they could think of to get them through the End Times and so this friendly neighbourhood restaurant became your friendly neighbourhood greengrocers and wine merchants. I can't honestly remember what I came away with - definitely a box of veg, possibly a bottle or two of natural wine, and I'm sure it was all lovely - but I think I'm confident in saying it's a period of time both they and myself are happy to forget.

Fast forward to 2025, and Belzan is happily back at doing what it's best at - namely charming the pants off lucky Wavertree locals and curious out-of-towners alike. It is utterly impossible not to fall in love with the place, which is close to the platonic ideal of an unpretentious local bistro as it's possible to imagine. Staff all act like they've landed their dream job - which of course they probably have - the menu is full of things that you'd want to eat, and it's all pulled off with such easy grace that you wonder why there can't be a Belzan on every street corner in the country.

I started with a "Peter Piper", a kind of dirty vodka martini involving guindilla (Spanish chilli) pickle juice. Like the best dirty martinis it sailed very, very close to being completely wrong while at the same time just about pulling it off - the pickle juice blasted your senses but the vodka and vermouth just about managed to ground the flavours in something approaching normality. That weekend, in a moment of hideously misplaced confidence, I attempted to make one myself using burger pickle juice and gin. It didn't work.

The bread course at Belzan - sourdough cooked by "Leila", a local who offered their services during that same first lockdown and has been a supplier since - comes with a choice cauliflower butter, a lovely concoction full of satisfying, earthy vegetal flavours, and oil and vinegar, the vegan option but which they'll happily provide alongside the cauliflower butter if requested. You can tell a lot about a place from their bread offering - the attention to detail here was very evident.

Also from the "snacks" was this giant grilled scallop gratin, a lovely plump bit of sweet, meaty seafood (with roe attached I was delighted to discover) draped in bubbling grilled cheese. I don't know why Coquilles Saint-Jacques have gone out of fashion - perhaps they just belong to a period of French cooking that's a little bit looked down on these days - but scallops and cheese definitely need to be a thing again. This was gorgeous.

Courgettes came soft and grilled, with bits of blackened skin adding some very nice detail, and topped with a strong, salty pine nut gremolata. Underneath was a hummus made from butterbean, bright white and silky smooth and the perfect foil for the other vegetables. This is one of those dishes seemingly so simple and rewarding it might inspire you to have a go on the BBQ at home, which one day I indeed may do, albeit perhaps with not quite so much of a cavalier attitude as that with which I approached the pickle martini.

Grilled hispi cabbage was only slightly less successful than the courgettes, possibly because the Lancashire cheese was asking to do a bit more of the seasoning heavy lifting than it was equipped to deal with. A bit more salt on the cabbage and in the romesco and this would have been better, and perhaps it could all have been a bit warmer, but it was still a fun thing to eat, with the little crispy bits of charred cabbage adding more of those interesting textures.

Poached trout came as a giant, well-seasoned and perfectly timed slab of fresh fish and was a joy from start to finish. Underneath a Vichyssoise sauce was full of satisfying earthy flavours and was studded both with runner beans and mussels, the latter being sweet-pickled somehow. Very clever stuff.

And finally from the savoury courses, a huge pile of grilled lamb chops, each blushed perfect pink and so deliriously tender you could have cut them with a spoon. They came on an interesting bed of labneh and grilled nectarines, a vaguely Middle-Eastern range of flavours that worked incredibly well, but the crowning glory was a thick, salty, rich lamb jus that I wanted to bottle and take home with me. If you can tell a lot about a restaurant from their bread course, you can tell even more from their ability with sauces. This lamb sauce was as close to perfect as it's possible to get.

We found room for one dessert, a strawberry choux bun so delicate and light that, when I attempted to cut it in half, flattened hilariously onto the plate, leaving us with a kind of strawberry-pastry Eton mess. It tasted fantastic anyway, you won't be surprised to learn, as did the sweet (but actually not overly sweet) Riesling I'd picked to go with it. Can't leave a place like this without trying a dessert wine - it's the rules.

The bill came to £75 each, which although not a complete bargain (I think the days of restaurant bargains have long gone, with certain notable exceptions) is still great value for the amount of skill and effort that had gone into everything we tried. And certainly, we weren't the only people to think so, with Belzan turning the tables throughout this Wednesday evening, quite a hopeful thing to see from an industry seemingly so consumed with doom and gloom.

So could there be a Belzan on every street corner? Should there be? Let's face it - the trick that places like this pull off so successfully is to make the difficult and skilful look easy and effortless, and if after 7 years they've not even opened a second spot in Liverpool never mind attempted to throw their net wider probably tells you all you need to know about the logistics of running a modern British bistro. But then that just makes what Belzan are doing all the more special - if you want great food, made with care and intelligence and served with a smile, then you will just have to come to Smithdown Road. You won't regret it.

9/10