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.

The Cadogan Arms, Chelsea

There's no sign of a cost of living crisis on the King's Road, but then the people of Chelsea aren't known for their frugality. The Cadogan Arms is a grand old Victorian boozer - which means it has nice high ceilings, stained glass and a big carved wooden bar - but then this is also Chelsea so they can do a good cocktail and have oysters and fancy salads on the menu. The place had been on my list for years thanks to the "new" owners (this was in 2021, when the country was in full plague mode) being JKS of Gymkhana, Hoppers and Trishna fame, but also because it's not that far from my house in Battersea, and living in Battersea, believe me, a short journey home is a rare treat indeed.

It was a good thing we'd booked - the place was completely slammed on a Friday night, not at all a given in many city centre pubs I've noticed lately. Welcome cocktails (well, we welcomed ourselves with them) were very good - an El Diablo with both mezcal and tequila, and a Sticky Toffee Pudding Old Fashioned which combined buttered bourbon and PX to produce a remarkably authentic STP flavour profile. There's a definite North-American-Mexican lean to the drinks list - I also notice they sold Agua di Madre as a non-alcoholic option, and interesting range of drinks made with fermented kefir. I mean, this is Chelsea, after all.

Now, I hesitate - usually - to review a place after having just one dish (each) but this is, after all, a gastropub and we definitely weren't the only people just popping in for one dish before heading home to watch the new White Lotus. My burger was perfectly fine - a good shape and size, easily eaten with my hands so many marks for that, but unfortunately the beef was overcooked to grey and rather dry. They didn't ask me how I'd like it cooked, so maybe this is just how they want to serve it.

Much better was a £34 sirloin, a giant chunky thing cooked accurately albeit a little timidly - we'd like to have seen more of a dark crust - but it tasted great and it really was something almost approaching a bargain for your money. Both sets of chips - chunky and fries - were decent, and the bill which I completely forgot to take a photo of but we did pay honestly, was £47.88 each, about right really. I mean, we didn't leave hungry.

It's almost always the case that when a restaurant doesn't have to be good to make money - when your customer base is the captive audience of an airport terminal, for example, or a posh suburb of London where residents are independently wealthy and not very discerning - it isn't. I have had some genuinely diabolical meals in Kensington and Chelsea - and Belgravia, and Hampstead - over the years, to the extent that it almost puts you off trying anywhere in this places again. But I'm glad I challenged my prejudices at the Cadogan, and found a place that both knows its audience and tries to do things well. And such an easy journey home, too.

7/10

Kahani, Chelsea

The cliché, repeated often enough that it's usually accepted as fact, is that the more well off a suburb of London is, the less likely you are to find anything good there to eat. Hampstead, Holland Park, St John's Wood, these are lovely areas to visit (I particularly recommend a walking tour of the Beatles locations in St John's Wood as I did a couple of weekends back), but once you start feeling the pangs of hunger you're better off jumping on a bus and eating somewhere else.

Chelsea used to be firmly in the "too posh for dinner" category (notwithstanding the existence of Medlar, which is, and always was, brilliant) but interestingly, and quite happily as far as I'm concerned as I live only a short bus ride away, the area around Sloane Square seems to have become a bit of a center for high-end Indian food. Kutir took over from the old Vijay Bhatia site (itself rather highly regarded back in the day, so I'm told), and is worth a trip to the area alone, especially given its incredibly reasonal (for Chelsea) prices and special game menus. And a short walk the other side of Sloane Square is Kahani, where I enjoyed an absolutely wonderful series of dishes last week.

I nearly described Kahani as "new" in that last paragraph, but apparently it's been open since 2018. I guess that's the point of these invites, to reintroduce the public - or at least a dedicated handful of overeager restaurants spods like me - to somewhere that for whatever reason has slipped off the radar. Or even to remind people that it is worth travelling to Chelsea for dinner after all. And in the case of Kahani, it really, really is.

There's been a worrying trend in some high-end Indian subcontinent restaurants to steer away from the traditional pre-order snack of poppadums and chutneys, and to consder them somehow a bit lowbrow. There's a part of me sympathises - if you are charging £100 instead of £20 for their dinner, you want to end up with as little about the expensive experience that's in common with the budget option as possible, otherwise people are going to wonder where the money's gone. But the thing is, authenticity and sophistication be damned, I love poppadums and chutneys and consider any meal that doesn't start with them a wasted opportunity. Plus, if Jamavar can do a classy version, with interesting chutneys and cute little cone-shaped poppadums and fried plantain chips, there's no excuse for anyone else not to make the effort. These were perfectly nice, though the chutneys all tasted rather similar, and I missed a coriander and chilli version.

Cocktails were great fun - just the right side of eccentric to be interesting, and well-constructed enough to taste worth the money being asked. The "Chacotic" was particularly good, a barrel-aged negroni spiked with woodsmoke, which filled the air with intoxicating autumn aromas.

Spiced chickpeas were colourful, involved plenty of interesting textures, and was impossible not to enjoy. The match of chickpea with tamarind has plenty of precedent in Indian food - I will never forget the late, lamented Kastoori in Tooting's pani puri, which were always a must-order - but sometimes the classic combos are classic for a reason.

"Black chicken" was, well, certainly as described, darkened with a thick coating of roasted spices and absorbing so much light my photo has them looking like lumps of charcoal. Fortunately though, that's where the similarity ends, as they were beautifully tender and boasting deliriously complex spicing.

One of the signs a restaurant knows what it's doing when it comes to seafood is that no matter how large or unweildly the animal in question, the kitchen will always have it turn out soft and moist to the very last inch. These smoked malabar prawns were great big chunky things but the meat fell satisfyingly out of the shell in one piece, and the spice mix made the most of the flesh without overwhelming or fighting it. Very nicely done.

Guinea fowl tikka were similarly sensitively cooked, with a good texture (not always a given with guinea fowl, whose leanness can foil even in the best kitchens) and addictive cream-tomato sauce.

And last of the grilled items, lamb chops - more complex spicing, and top-quality meat touched with a gentle crust but which inside was pink and meltingly tender. All of the these dishes had been so good we'd had no trouble in hoovering them all up but I think by the time the last of the lamb chops had gone to the great tandoor in the sky, our capacity to carry on was being somewhat challenged.

Sensing our valiant struggles, Kahani did what every Indian restaurant worth its salt would do to a reviewer, and decided to bring all of the rest of the menu at once. So, here's a giant slow-cooked lamb shank about the size of my head, which had a fantastic firm texture and came soaked in a sauce that would have been worth the journey all by itself. I think I managed about a teaspoon's worth of it.

Also, chicken "Makhani", yet more beautifully cooked cubes of chicken in a tomato-cream sauce, so good that the fact I was utterly unable to fit more than a single forkful in my mouth was a matter of profound despair.

Jeera aloo, a marvellous soft spiced potato side that was fragrant and comforting and precisely spiced, was another reason to curse my inadequate appetite.

Bread was nice, too, of course, fluffy and buttery and light. I don't think I managed any of this, just stared at it wistfully until it was time to clear up and leave.

I should point out that excellent front of house at Kahani, enthusiastic and attentive and determined to kill us as they were, tried very hard to persuade us to have a dessert. Each. We declined, as apologetically as we could through the pain and promised to come back and try them at some point soon, perhaps with the English rugby team in tow, or at the very least a hungry dog.

Anyway, you'll be pleased to know none of that food went to waste. Kahani happily provide takeout bags, and that incredible lamb shank, the chicken makhani, the potatoes and the bread made a supremely enjoyable buffet lunch the next day. Indian food usually reheats superbly, high-end Indian food doubly so, and Kahani's is no exception. So if you do over-order, a very real possibility given a menu that reads this well even if you're not being treated, or if the front of house sweet-talk you into ordering an entire roast sheep on top of the hardly modest selection you'd hitherto come up with, remember that they may not necessarily, despite first appearances, be trying to kill you. They may just want to make sure you have enough in for lunch the next day.

That's Kahani, then - an excellent addition to the Sloaney neighbourhood, and another high-end Indian restaurant very much worth visiting. Even if Chelsea never quite becomes a destination dining area, there's increasingly enough to recommend it as a diversion, and perhaps that'll do for now. After all, even Shoreditch had to start somewhere.

8/10

I was invited to Kahani and didn't see a bill.

Kutir, Chelsea

Like most residents of the UK, I used to have a very fixed idea of what an Indian restaurant was. Our nearest curry house growing up occupied a charming old schoolhouse in Formby Village - it's called Hilal Balti House now but chances are in the 80s and 90s it was maybe called Indian Spice or the Taj Mahal or something equally generic. The experience of eating there - well, I'm sure I hardly need to tell you. Paper napkins and floral wallpaper; papadums and chutneys; Korma, Rogan Josh, Vindaloo - the staples of any British high street Indian restaurant, reliable, inexpensive, and in its own way quite wonderful. I'm sure even back in those days there were more exciting mixed grills and Punjabi specials being served to the immigrant communities of Bradford and Burley but for the rest of us, this was a curry, and a curry was this.

Many years after I moved to London I still thought Brick Lane was about as good as it got. I wouldn't have known it's common for many different restaurant fronts to use a shared kitchen at the back, and that some of the Scores on the Doors would be as rare as Michelin stars, but I probably wouldn't have cared even if I did. The same comfort and familiarity of every single Indian (/Bangladeshi/Pakistani) restaurant in the country found an equally captive audience here, amongst the touts and Cash 'n' Carrys of E1.

But before long, my narrow world expanded. Not just thanks to Lahore Kebab House and Tayyabs in Whitechapel, fiercely authentic Pakistani grill houses that I've already banged on about far too much on this blog, but at the top end too, specifically Trishna in Marylebone which opened my eyes as to what fireworks were possible when top ingredients were treated to fiercely intelligent subcontinental cooking. It was literally life-changing food, the kind of thing I didn't even know was possible, and I made a special note of head chef Rohit Ghai in case he popped up anywhere else. And pop up he did. Long story short, Ghai's career since Trishna is basically a list of all my favourite high-end Indian restaurants in London - Gymkhana, Jamavar, Bombay Bustle, and now, Kutir. And there's an argument - a strong argument - that Kutir is perhaps his greatest achievement to date.

At first glance, it's all very Chelsea. The handsome townhouse, the sparkling service, the plush (and nicely spaced) tables. You expect to open the menu and be confronted with the kind of prices that make your mouth go dry but instead - starters average £10-12, mains £16-18, desserts £5-6. It's all incredibly reasonable, and as anyone who's ever eaten there will tell you, Chelsea is not often that.

Another thing that's very un-Chelsea about Kutir is a determination not to reduce the spicing levels. Even a pretty tray of amuses packed a punch - I think a little pastry cylinder of crab and coriander, and neat balls of mushroom croquettes, but don't quote me as they weren't on the menu - a fantastic intro to all that Kutir are about.

Similarly, "Aloo Tikki - Honey Yoghurt' was a fiercely chillified arrangement of potato, tamarind and mint chutney which like all the best Indian vegetarian food was such a riot of texture and colour the lack of a central lump of protein was a complete non-issue.

Lamb chops, vast, plump things cooked to a perfect soft pink inside, used the tandoor sensitively enough to retain moisture but with enough heat to produce a few delightful crunchy spots. The meat was clearly high quality - not overwhelmingly gamey but with a lovely soft, lamb-y profile - but Ghai's tikka spicing is next-level, an utter masterclass in balance and power. Right up there with the very best high-end lamb chops you're ever likely to come across.

"Dhokla - Apple" was another bewilderingly complex, and equally rewarding, vegetarian dish. Gram flour cake - sharp and spicy - was surrounded by various early spring vegetables such as radish and beetroot, and sweetened with honey.

And this, what is fast becoming a Kutir signature dish - (excellent) naan bread topped with shredded roast quail, scrambled egg and real black truffle, an unusual combination of flavours and textures on paper but which we demolished seconds after the first bite. It's notable how Kutir plays with the expectations and demands of the Chelsea audience, with its veggie-friendly options and premium ingredients, while at the same time retaining all of the charm and authenticity of Indian cuisine. It's a tricky balancing act that they've got spot-on.

Sea bass, a nice neat fillet with a good crisp skin, came resting in a tomato and coconut curry so rich and satisfying even if the dish had consisted of nothing but that, it would have still been worth the £16. Also, one of the best things about any Indian Subcontinent restaurant, at any budget, is that leftovers eaten after the event sometimes even better than they did on the day. Kutir are happy to package up anything you can't finish, and I thoroughly recommend you do so if you managed to over-order like we did.

Duck korma suffered only slightly from a rather unappealing dump of sauce on top - strange where everything else had looked so immaculate. However it's a pleasure to report the duck itself was incredible - soft, gently spiced and full of flavour, with a side of pickled swede being the accompaniment we didn't know we wanted but now can hardly imagine duck with anything else.

The final savoury course was jackfruit 'kofta' - marvellously meaty and greaseless - in another knockout curry sauce studded with spinach. Snazzy presentation too, under a pastry arch.

Desserts weren't quite as innovative or notable as the savouries, but we still polished them off. Mango and passionfruit sorbet were packed with fruity flavours and had a perfect smooth texture...

...and yes, chocolate and banana is hardly a staggeringly unique concept but the banana fritters were crunchy and addictive, and the chocolate had a good balance of sugar, cacao and dairy. Which is all you can ask for, really.

Our bill was slightly reduced thanks to a spot of the old blogger privilege, but as you can see even at full price this would have been a £50/head meal, including a bottle of nice Chardonnay, incredible value for this level of food, and in this part of town.

As much as I ever know how I'm going to react any restaurant on the day, I knew for sure I was going to enjoy Kutir. Rohit Ghai's restaurants have never been anything less than superb, each with their own distinct style (and all coming highly recommended, even now) but always offering the kind of thoughtful, studied take on Indian food that so many places attempt but so few get right. But perhaps due to a greater level of control of the menu after a string of high-profile collaborations, or just simply because practice makes perfect, this seems to be the restaurant that reflects most accurately - and most brilliantly - the style and attitude of cooking he's been pointing towards all along. It may come with somewhat less of the practiced elegance of Gymkhana and the like, but what it lacks in polish it makes up in heart, and it's impossible not to be defeated by its charms. So why resist? Book yourself in - you won't regret it.

9/10

I was invited to try Kutir, then liked it so much I went back and paid. All the above happened on my 2nd visit. Sorry for the terrible photos, it's dark in there.

The Bluebird, Chelsea

When I first moved to Battersea waaay back in the summer of 2005, one of the first things I did (after buying some plates, cutlery, a toaster and a kettle from Asda) was wander over Battersea Bridge to check out the sights of Chelsea. The very first restaurant I saw as I turned the corner from Beaufort St onto King's Road was the grand edifice of the Bluebird Café, art deco home of the Bluebird Motor Company (1923), a former garage repurposed, as was the style in those days (see also Bibendum and the Wolseley) as a self-consciously upscale eatery. Sat outside enjoying a coffee in the sun was none other than Jean-Paul Gaultier, equally self-consciously dressed in his trademark black-and-white striped skin tight t-shirt, knowing full well the whole of the Kings Road had eyes on him as they passed.

It was the perfect introduction to this strange corner of London, glamorous and wealthy but with at least still a memory of the counter-culture that formed the heart of the swinging 60s. The Bluebird was - still is, based on my meal on Friday - a place first and foremost to strut about and be seen, and for that reason I never felt compelled to go in and see if the food was any good. But now they have a new chef, and a PR company who usually know what they're talking about, and so I was persuaded to take a spot amongst the high heels and hairdos and see what was up.

I can't tell you what the upstairs dining room at Bluebird looked like pre-refurb, but am happy to report that now it is genuinely beautiful, a vast room illuminated by generous skylights and clever use of foliage softening the more industrial shapes of the old garage. One side of the room boasts a panoramic view over the Kings Road, and - crucially - all chairs and tables are exactly the right height and very comfortable. Believe me, this is a detail you can't take for granted anywhere these days.

First impressions of the food menu were less knockout but made sense in the context of a restaurant trying to please as many fussy Chelsea types as possible - a few salads, familiar seafood, steaks, burgers. It threatened dishes "will be served as they are ready" but in reality things appeared more or less in the order we'd requested, albeit starting with a bowl of dry and bready "gougères", either stale or overbaked, with hardly a hint of cheese flavour. Not a great start.

Fortunately oysters were much more pleasant, not least because I found fully three (yes three) actual pearls. Now I have eaten a vast number of oysters in my time and never so much as found one, so to find three in a tray of a half dozen is, well, mind-boggling. My incredulous tweets were met with stats such as the odds of finding even one to be 12,000-1, so finding three in six quite rightly raised a few eyebrows, one person going so far as to suggest they were planted for PR purposes. But the way they were buried in the oyster flesh, attached to the muscle, suggested that I'd actually just been incredibly lucky. "You should buy a lottery ticket!" someone else quipped.

Steak tartare was also top-notch, and it was about this time that any early worries about style-over-substance and the populist menu began to fade. The cooking here, gougères aside, is very good, speaking of a great deal of classical training and proper command of flavour. Steak tartare is a very easy thing to get very wrong indeed, to the extent where you wonder why so many places still attempt it when the end result is often so inedible. Here though it was great, robustly seasoned and lifted with just the right amount of capers.

Whole roast black leg chicken & foie gras is somewhat conservatively marked on the menu as being "for two", but I am absolutely certain this vast bird with its drumsticks the size of turkey legs could comfortably feed four, making its £65 price tag slightly more reasonable. And yes, those really are two huge wobbly slabs of foie gras balanced on top, their juices rolling over the crisp skin of the chicken beneath and pooling in the base of the serving skillet forming a heavenly rich gravy to be soaked up with chunks of fried baguette. If there's one must-order dish at Bluebird it's this heaving beautiful-ugly pile of bronzed chicken and foie.

Given we stuffed ourselves to the brim with chicken and still had to take a kilo of goodie-bag home we obviously had to skip desserts. But there was still enough in what we did try to convince that Bluebird is, somewhat against expectations in this part of town, a Good Restaurant, and I would have no hesistation in recommending it to anyone, or indeed going back on my own dollar. It's not groundbreaking or life-changing, but there's a lot to like here, and there's not often you can say that about a restaurant in Chelsea. Oh, and I did play the lottery. £10 worth on Saturday night. I didn't win. But at least I've got those pearls.

8/10

I was invited to Bluebird.