Serra, Mayfair

It's very often the case about the very top London hotels that despite the amount of money they have at their disposal, and the pick of whatever celebrity or otherwise feted chefs they can choose from, the restaurants end up being rather mediocre. Partly this is due to the unique demands placed on a hotel restaurant, who have to cater for all kinds of requirements at all times of the day, and often various wildly different cuisines (burgers, curries, pasta) and inevitably end up doing none of them well.

If you have room (and money) though, you can divide up your food offering amongst various different restaurants in the same hotel, and stand a much better chance of getting things right. In the brand-new Rosewood Chancery on Grosvenor Square there are fully six dining options (or at least will be - some are not going yet), ranging from super-spendy Japanese (Masa from NYC which once held the dubious title of New York's most expensive restaurant) down to GSQ (no I don't know what the letters stand for) a much more informal deli selling pastries and sandwiches.

And somewhere in-between sits Serra, a vaguely Modern Greek-themed bistro with attached bar in a room that one of our party that evening recognised as being the place where you used to spend hours waiting for your visa interviews (it's the old US embassy building), albeit slightly more gussied up these days. Actually, I'm being disingenuous - it's a truly stunning space that's a delight to spend time in, more than enough to banish any lingering memories of visa applications.

We began (after a decent gin Martini of course) with house breads - a sesame "koulouri" and a buttermilk pita. Both were either straight out of the oven or cleverly reheated as they were warm and fluffy and salty in all the right places. I've never been to Greece, but if these are indicative of the kind of bread they're eating over there, I need to make plans.

Taramasalata was also superb - supremely smooth and light, full of flavour and presented neatly. It's become a cliché over the years that Greek food doesn't travel - that you eat very well in Greece itself but that Greek restaurants outside of the country tend to be a bit ropey - but places like here and Peckham Bazaar are enough evidence that it can be done if you approach it in the right way.

This is beef loin with preserved tomato, studded with little blobs of 'grape must mustard'. Grape must (Wikipedia tells me) is an early stage of winemaking, and how they go about making mustard out of it is beyond me, but the effect was good, lifting what would be otherwise rather bland beef into something more interesting.

Much better were scallops with peas and marigold, the sweet seafood (and a pretty generous portion for your £22) boosted by fresh herbs and really good fresh garden peas. This was one of the highlights of the dinner, a genuinely surprising and innovative preparation that was quite unlike anything I'd ever tried before. Not rocket science of course, but quirky and clever and a departure from your usual raw scallop dishes.

Raw tuna (we tried ordering the sardines and the langoustines first but both were unavailable - don't put them on the menu, then, is my advice) was another top bit of seafood work, studded with lovely toasted hazelnuts, bottarga and - my favourite element - caper leaves. Like the scallops dish it took a familiar raw ingredient and added just enough intelligence and style to twist it into something new without losing what makes raw tuna so much fun to eat in the first place.

Middlewhite pork "souvlaki" was a neat little arrangement of beautifully tender chargrilled pork, not overly fatty but with just enough to create crunch and ooze, dressed delicately with fennel seed, mustard and lemon as well as some colourful pickles. Technically impressive, of course, but crucially succeeding on the strength of the main ingredient - this was very good pork.

And it was a slightly less than impressive main ingredient - the beef, again - that somewhat let down this grilled sirloin. As with the pork, the protein had been expertly grilled with a lovely pink colour and dark, dry crust, but just didn't really taste of much. The mixture underneath, in fact - aubergine peperonata - was the most notable thing about the dish, but you wouldn't really spend £40 just for that.

We had a couple of sides I think but for some reason I've only ended up with a photo of the "fried potato", actually a Quality Chop House style confit/mandolined affair. They had a very good texture but I'm not sure 5 bitesize pieces for £8 is very close to anything approaching value. Yes, that's me moaning about prices in a brand new 5* hotel in Mayfair. Sue me (don't, I can't afford it).

There was another main of wild prawn tartare pasta, which I didn't try because raw seafood on warm pasta makes me feel a bit queasy, but it looked like good pasta and I believe it went down pretty well.

The only dessert I tried was the Sicilian lemon sorbet, which they offered to convert to a sgroppino with a shot of vodka so obviously I did. It was very nice actually - the lemon flavour boosted by grated lemon rind on top.

I didn't get invited to Serra but I didn't see the bill as someone else was very kindly paying, so I can't tell you exactly what the damage was, but this is, after all, a brand new 5* hotel in Mayfair so you're not going to get away with a bargain. That said, service was on the ball the prices were generally not too crazy and we had a good time so I suppose it could be worse.

And when the food was good, it was very good, and sometimes it really is worth paying extra to sit in spectacular surroundings, and get cosseted by sparkling service. So if the prices bring the overall score down a bit, bear in mind that this is still way better than meals I've had in some other equally prestigious - and often far more spendy - places, and I can still recommend Serra, for trying to bring something genuinely new to top-end hotel dining.

7/10

OMA, Borough Market

Dave Carter, a big friendly giant of a man with a completely impenetrable Barbadian accent, began his London restaurant journey at Smokestak, the hugely influential East London BBQ joint. Smokestak, together with a tiny handful of other brave pioneers around the same time (Lockhart, Shotgun, Pitt Cue, etc.), introduced the British public to the idea that BBQ didn't have to involve soggy overcooked ribs soaked in commodity sauce, or feeble bone-splintered chicken wings, or leathery bland mystery-meat "brisket", but in fact with a bit of care in sourcing and intelligence in applying smoking and live fire, could show itself to be a noble and mature cooking tradition.

Carter, I'm sure, could have made a very nice living for himself opening up a string of Smokestaks across the capital and beyond but it was somewhat of a surprise to see his name next attached to Manteca, one of my best meals of 2022 and, with its authentic, modern Italian aesthetic about as different from Smokestak - but just as brilliant - as you could possibly imagine.

So it really shouldn't be any surprise that OMA, his latest passion project, attempting to do for modern Greek food what Smokestak did for BBQ and Manteca did for Italian, is anything less than extraordinary, but it's fair to say that Greek cuisine is one of the most regularly abused and under-appreciated in the capital, and for anywhere calling itself Greek and being anything better than OK has the potential to be a complete game-changer. And let me tell you, OMA is a complete game-changer.

We started with two types of bread, both baked in-house, a wildfarmed laffa (flatbread), light and warm and with just enough of a char from the grill, and açma verde, a bagel-shaped soft bread that has wild garlic butter folded into its fluffy insides. Both were brilliant, the laffa in particular so good that as soon as we'd taken one bite we ordered another.

And bread is a critical component of the OMA experience because there are so many lovely thing to dip it into, such as this bright-white, silky-smooth tarama studded with pickled cucumber and crunchy little nuggets of 'carob rusk' which added a - for want of a better word - soily (in a good way) counterpoint to the fish. There are plenty of thrusting modern restaurants that can knock up a decent tarama these days - this was up with the best of them.

Babaghanoush, smoky and rich, came under a layer of zingy tahini spread and topped with greaseless, brittle Jerusalem artichoke crisps and was another riot of flavour and texture. Again, you will have had babaghanoush before, you will have had tahini before, you possibly would have even tried jerusalem artichoke crisps before, but rarely have they all worked together as well as this.

Oyster, a Carlingford Lough variety, came dressed in a chilli and tomato sauce that worked like a kind of posh Tabasco, highlighting the oyster without masking the flavour. I could have eaten a lot of these but in the interests of trying as much of the menu as possible I just had one. So I'll just have to go back and have some more in the future.

In a similar vein, the tomato and citrus dressing on the chalkstream trout crudo was intelligently balanced to make the most of the main ingredient, although I should warn that those slices of raw jalapeño aren't messing about - unless you want them as a pleasant background note in the dressing I recommend you don't mindlessly decide to chomp down on one whole unless you want to spend the next ten minutes gasping for water. I'll know better next time.

Hand-dived scallop with chilli oil butter was a giant, plump thing with - glory of glories - its roe attached, so you really did get quite a lot of seafood for your £11. Beautifully cooked to a dark crust and topped with a beguiling dried chilli dressing it was, again, about the nicest thing you can imagine happening to a scallop.

Even ostensibly throwaway sides such as this fennel salad had plenty to recommend it, containing a wide variety of lovely summery things like oranges and grapefruit, shot through with fresh mint. All the dishes at OMA are poised, posed and pretty, full of life and colour.

We only tried one of the 'skewer' category but it was an absolute belter - neat little pieces of squid, beautifully charred from the grill and coated with za'atar herb oil, a clear indication that the other skewers - including asparagus, lamb, octopus and an eye-catching ex-dairy txuleton, would have been equally worth an order. So yes, I suppose I'll just have to go back and make sure.

My favourite of the desserts was a superb olive oil ice cream, with a heady grassy flavour and so smooth and light it was like eating cold whipped cream. But a chocolate cremoso was also very good indeed, topped with salted caramelised nuts.

Service had that irresistible energy and sparkle of a brand new operation that knows it's onto a good thing, and despite being a full house (this is something they - and you - will have to get used to - it's already one of the hottest tickets in town, booked up for weeks) never left us wanting for anything. And it's a very attractive place to enjoy it all in too, with decently-spaced tables and a terrace overlooking the market below. If it sounds like they're doing everything right, well, I suspect they pretty much are.

The bill came to just under £50 a head - incredible value although I suspect we could have easily polished off at least one more skewer, or even the wild prawns cooked in seafood butter which I am still kicking myself we didn't order, so I think a more realistic spend is around £70-£80. Still good for London, and still nigh-on amazing for the quality of food on offer.

Just as we were wrapping up our evening at OMA, chatting idly about Google reviews and the happy challenges of being a restaurant in heavy demand, our very pleasant South African server asked us a favour. It seems in recent days the restaurant's entry on Google had been landed with a number of negative reviews seemingly from angry Greeks (although really, who knows) accusing the place of betraying Greek food and not being "authentic". Apparently they had the same at Manteca from angry "Italians" too.

So we were politely asked, if we had a moment, if we could readdress the balance by posting about our evening on Google. Well, I don't do Google reviews - life's too short - but I can hopefully do them one better on this blog, by reporting honestly and truthfully that whatever you call the food at OMA - although I don't see what's wrong with Modern Greek - that there is hardly any better way to spend money on dinner in the capital. And I hope they're happy with that.

10/10

INO Gastrobar, Soho

All the game-changing restaurants in recent London history have a certain thing in common. Watever culinary fireworks or technical expertise are on display over the course of the menu at large, there's usually one "wow" moment that grabs the imagination and writes the headlines, a single dish (or combination of dishes) that stands as a flagship symbol of everything the restaurant is about. Think about the West Coast burger aesthetic demonstrated by MeatLiquor's Dead Hippy, or the East-meets-West fusion genius of Dishoom's bacon naan. These things have rightly gone down in London food history, but crucially still stand as shorthand for the restaurant, encapsulated in one dish. They're also, most importantly, still on the menus to this day.

I got as far as the very first dish at INO Gastrobar when I began to get that long-forgotten feeling of being a part of something rather special. There have been plenty of exciting new restaurants in the last year or two - astonishingly, considering that most will have been closed for a good proportion of that and those that have opened are struggling with Covid-necessary social distancing, temporary shutdowns and Brexit-forced supply line issues - but through all this somehow the creative food types of the city still manage to adapt and improve, and take the restaurant experience to new and exciting places. And there are few places as exciting, right now, as INO Gastrobar.

The dish in question, by the way, is this. Called "Kakavia", it's part deeply flavoured, extravagantly buttery fish broth, part serving of top-quality seabass (I think) sashimi, and you are instructed to dip the raw fish into the soup one bit at a time, before finally polishing off the rest of the liquid with one satisfying gulp. It's obviously brilliant, both imaginitive and genuinely (at least to London eyes) innovative but also, despite the 'sashimi' element presentation, recognisably Greek, a deconstruction of a traditional fisherman's soup still holding true to the flavour profile of the inspiration whilst pushing in exciting new directions. This is how you should start any meal at INO Gastrobar.

From here on, it was clear that everything that came out of the kitchens would be exquisitely presented, and full of summer joy. Perhaps it was a little bit unimaginitive to go with two dishes both using the catch of the day, but this carpaccio was absolutely worth an order, with nice big thick slices of raw fish and topped with "Greek salad aromas", little chunks of feta, neatly sliced cherry tomato and dried oregano.

The house bread was "hand-stretched" pitta, a neat little thing with a nice smoky crust, seasoned with herbs and salt. It's strange - and often frustrating - that restaurants still regard breadmaking as some kind of ancilliary activity when it's something they'll be serving to 90% of their customers. I'm thinking particularly of even the most well-regarded ocakbasi in town that all get their cardboardy flatbread from the same supplier. But anyway, this was very good.

Tarama was superb, an arrangement of piped star shapes topped with salty bottarga and a slow-cooked yolk to bind it all together. With the warm pitta bread it made an irresistable combination, the roe soaking into the soft of the bread like fishy butter. It didn't last long.

Next a kind of broad bean mousse thing (sorry I'm pretty sure that's right) studded with an interesting collection of miniature onions (again...), various herbs and - wonderfully - chunks of chargrilled eel. Eel is a fish you rarely see outside of specialist Japanese and Chinese restaurants, so to see it presented like this, with confidence and care, in a Mediterranean context is quite thrilling. The "fava stifado" and the onions were lovely, definitely, but the star of this show was the eel, and as soon as it was finished I wanted to order it all over again.

Charred okra, tomato and feta was a little bonus from the kitchen and though perfectly pleasant, didn't really dazzle in the way that everything else had up to this point. You can't really go wrong with feta and tomatoes, but there's not really too much to get excited about here either. Still, appreciate the effort.

Seftalies were much more my kind of thing. Minced beef kebabs wrapped in caul, I had previously only read about these things in publications such as Pit Magazine and by chefs like Big Has so was delighted to finally get to sample them. They didn't disappoint - the beef was loose and richly flavoured, and a deft touch on the grill had got them bronzed without being charred, just the right texture.

The only dish I wouldn't order again is the "funky burger". It didn't really fit well on the menu, it was way too small a mouthful of food for £6, and - most importantly - it just didn't taste of much, not in the least bit "funky" and with a strange sausagey texture suggested it had been seasoned a while ago and left to sit.

But let's not dwell on that because "wild mushrooms" was yet another absolute triumph. Hen of the woods is one of the more remarkable foraged fungi available on these isles - dense and meaty, with a satisfying squeaky "bite", if it's not one of your favourite wild ingredients then you haven't tried it, simple as that. Here the natural faintly chicken-y flavour of the mushrooms were lifted by a lemon and oregano dressing, which gave the whole thing an entirely new dimension. This is a restaurant that knows good ingredients, and how to treat them.

For such ingredients, and the knowledge to make the most of them, you of course do pay. But with 4 glasses of wine between 2 people, a negroni, more than enough bewilderingly good food, a final price including (brilliant) service of £65pp is not anywhere near unreasonable. In fact, looking at the bill again now, I'd say I would have paid a lot more for that meal and it still would have felt like value. The amount of effort, and style, and skill that had gone into all the dishes was quite something to behold.

Romesco, San Diego

Back in what has firmly become my second city and home-from-home, San Diego, and a belated write-up of what is fast becoming my favourite restaurant there - Romesco, in Bonita. You may remember me waxing lyrical about the extraordinary Mision 19 in Tijuana last year, a world-class celebration of the finest Mexican food (and believe me, the competition in that category is quite fierce) from chef Javier Plascencia. Romesco actually predates the Tijuana joint by a few years, but is still the only Plascencia place in USA - all the rest are in his home town - so for Californians wanting to try innovative and exemplary Mexican food without negotiating a border crossing, it's a great place to start.

Which is odd, because on paper (literally, I mean the menu), Romesco is doing a lot of things very wrong. It calls its food Mexican-Spanish (or even "Mexiterranean", would you believe it), but has a vast, rambling list of dishes encompassing Greek salads, lasagne, risotto, tapas, tacos and steaks enough to strike the fear of God into anyone who's ever suffered at the hand of so many other unfortunate "fusion" restaurants. I'm usually the first to ridicule anywhere that claims it can cook, say, Malaysian, Thai and Chinese food to a competent level in the same kitchen but those cuisines at least all share the same subcontinent; how on earth would Mexican-Spanish be any more successful?

The answer, to everyone's great relief, not least my own, is a whole lot. Romesco dismisses worries about the oddness of its concept and geographical fuzziness with food that, sampled over two visits and at least two dozen dishes, is rarely less than stellar. Perhaps this success is down to the wise decision to largely keep the Spanish and Mexican elements (and American, and Greek, and Italian, and so on) distinct but separate, rather than attempting too many linguini tacos or chicken mole paellas. So despite being somewhat experimental, a tamarind margherita, for example, is unmistakeably Mexican - and very nice.

House bread (a French baguette, just in case they hadn't quite covered every single country in the world just yet) went remarkably well with pickled garlic (Lebanese? Syrian?), bouncy and crunchy and bright.

OK so maybe some dishes are literally Mexican-Spanish fusion after all. "Grandma's Tacos de Fideo" (I hope she doesn't want them back) were made with that noodly stuff the Catalans use, and also included Spanish chorizo, a rarity in this part of the world more used to the chilli paste (think Mexican n'duja). And very nice they were too.

Even better were the beef cheek tacos - no fancy fusion business here, just a great big glistening load of heavenly-rich beef, and a steamer full of those fresh masa flour casings that make Californians go all wobbly and sing the Star Spangled Banner.

Croquettas were, if we're going to be brutal, perhaps not quite as impressive as examples I've tried in London - using Cheddar cheese can't have helped - but a fluffy aioli perked them up a bit, and they were still enjoyed.

And then. And. Then.

And then the bone marrow sope.

Try and imagine - you won't be able to, but try - three golden brown, piping hot cylinders of roast bone containing a marrow so unbelievably smooth and rich and intense it was like eating the result of an experiment designed to distil the very best beef on the planet into a single mouthful. Each perched on a neat little circle of crisp cornmeal, and topped with a sprig of greaselessly deep-fried curly parsley, delicate enough to collapse into essence after little more than a hard stare.

We're not done yet. Next imagine a little bowl of chile de arbol sauce, with the haunting flavour of wood fires and citrus, presented alongside. Next to that, another bowl of what Romesco coyingly refer to as "beef glaze" but which goes nowhere near describing the wonder, the utter life-changing glory of this, God's own demiglace, a silky, heady reduction of red wine and beef stock so extraordinary simply knowing it exists makes me feel infinitely better about the state of humanity.

Then imagine combining all of the above and enjoying it as a single, divine entity. A symphony of animal and vegetable, taste and texture. Impossibly good.

Sorry I think I lost myself for a second there, but if there's one dish that was worth travelling 5,000 miles for it's that bone marrow sope, and I'm going to make it my mission to eat it on every future trip to San Diego.

Prawns - sorry, shrimp - in garlic butter were authentically Spanish, and perfectly cooked so as to retain a good firm texture. And even the desserts didn't disappoint, fluffy fresh churros served with a good homemade ice cream and creamy dulce de leche dip.

What else? Oh, the service - this, too, was something special, our waiter on our most recent visit (I'll namecheck - he was called Alfonso) a relaxed, seasoned career professional of a kind that exist hardly anywhere else in the world. And the icing on the churros was the bill - with the wine list being half price on Wednesdays we got a whole bottle of Californian Pinot Noir for about a tenner.

Looking back at the Romesco menu even now, after two trips, I still can't quite understand how it all works. This bonkers collection of influences and inspirations should have been, and heaven knows usually is, a disaster. Javier Plascencia is a supreme chef, of course, but being a skill in the kitchen is one thing; making a success out of a fideua taco is quite another.

But, in the end, who cares how it works. You need to know only this - it does work, and it's good value, and the staff are lovely and it's all just... just really, really good. Sorry, I've run out of words. I was thinking about the bone marrow sope again.

9/10



My flights to San Diego were very kindly provided by British Airways. Prices start around £717 return.