Darby's, Battersea

I have been following chef Robin Gill's career with an interest bordering on obsession since a meal at the Dairy all the way back in 2013. Restaurants like the Dairy, and chefs like Gill, tend to invite obsession - his food is an unbeatable combination of exquisitely tasteful and flatteringly accessible, just one case in point being the famous truffled Brie de Meaux on sourdough toast (later Baron Bigod) with rooftop honey, a superficially simple arrangement of ingredients that swiftly became the talk of the town and something approaching a signature dish. For this, and countless other wonderful things, I made the Dairy my restaurant of the year in 2014, and it's absolutely still one of the best tables in town, even as its rustic style and seasonal philosophies have spawned a hundred close imitators.

But despite all this, only a fool would think the success of the Dairy automatically made it some kind of template you could stamp onto anywhere you wanted a nice restaurant. And presumably as well, a project such as Darby's comes with an extra large helping of massive risk - this vast space, with its beef ageing rooms and bakery and huge central bar, positioned in a windswept no-man's-land around the back of the new US embassy and absolutely nowhere you'd stumble across by accident - had the potential on paper of being the biggest white elephant since the Millenium Dome. Would anyone make the effort to find it?

Well yes, they would - and they will - and that's because, somewhow, Gill's technically-brilliant-yet-homely cooking has evolved and expanded quite naturally into this new showroom, and has been joined by a selection of fresh seafood, premium steaks and house charcuterie that help form a menu best described as the Dairy by way of Bentley's.

And much like the Richard Corrigan gaff, it's a good idea to start with oysters. At early evenings, half a dozen and a pint of Guinness is an incredible £10 - surely one of London's great seafood bargains. Any other time expect to pay a slight more realistic £2.75/pop upwards, but these are excellent specimens, shucked to order (not always a given, believe me) and presented with all the trimmings. Oh, and the Guinness is nicely done too.

Gill's love of Spanish and Italian food is given expression in the snacks menu, where gildas (Basque skewers of anchovy and olives) appear alongside truffled arancini (as good as I remember from Sorella) and occasionally off-menu delicacies such as rich, tomato-y tinned mussels and a Mediterranean salad of canned mackerel. Don't worry though, this isn't your John West supermarket mackerel, these are the posh Spanish kind - substantial and rewarding, definitely worth sampling if available, and you won't know unless you ask...

Unsurprisingly for somewhere boasting its own dry ageing room, the steaks at Darby's, from the diminutive Dexter breed, are top notch. Grilled confidently over coals and boasting thick ribbons of funky yellow fat, they are beautiful things indeed, and it's my equal pleasure to report that after some deeply disappointing steak sauces in various places (hang your head, STK), the green peppercorn sauce and bone marrow gravy at Darby's are both essential. So order them both - I did. Also, keep an eye on that ageing room for huge turbot, and later in the year pheasant and grouse and who knows what else.

Darby's even do their own version of the Quality Chop House confit potatoes - here called "crispy beef fat potatoes" - with delicate layers of spud mandolined and pressed back together into a kind of a savoury millefeuille. Order those, too.

If you've ever had the bone marrow agnolotti at the Dairy (and if you haven't, put that right immediately) then you'll know these guys do a good pasta. And so this veal pappardelle was predictably glorious, with a meaty, Marmite-y ragu draped over huge folds of bouncy carbs, the kind of texture you find only from places bothering to make their own pasta from scratch, daily. Which, of course, they do.

I wasn't going to have any dessert (all the above was somehow divvied out between just two of us) but this little sorbet appeared as we asked for the bill, so that was nice of them. It was excellent, as I'm sure are all the desserts based on many years sampling the offerings from the Dairy.

There are two other things worth mentioning while I have your attention. Firstly, front of house is headed by Emma Underwood, formerly of Sticky Walnut, Where the Light Gets In, Stem and basically every not just exciting but groundbreaking new restaurant of the last few years so clearly she knows a good thing when she sees one. Whether you decide to fold yourself into one of Darby's' generously proportioned booths or perch at the bar and pester the chefs with questions about oysters and pasta (no prizes for guessing which of these options I went for), you'll be in exceedingly safe hands. And secondly, having made extensive use of their services at both (full disclosure) the launch party and this particularly booze-soaked Sunday lunch, the guys behind the bar make some brilliant drinks. The martini is served in a frozen glass, for example, which I always find is a sign of somewhere going that extra mile.

So all in all, there's very little not to love about Darby's. From a team with such a proven track record in all their various specialist areas, and given such a (presumably) dream budget to work with, we were always like to end up with somewhere worth lavishing with your dinner money. But as I wobbled home on the 344 bus that sunny Sunday afternoon I realised that very few people other than the Gills (it's a family affair, jointly run with wife Sarah, and with son Ziggy providing additional entertainment) could have taken such an unpromising chunk of this faceless, endless Nine Elms development and given it such heart. And it's that extra sprinkling of pixie dust, that gloss of Irish charm, that turns what could have been a rather obscure Battersea building site into the latest great London food destination.

9/10

I went to the Darby's opening party, and as part of general blogger privilege the oysters and a couple of the tinned dishes didn't appear on the bill.

Nuala, Old Street

It's a sign of just how old I and my peer group in London are getting that meals in fancy new restaurants often begin with a period of reminiscing about the previous use - or uses - of the building we happen to find ourselves in. I remember this particular spot on City Road, when I worked in the area in around 2008, being home to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, but my dining companion last night's knowledge of the area stretches back even further, to when it was apparently a grim, bare-bones nightclub with blacked-out windows and murky reputation. That was when you'd occasionally catch Noel Fielding in the Dragon Bar just over the road, and a pint cost £4. Yes, that far back.

Anyway, in the now-almost-unrecognisable Silicon Roundabout, up pops Nuala, as flashy and "designed" as befits the area but with a welcome as warm and kind as an Irish mammy. Yes, Nuala takes a certain inspiration from the Emerald Isle as head chef Niall Davidson (formerly of, well, lots of places but most recently Chiltern Firehouse) hails from there, but the menu is far from traditional and has rather more Dalston than Dalkey about it. The friendliness and charm of the front of house, though, seems very Irish.

From "Snacks" (you'll know how the menu is organised if you've eaten at another cutting-edge British-Irish restaurant, the Dairy, in the last few years) we tried cod's roe crackers, superb smooth, salty tarama on top of delicate corn crisps, and neat discs of home made soda bread, sweet and soft, topped with shavings of foie gras and enchanting ribbons of preserved clementine.

"Crab salad in chilled cucumber broth" performed the intricate task of balancing white and brown crab meat utterly perfectly - just enough brown to have that earthy umami kick, sweetened with just the right amount of white - and the "broth" - in fact more like a gel - had a clean, defined cucumber taste. It was the kind of crab dish you always hope to find on a menu like this, but it's by no means a given that every kitchen can pull it off. Nuala managed it though.

Then the best sweetbreads I can remember eating in a long time. Huge, beautiful things, glazed with a superb meaty jus and without a hint of the mealiness that can affect lesser examples, they would have been astonishingly successful even without the "cauliflower rarebit", rich and smokey from the open grill, which accompanied them. Much like the crab dish, you hope when you see something like this on a menu it will live up to the promise, but only very rarely is it realised quite so brilliantly.

Rabbit is another tricky meat to get right - cooked well, it can be lean and gamey without being dry, but I've lost count of the number of times I've been presented with vaguely rabbity lumps of cotton wool, in otherwise even quite accomplished restaurants. Needless to say, at Nuala they know what they're doing with a bit of bunny, and a lovely grilled leg was presented alongside a couple of medallions of stuffed loin, all of it beautifully moist. Chunks of salt-baked celeriac sat in a subtle cream sauce studded with samphire, and added up to a very rewarding plate of food indeed.

Even superficially more straightforward dishes had plenty to recommend them. True, rump is often a chewier cut of cow, ordered often with the tacit understanding that whatever you lose in texture you'll gain in taste. And yes, although it took a bit of chewing, the taste from this beautiful bit of steak, Torloisk Highland cattle cooked to medium-rare over the coals and funky with a good deal of dry-aging, was well worth the effort and then some. This producer is a new one to me, but I will certainly be looking out for it on menus in the future.

It's at this point in lesser restaurants, whether the savoury courses had been mediocre or even quite good, that, sated and slowing, we'd pay up and leave. However we were having such a blast at Nuala that not only did we not dash home after mains but, having come to the conclusion that this kitchen could basically do no wrong, we decided to order all the desserts. So, a char-grilled pineapple, delicately filleted and arranged into a pretty yellow rose was joined by a quenelle of buttermilk/lime sorbet...

...pumpkin ice cream boasted a fantastic sliky-smooth texture that only the very best home made ice cream has, and a chocolate and coffee affair had a nice big caffeine kick paired with cool, light dairy. All of it was polished off so thoroughly they could have re-used the artful stoneware without use of a pot-washer.

There's a lot of pessmism blowing aroud the London restaurant scene lately. Some of it, no doubt, is well-founded; the effect Brexit will have on our ability to attract quality talent from Europe and the world is yet to be quantified, and ingredient inflation is already making things very difficult for Spanish and Italian restaurants (and many others) who import much of their menus. But however easy it is to succumb to fear and despair, and however much the following months and years may give us reason to do so, it seems London's restaurants, for now, have decided to just sod it all and carry on being brilliant anyway. So, the best advice I can give is to make a booking at Nuala immediately and make the bloody most of it.

9/10