Chicken Shop, Holborn

It occurred to me the other day that a good number of the "wishlist" dishes or cuisines I've griped about not having access to in London over the years have, gradually, one-by-one, been ticked off. For a while it was burgers, where years of crushed hopes and disappointment were finally answered in a little white van in Peckham and since then we've had more than enough decent options. Then attention turned to Mexican food where following a disastrous false start at a grotty US chain, suddenly like the buses Breddos and El Pastor opened in the same month, and now I don't need to wait for a twice-yearly trip to Southern California to get my taco fix.

So what's left? Well, I enjoyed trying the Salvadorian cuisine of San Francisco, with their pupusa and curtido, although perhaps not quite enough to start a campaign, and besides the chances of us being able to scrape together enough El Salvadorians in London to run a lemonade stall never mind a full restaurant are slim to none. The generally lacklustre offering of Greek food is perhaps harder to excuse - there's a pretty healthy Greek community in London and yet if the best it can come up with is Lemonia, something's gone wrong somewhere. I've had high hopes for a few places not least the relaunched Real Greek and they've all come up short so here's hoping some budding entrepreneur fills this gap in the market in the near future.

But there's one thing I've been desperately searching for almost for the entire time I've lived in London, which despite certain steps in the right direction has remained stubbornly just out of grasp, and that's Mediterranean rotisserie chicken. In Catalonia, every small town boasts at least one (in fact usually two or three) pollo a l'ast peddler, with banks of stainless steel spits full of birds, rubbed with obscene amounts of salt and herbs, slowly bronzing away. For the best results, and at the best places, you put your name down earlier in the day and turn up just as they're cooked, to whisk it home to eat with pan con tomate and salad, but even lesser pollo a l'ast from tourist spots near the beach can be well worth the effort. In Barcelona, as you might imagine in the regional capital, the humble roadside rotisserie chicken as been given the full posh treatment in places like Chez Coco but even here the concept is the same - plump birds rubbed with salt, lemon, thyme and bay, served with a salad or patatas fritas. Wonderfully simple, and simply wonderful.

Now, I should say in case you think this post is building up to something, Chicken Shop is not the answer to all our (ok, my) rotisserie chicken dreams. It's great, and I love it, but there's not the same depth and agression in the seasoning, or crunch in the skin. Perhaps I'm on a hiding to nothing expecting a chain of London restaurants to be able to exactly recreate the experience of a trip to Kan Kilis in l'Escala of a hot summer afternoon but even so I'm holding out hope that one day someone will get their act together.

In the meantime, anyway, Chicken Shop is very good. The seasoning, though not particularly complex, is still fairly robust - mainly lemon and salt which means the skin has a good colour and citrus tang. The flesh is - remarkably - never in the least bit dry, a result I believe of a day of marination and some fiendish steaming process, which means that yes some of the fire and flavour of the Spanish style is lost but hey, at least on quiet days you don't run the risk of recreating the National Lampoon's Christmas dinner scene. It's not perfect, but it is the best rotisserie chicken in London, by quite some stretch, which is of course to be much applauded.

On top of this, the crinkle-cut chips are great, the sauces are fantastic (particularly the chilli which is great to dip chips into), and they do a genuinely lovely butter lettuce and avocado salad, not to mention a great big apple pie and ice cream for £6. Oh yes that's the other thing worth pointing out about Chicken Shop - it's cheap; a whole chicken for £19 and on weekday lunches you can get a quarter chicken and chips for £8.50. For Holborn (my usual haunt), this puts it in direct competition with Chicken Cottage over the road. And I know which one of those is more deserving of your lunch money.

So though the wait goes on for the truly authentic Catalan experience, perhaps forever, us Londoners really should be grateful for Nick Jones, whose attention to detail and sense of style and occasion made Soho House such a runaway success and which make Chicken Shop such a friendly and reliable little spot to have a chicken dinner.

8/10

Kym's, Bloomberg Arcade

It seems I'm not the only one that's been waiting - with an expectation bordering on feverish - for Kym's, the new restaurant from restaurateur-chef Andrew Wong. During the course of dinner there last week I lost count of the number of people trying their luck as a walk-in. Again and again, every few seconds, for the whole two hours or so we were there, various groups of rather well dressed people (this is the City after all) would approach the front desk, look longingly around the room, and then be sent dejectedly back out into the rainy London streets, tail between their legs. It was enough to make someone who had secured his booking a few days before the inevitable slew of 5 star reviews quite pleased with himself (that would be me, then) - sometimes it pays to be a restaurant obsessive.

So Kym's is the hottest ticket in town, but this was always likely to be the case. A Wong in Victoria is many people's favourite Chinese restaurant, pretty much the only good reason to travel to that part of town if you don't have tickets to see Wicked, but in that functional (albeit friendly) little space, the food did the talking. In Bloomberg Arcade, Wong's team have installed themselves in one of those flashy split-level City spaces typical of these kinds of new builds, a grand central staircase circling a huge fake sakura tree and various attractively spotlit tables, so here there's even more to get excited about. The food could even take a bit of a back seat, and the place would still be rammed.

Of course, there's no sign of the food being anything less than as exquisitely thoughtful and well-rendered as in Victoria, so you can relax on that front as well. But first, a citrus cocktail involving a pleasing buzz of sichuan peppercorns, which glowed wonderfully under the house lights. Sorry to bang on about the lighting so much - it really won't be that much of an issue for most diners, but if you're taking photos of your food it really makes a difference.

I mean just look at these pork skewers. See how the light plays on their delicately-chargrilled flesh. See the interplay of highlights and shadow. See the inviting bowl of sweet peanut dip floating just out of focus. Oh and yes, they tasted great, too.

Silken tofu is exactly the kind of thing I want to eat when I go to a restaurant like this, something so far removed from your standard Chinese offering that it was still a topic of conversation an hour after we'd paid up and left. No description I could offer could do it justice, but try and imagine neat little cubes of the finest tofu - "silken" really is the perfect adjective - in a complex mix of sesame seeds, crispy shallots and spring onions, all bathed in rich dark soy. This was so good - so fantastically good - that we ordered spoons to scoop out every last bit of the sauce that was left at the bottom of the bowl. Kym's style themselves as a "roasting" concept restaurant, so it was a delightful surprise that the first vegetarian dish impressed as much as this.

A spring roll was very good - I particularly liked the flourish of the delicate extra rice cracker casing on the outside. If I'm being brutally honest, even the country's finest spring roll can only, in the end, be a spring roll, but I've no doubt this had just as much care and effort lavished on it as everything else on the menu.

"Three treasure" is a selection of three different roast meats - chicken, pork belly and Iberico char sui - and is another example of how Andrew Wong can lift already an even pretty complex set of techniques performed on premium products to another level. If you've had better Chinese roast chicken than this anywhere - gently soy-marinated thigh with a skin of golden, melting perfection - well I need to know about it, because I have a new obsession. Similarly, pork belly had the most impossibly delicate puffed skin, just thick enough to crunch but not chewy, with a bright-white and bouncy flesh, and Iberico char sui was glazed with- well, I can't even begin to guess, possibly honey, possibly spiced sugar, but enough to make you want to order the whole thing again as soon as it was over.

We didn't do that, though, because we had this to eat next - chicken chop, breadcrumbed and fried in the Taiwanese style, cleverly done and not too thick or greasy, with an interesting mix of deep-fried and fresh herbs on top. You get the strong impression that even with the more straightforward items - the spring roll, the chicken chop - that these are the absolute best they can be, and that any vague sense of disappointment from not enjoying a tender fried piece of breadcrumbed chicken breast is entirely the fault of the diner, not the restaurant.

French beans would probably have been better enjoyed as a side with the previous courses rather than munched through on their own as we mentally prepared ourselves for dessert. Though perfection is a word that can easily be used to described much of the food, I'm afraid the service was a rather frustrating mixture of completely absent and rather scatty - lamb buns appeared without having been ordered (we even corrected them when they repeated our order at the start of the meal; fat lot of good it seemed to do) and it took about half an hour (!) to be asked if we'd even wanted a drink at the start of the meal. The food was so good this was all almost forgiven, but it's enough to bring the score down a bit.

But I'm sure some of these service niggles will sort themselves out in the fullness of time, and eventually allow the extraordinary food coming out of the kitchens at Kym's to be given the presentation they deserve. Even with a less-than-brilliant table near the front door on the route to the loos, occasionally ignored by staff and missing some of our order, we still had a whale of a time - enough to want to see what they could do with desserts as well. So here is a Hong Kong bun, kind of a less sweet choux pastry affair with a powerfully vanilla-y custard and sweet pineapple chunks...

...and this is glazed summer berries and a sharp, smooth berry sorbet, sat in a fluffy white chocolate mousse.

And it didn't even cost all that much. £66 a head with a bottle of wine and a cocktail each is a desperately reasonable amount of money to spend for food of this standard and in this part of town, and so even with reservations about service, my recommendation of the place is hardly much qualified. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say I want to go immediately back and try all the other menu items that I've seen whizzing past my Instagram feed over the last couple of weeks. Whether I'll get a chance, well that depends on whether interest in the place remains merely "feverish" or rises to "Sushi Tetsu". But you know what, I'm going to have a damn good try.

9/10

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.