You Decide 2022

Right, I've put this off long enough. I can only use Covid as an excuse for so long, and now I'm not wearing a mask on the tube any more there's no reason I can't subject myself to the usual ritual Death by Restaurant. So it's time, after a two year break, for my considerate and well-meaning readership (hint hint) to vote on the subject of my next restaurant review.

Same caveats apply:

1. I can't have reviewed the place before (have a quick Google if you're unsure)

2. It has to be either in London or easily accessible from London (I'll get on a train but I'm not flying to Athens)

3. Please check the restaurant you want to vote for hasn't already been added before you add it yourself.

And yes, I am aware it's more than likely I'll end up going to Nusr-Et, but that doesn't mean I can't start you off with Nathan Outlaw as an option, either. SOLA won last time, so there's always hope. Knock yourselves out.

EDIT: Nusr-Et was, predictably, the winner. I'd better start saving.

SO|LA, Soho

I was halfway through my evening at Sola (I'm not going to do the SO|LA thing in this post, it would drive me mad), being plied with top ingredients, fed fine wines and cosseted with charming service, that I suddenly remembered that this meal was the result of my annual public vote. Partly I'd forgotten because the vote was so bloody long ago - thank you global pandemic - and usually I try to follow up on the result as soon as possible, to get the whole sorry business out of the way ASAP. But also, having had some of the worst meals of my entire life forced upon me as a result of that vote, it seemed incredibly unlikely that a restaurant as good as Sola - and it's a very good restaurant indeed - should succeed in a competition where previous winners had included an all you can eat buffet, a carvery in suburban Croydon, and a train station pasta chain.

But anyway, here we are and you won't hear me complaining. Sola is the latest venture from the rather dizzying career of chef Victor Garvey, previously of Duende, Encant, Barolo, Rambla - I mean, I've completely lost count but then I imagine so has he. The concept is Californian Fine Dining, not a contradition in terms actually but a nod to the high-end Asian-American restaurants of Los Angeles and the Pacific West Coast more generally. There's a place in La Jolla called George's at the Cove which strikes me as the kind of place Garvey has in mind - tablecloths, tasting menus, and stunning views of the ocean. There's no flocks of pelicans or basking seals in Soho, sadly, and the views of Dean Street are often memorable for the wrong reasons, but in their little section of newly pedestrianised street they've created a little private haven of soft furnishings and greenery, and with the mercury hitting 30C of a Tuesday evening, it was here we settled in.

Four dainty amuses arrived speared into a wooden 3D map of California, which was rather clever. From left to right they were quail egg "Mimosa" (devilled eggs, which I'd last eaten at Juniper & Ivy in downtown San Diego, so that's another tick for authenticity), nori cured salmon, tuna tartare with a generous base of foie gras and loads of truffle on top, and compressed watermelon lime and basil.

Bread next, a foccacia studded with sun dried tomatoes which was excellent, and a whipped butter came topped with loads more shaved truffle, which was also obviously a Good Idea. I judge the success of a bread course in a tasting menu by how much of it I manage to avoid eating before the next dish arrives - this had all been demolished by the time the gazpacho turned up.

Gazpacho, incidentally, that was one of my favourite dishes from two of those previously mentioned restaurants, Encant and Rambla. Garvey has Spanish - or more specifically Catalan - heritage, and here has worked a little taste of Spain in amongst the trip to California. It was a real zinger of a dish, a bright purple beetroot sorbet sitting amongst summer flowers and luminescent cubes of compressed cucumber, before being draped in a robust tomato broth. Every bit of it was brilliant.

From here on, each subsequent savoury dish seemed to not only continue the tasteful and intelligent theme, but somehow kept getting better and better. Torched mackerel, with a deep, rich flavour of the finest quality fish, lay alongside painstakingly-sculptured "flowers" of kohlrabi and watermelon. Then over the top was poured tomato ponzu, an astonishingly flavoured sauce that would have been worth the price of admission by itself.

I'm sure there's a certain amount of sly humour at play in Sola's use of foie gras, given that the actual state of California banned the sale of it between 2015 and 2020. Here a nice solid chunk of it was served with "KPH sauce", named after food writer Kay Plunkett-Hogge and containing an addictive blend of Thai-style flavours in a sweet syrup, green mango, peanut and coconut. I'd genuinely never had this kind of flavour combination before; being surprised as well as well-fed is one of the joys of going to restaurants like this.

Next, lobster flambéed on a hot rock tableside, and served literally as is, just the beautifully unadorned tail meat on its own, very Spanish style. OK so admittedly there was also a cute little bowl of wild mushroom agnolotti and roast chard, soon to be soaked in another fantastic clear dashi broth, and that was brilliant too.

A fillet of seabass, skin crisped up beautifully and topped with caviar, arrived sat in a yuzu-spiked foam, into which was poured a stunning seafood bisque. And if you can read that list of ingredients without wanting to dive right in, then there's something definitely wrong with you. Some foraged coastal herbs to add a bit of colour too, which are always welcome.

"Squab" is a word you often see on American menus, but I'm not sure whether it's a materially different bit of game to our own "pigeon" or whether that's just a North American word for the same thing. Anyway its appearance here made perfect sense in the context of a Californian menu, and this was very nicely done with white peach and sand carrot (from Normandy apparently) and finished with another great sauce, this time laced with togarashi (a Japanese spice mix).

As you can probably tell from the above, the savoury courses at Sola are right up there with the city's best; successful, intelligent food that is unashamedly high-end but never anything less than joyful. The desserts were by no means a failure, but just seemed to have slightly less of a touch of magic about them than what had come before. Pistachio semifreddo had a weirdly subdued flavour and strangely unsatisfying pappy texture, and although the scoop of (calamansi?) ice cream was nice, it just seemed like it was doing the same job as the semifreddo.

Chocolate cremeux was various different blobs of chocolate ice cream and mousse, and although perfectly nice again just seemed a bit underthought compared to what had come before. Don't get me wrong, I still polished it off, there just wasn't fireworks.

We managed to end on a high though - Sola's house chocolates are superb, one spiked with wasabi and one contaning a punchy passionfruit jam, all with a delicate chocolate casing. Very much Paul A Young level work, which is high praise indeed I'm sure you'll agree.

The bill came to £180.55 for two but, full disclosure time, it should have been a bit - OK, a lot - more. Once he'd got wind of the public vote result back in March, Garvey in fact offered to comp the entire meal, but in the Covid era it felt wrong to accept so much from an industry that may need all the help it can get in the next few months, so we compromised on paying the prix fixe price for the full California tasting. Without the friends & family discount the bill would probably have come to over £200pp with service and tax included, but you know what, it really did feel like a £200 meal, from the thought and effort that had gone into everything to the beautiful surroundings and attentive service. £200 can get you a lot less in London, I can tell you from experience.

I don't want to break down scores for individual elements of a meal - that way madness lies - so 8/10 really reflects an essentially perfect savoury offering and slightly disappointing desserts. I think if you were more of a dessert person your score would be lower, but the good news is that the pastry section at Sola is being boosted and refined, and there's every chance on your own visit the desserts would be perfect too. And there's only one way of finding that out.

8/10

I was kindly given a discounted bill at Sola

You Decide 2020

Well, with a due sense of resignation and dread it's that time of year again when I open up my next review subject to public vote.

As ever, I'll start you off with a short list of places I actually want to go to, for you to completely ignore and instead add the usual list of ripoff chains, all-you-can-eat buffets and misguided vanity projects. Or will we have another shock result of somewhere not diabolically awful

Rules, as usual:

1. I can't have reviewed the restaurant before (have a quick Google if you're unsure)

2. It has to be either in London or easily accessible from London (I'll get on a train but I'm not flying to Athens)

3. Please check the restaurant you want to vote for hasn't already been added before you add it yourself.

I'll close the voting in 48h, so midday on Friday. That should be long enough for a representative sample.

AND THE WINNER IS... So|La! Thanks to everyone who voted, you guys rock.

You Decide 2019

It's that time of year again, when all you sadistic bastardslovely people get to decide the subject of an upcoming blog review.

Each year we go through the same rigmarole of my offering a list of restaurants I actually want to go to, which get roundly ignored in favour of a list of absolute shitshows that people have added themselves. But you know what, I am nothing if not an optimist so I'm going to get you started off with a selection of some of the country's best restaurants that I've not yet been to (or not booked in to go to, which is why Sat Bains isn't on the list - I'm going in March) and even if they get ignored at least I can say I tried.

Rules, as ever:

1. I can't have reviewed the restaurant before (have a quick Google if you're unsure)

2. It has to be either in London or easily accessible from London (I'll get on a train but I'm not flying to Athens)

3. Please check the restaurant you want to vote for hasn't already been added before you add it yourself.

I'll close the voting in 48h, so 2pm on Wednesday. That should be long enough for a representative sample.

EDIT: Cripes, Le Gavroche it is. Thanks to all who voted! Guess I'd better start saving...

Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant, Euston

On a wet weekday evening on the mezzanine level of Euston station, I and my dining companion are perhaps the only two people that are there only to eat. Ordinarily, the customer base of Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant would consist of frazzled parents and their kids, intercity commuters and the odd hen party, all nervously guarding their luggage while Virgin Trains pick up the biggest chunks from the floor of the 18:47 departure to Glasgow Central. Nobody chooses to spend their evening at Euston, or any departure hall for that matter, from Gatwick Airport to Victoria Coach Station. Which is generally why they're amongst the most depressing places on the planet.

It's this atmosphere of collective anxiety and gloom that My Restaurant has its work cut out to battle against, and under the harsh Network Rail strip-lighting and to the accompaniment of delayed departure announcements and grim security warnings, there's only so far a jaunty colour scheme and comfy booths will get you. So, perhaps taking a cue from its famously ebullient celebrity owner, front of house are the most insanely overenthusiastic and excitable bunch of people I've come across since the affected theme-park bonhomie of the Hard Rock Café, all young Italian men with giant haircuts flamboyantly flapping their dishclothes around and shouting at each other. Halfway through our meal, one whose shift was ending (and who had already thrown a hoodie over his work jumper) insisted on shaking our hands and curtseying (at least I think that's what it was) before heading downstairs for the tube. It was all quite overwhelming.

Typically, of course, I'd find service at this level of rabid fervour utterly insufferable, and indeed there were a couple of moments I wanted to climb into my glass of Chardonnay and die. But you know what, they meant well. And if they feel the need to engage grumpy food bloggers in banter, even said food blogger made it as clear as he possibly could that he'd rather pull his fingernails out than put up with one more second of it, then I suppose they need something to distract themselves from the reality of working in a train station restaurant.

Anyway, I imagine you'll want to know what the food is like, and on this front - initially - everything went exactly according to plan. Which is to say a sharing platter of charcuterie and bread called somewhat optimistically "Fantastico" contained, for a whacking £24.75, stale old slices of grim supermarket hams, soggy foccacia, bendy grissini and the very worst pesto either of us had come across in our lives, looking and tasting like pond scum. Weirdly, the hams were only stale and dry in parts, and the grissini only chewy at one end, which suggests that the problem may be more storage than sourcing. But it was clear none of it should have been served, and was worth nowhere near the prices being charged.

So far, so predictable. Nobody would expect me to have anything even approaching a nice time at any of the public vote restaurants, and suffering through a board of stale salami while an extravagant Italian performs tricks with cutlery is presumably exactly the kind of thing you came here to read. We awaited our main courses with the familiar gut-punch of dread and hopelessness. Things weren't going well.

And then something very strange happened. A £31 fillet steak in green peppercorn sauce arrived, just two pieces of meat neatly arranged on a plate, with no fripperies and no frills, looking like something you might actually want to eat. I cut into one of the pieces to reveal medium-rare, tender flesh, bleeding in the same way you might expect a perfectly good, perfectly cooked bit of beef to bleed. It tasted, if not like the greatest bit of protein I've ever had access to, then certainly better than I've been asked to eat at far more expensive places, places with tablecloths and cloakrooms and toiliets you don't have to pay 30p to use.

More astonishingly, and yet more confusingly, my friend's crab linguini was actually, well, good. Expertly cooked pasta with plenty of bite and bounce, a good, well-seasoned sauce containing lots of fresh ingredients, a bit heavy on the garlic perhaps but not disastrously so, and loads of sweet white crab meat. Surely the crab wouldn't have been picked on site and was probably frozen, but there's no harm in using pre-prepared seafood, and to pair it with such skill with just the right amount of everything else, and season it fautlessly, requires someone in the kitchen to know exactly what they're doing.

We ate our main courses slowly, and in silence. Like a special effects sequence from a pretentious food documentary, the crowds around us jittered and blurred and spun around in hyperspeed as our little table became the calm, focussed centre of the world. As the last forkful of crab-flecked pasta, and the last morsel of tender fillet steak disappeared from our plates, we came to in an empty dining room, all travellers having left for destinations up the country, and with only a skeleton staff to cheerily wave us goodbye into the dark, rainy night.

So yes, there were mistakes made that should be unforgivable. Nobody should be charging any amount, least of all the price of a ticket to Birmingham, for stale prosciutto and bad pesto, and even the good food was too expensive. The service needs to be dialled several notches back from hysterical, and it will never be particularly pleasant to eat your dinner in a train station departure lounge. All these things are undoubtedly marks against Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant.

But partly due to the wine - we had quite a bit of it, more for insurance reasons than anything else - but mostly because there are some people in the kitchens of this strange goldfish tank of a space overlooking the station concourse that are clearly taking pride in what they do - we left without the expected fug of queasiness and resentment, but with something almost approaching happiness. A first, after so many years, from a You Decide restaurant. So thank you, the voting public, for this one; I imagine next year I'll be back to visiting car parks in Croydon and rage-tweeting about brownfood, but for this brief moment all I have is gratitude. Gino D'Acampo's My Restaurant isn't bad at all.

6/10

You Decide 2018

Doesn't time fly? It seems like only yesterday I was sitting down to a £7 carvery in South Croydon, eyeing the mystery meats under the hot lamps suspiciously and expecting the worst, certain that it would all, as these public votes usually do, end in tears.

And yet, as you might remember, Toby Carvery was actually perfectly fine - not anywhere I'd rush to revisit but the food was edible, it was certainly cheap, and the service was - incredibly - better than many £100/head restaurants in central London I've been to.

The point is, these public vote restaurants don't necessarily have to be complete torture. If you enjoyed reading about a not-entirely-terrible all-you-can-eat carvery in Croydon then imagine how much more entertaining and rewarding a review of Sat Bains, or Le Gavroche, or Raby Hunt would be! You'd like to read about those, too, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you? Please?

Rules, as ever:

1. I can't have reviewed the restaurant before (have a quick Google if you're unsure)

2. It has to be either in London or easily accessible from London (I'll get on a train but I'm not flying to Athens)

3. Please check the restaurant you want to vote for hasn't already been added before you add it yourself.

Voting closes 5pm on Thursday; I think 3 days is long enough to gather a representative sample size.

Wish me luck...

EDIT: Well, I know I said Thursday (I actually meant Tuesday) but the longer I left it the further Gino D'Acampo extended his lead, so let's not prolong the agony. The concourse at Euston station (Christ) can soon expect from me and the person responsible for this place entering the race in the first place. Ciao.

The Toby Carvery, South Croydon

I fear this post is going to come as a huge disappointment to a great deal of you. Many years ago, I started the You Decides as a way of getting my readership involved in the blog decision-making process (such as it is), with the idea of plugging any glaring gaps in my post history or uncovering some under-reviewed gems. Very soon - because people are awful and people on the internet doubly so - it descended into a game of "what's the worst place we can send Chris to eat at", and so once a year I dutifully trotted off to rotten ripoff joints like the Rainforest Café and Frankie & Benny's, ate an overpriced meal of frozen chips and grilled chicken then wrote about how much I hated it.

Every year, another diabolical theme restaurant or godforsaken chain won the poll, another terrible meal where the only comfort was to get as drunk as possible on sugary lager (the utter crappiness of crappy restaurants easily extends to the drinks list) and wishing the whole thing was over as quickly as possible. And each time I thought this year's choice couldn't possibly be worse than the last, and yet somehow each time it was, reaching the absolute nadir in 2016 in the form of JRC Global Buffet, a place so utterly devoid of charm and hospitality that I still feel I left a part of my soul there, scattered on the filthy floors like so many discarded spring rolls.

I nearly didn't do a public vote this year. Not so much to save myself the misery of another awful evening (I can take it), but just because I was running out of things to say about these places. Bad restaurants, you see, are all bad for pretty much the same reasons. They're selling horrible frozen food at huge markups, service is indifferent, the drinks list is moribund and the whole experience is about as much fun as having a root canal. It may be occasionally fun to read somewhere being torn apart on a restaurant blog, but if I just end up having the same moan year after year it becomes a bit boring and a bit, well, pointless.

How nice, then, that the Toby Carvery in South Croydon won this year, and turned out to not be completely awful. Don't get me wrong - it's not a great restaurant. It's not even a particularly good restaurant. But I did leave after dinner not wanting to saw my own arms off with a blunt hacksaw and so is at least better than anywhere else so far that's won the public vote.

The least enjoyable part of the whole operation is the food, so I'll do that first. This may be an obvious thing to say, but you are never going to get a very good bit of roast beef, roast turkey - roast anything, for the princely sum of £6.99 a head. The huge lumps of meat sweating under the lamps at the Toby Carvery won't be artisan cuts from small producers, they won't be organic or ethically farmed or even probably fully traceable. They'll be the very cheapest bits of pig, cow and turkey that money can buy, overcooked to keep the greatest number of pensioners from sending any of it back.

Which is all perfectly fine, of course. I personally would not choose to eat pork so dry it resisted the game attempts from the member of staff to carve it into need slices and instead collapsed into pork dust. I would not, in the course of a usual day, travel to South Croydon to crunch through "roast" potatoes cremated to the colour of volcanic rock, or rehydrated gravy tasting of wallpaper paste. I am not, in my London Elite bubble, Toby Carvery's target market. But I know more than a few members of my close family who would very much enjoy a cheap roast in a restaurant attached to a Travelodge of a Sunday afternoon, and indeed do so on a regular basis.

You may wonder why I'm being so pragmatic about the Toby Carvery when I've given other chains like Frankie & Benny's or Bubba Gump such a hard time. It's a fair question. The quality of the food at Toby Carvery is hardly any better - if at all - than any other rotten chain you'd care to mention, and I could easily make a point about the damage the demand for this lowest-common-denominator commodity meat does to our food chain and animal welfare standards. But in a strange way it just feels better - there's a certain honesty to it all. It's not pretending to be a New York Diner from the 1950s or a Louisiana Shrimp Boil, it's just a place to have a cheap roast. And crucially, unlike so many other chains, it is cheap - my plate of vaguely edible meat soaked in packet gravy and topped with oily Yorkshire pudding cost £6.99, a pint of Stella £3.90. You get what you pay for - in a good way.

Even so, all of this would still not really be enough to lift the score out of ten out of the basement were it not for the service at the Toby Carvery South Croydon, which was - and I'm not being in the least bit patronising here - up there with the very best I've ever had the pleasure to experience anywhere in London. The receipt has the name "Seniz" on it, and so if that was the girl who took our order smartly and articulately, brought drinks and non-buffet food items, all without us barely having to look up to catch her attention, well, then Seniz, you deserve every bit of the tip we left that Toby Carvery didn't even ask for. Also full marks for keeping a straight face while bringing my friend the most ridiculous looking 'sandwich' either of us had ever seen in our lives - seemingly an entire white loaf cut lengthways with some salad and ham inside. Brilliant.

If ever there was a mediocre meal lifted by sparkling service, then, it was our little trip to South Croydon on a Monday evening. And I'm sorry - again - if my not having a completely godawful time is a disappointment to you, but that's just how it went. I didn't hate Toby Carvery, and the fact I even stayed for dessert (treacle pudding and custard, like being back at school) shows you how much I didn't hate it. In fact we were not hating it so much we would have considered another pint in the bar were it not for a group of young men talking loudly about muslims over-running the country (though seemingly not South Croydon based on the demographic out that night) which spoiled the atmosphere a bit. So we got the train home, in all honesty most likely never to return. I'll miss Seniz, though.

5/10