Belzan, Liverpool

This was actually my second visit to Belzan. The first, according to my iPhone photo history, was on 8th May 2020, but was a little bit tricky to review as the building was operating as an improvised deli, with boxes of fruit and veg arranged amongst the booths and benches that would normally be hosting paying customers. Like so many restaurants during the first national Covid lockdown Belzan had pivoted to, well, just about anything they could think of to get them through the End Times and so this friendly neighbourhood restaurant became your friendly neighbourhood greengrocers and wine merchants. I can't honestly remember what I came away with - definitely a box of veg, possibly a bottle or two of natural wine, and I'm sure it was all lovely - but I think I'm confident in saying it's a period of time both they and myself are happy to forget.

Fast forward to 2025, and Belzan is happily back at doing what it's best at - namely charming the pants off lucky Wavertree locals and curious out-of-towners alike. It is utterly impossible not to fall in love with the place, which is close to the platonic ideal of an unpretentious local bistro as it's possible to imagine. Staff all act like they've landed their dream job - which of course they probably have - the menu is full of things that you'd want to eat, and it's all pulled off with such easy grace that you wonder why there can't be a Belzan on every street corner in the country.

I started with a "Peter Piper", a kind of dirty vodka martini involving guindilla (Spanish chilli) pickle juice. Like the best dirty martinis it sailed very, very close to being completely wrong while at the same time just about pulling it off - the pickle juice blasted your senses but the vodka and vermouth just about managed to ground the flavours in something approaching normality. That weekend, in a moment of hideously misplaced confidence, I attempted to make one myself using burger pickle juice and gin. It didn't work.

The bread course at Belzan - sourdough cooked by "Leila", a local who offered their services during that same first lockdown and has been a supplier since - comes with a choice cauliflower butter, a lovely concoction full of satisfying, earthy vegetal flavours, and oil and vinegar, the vegan option but which they'll happily provide alongside the cauliflower butter if requested. You can tell a lot about a place from their bread offering - the attention to detail here was very evident.

Also from the "snacks" was this giant grilled scallop gratin, a lovely plump bit of sweet, meaty seafood (with roe attached I was delighted to discover) draped in bubbling grilled cheese. I don't know why Coquilles Saint-Jacques have gone out of fashion - perhaps they just belong to a period of French cooking that's a little bit looked down on these days - but scallops and cheese definitely need to be a thing again. This was gorgeous.

Courgettes came soft and grilled, with bits of blackened skin adding some very nice detail, and topped with a strong, salty pine nut gremolata. Underneath was a hummus made from butterbean, bright white and silky smooth and the perfect foil for the other vegetables. This is one of those dishes seemingly so simple and rewarding it might inspire you to have a go on the BBQ at home, which one day I indeed may do, albeit perhaps with not quite so much of a cavalier attitude as that with which I approached the pickle martini.

Grilled hispi cabbage was only slightly less successful than the courgettes, possibly because the Lancashire cheese was asking to do a bit more of the seasoning heavy lifting than it was equipped to deal with. A bit more salt on the cabbage and in the romesco and this would have been better, and perhaps it could all have been a bit warmer, but it was still a fun thing to eat, with the little crispy bits of charred cabbage adding more of those interesting textures.

Poached trout came as a giant, well-seasoned and perfectly timed slab of fresh fish and was a joy from start to finish. Underneath a Vichyssoise sauce was full of satisfying earthy flavours and was studded both with runner beans and mussels, the latter being sweet-pickled somehow. Very clever stuff.

And finally from the savoury courses, a huge pile of grilled lamb chops, each blushed perfect pink and so deliriously tender you could have cut them with a spoon. They came on an interesting bed of labneh and grilled nectarines, a vaguely Middle-Eastern range of flavours that worked incredibly well, but the crowning glory was a thick, salty, rich lamb jus that I wanted to bottle and take home with me. If you can tell a lot about a restaurant from their bread course, you can tell even more from their ability with sauces. This lamb sauce was as close to perfect as it's possible to get.

We found room for one dessert, a strawberry choux bun so delicate and light that, when I attempted to cut it in half, flattened hilariously onto the plate, leaving us with a kind of strawberry-pastry Eton mess. It tasted fantastic anyway, you won't be surprised to learn, as did the sweet (but actually not overly sweet) Riesling I'd picked to go with it. Can't leave a place like this without trying a dessert wine - it's the rules.

The bill came to £75 each, which although not a complete bargain (I think the days of restaurant bargains have long gone, with certain notable exceptions) is still great value for the amount of skill and effort that had gone into everything we tried. And certainly, we weren't the only people to think so, with Belzan turning the tables throughout this Wednesday evening, quite a hopeful thing to see from an industry seemingly so consumed with doom and gloom.

So could there be a Belzan on every street corner? Should there be? Let's face it - the trick that places like this pull off so successfully is to make the difficult and skilful look easy and effortless, and if after 7 years they've not even opened a second spot in Liverpool never mind attempted to throw their net wider probably tells you all you need to know about the logistics of running a modern British bistro. But then that just makes what Belzan are doing all the more special - if you want great food, made with care and intelligence and served with a smile, then you will just have to come to Smithdown Road. You won't regret it.

9/10

Restaurant Dominic Chapman, Henley-on-Thames

This isn't going to be a very long post because, well, it wasn't a very long lunch. Sometimes you want to spend all day cooing over a tasting menu, getting through way too many bottles of wine and ending up leaving just as the next set of guests are arriving for dinner. Sometimes - quite often, in fact, in my case - that is very much what you want.

But then some other times, you want one or two courses, a glass of well-chosen fizz, and to then head off for a day in the sun. That's not to say Restaurant Dominic Chapman isn't a lovely place to hang around - it's the flagship restaurant of the very smart Relais Henley-on-Thames, which can boast some buildings dating back to the 14th century, and has for the best part of the last 300 years been a hotel right on the banks of the river. There's a plush dining room with conservatory opening on to an expansive, sun-drenched (at least on this day it was) courtyard, but I recommend you get the best of both worlds by sitting on the soft furniture just by the open doors, which still feels quite al-fresco.

As I said, we skipped starters and dove straight into mains. House burger was very nicely done, with a huge lump of lovely crumbly beef and what felt very much like a kind of custom house dressing somewhere between mayonnaise and a Caesar dressing. Fries were perfect - crunchy and golden and moreish, and were very swiftly all hoovered up. They make their own actual mayonnaise, too, which as any Belgian will tell you is the best thing to dip chips into.

I've been served enough dry, mealy, overcooked duck in my time to know that to get it as good as this - tender as you like, pink in the middle, with just a touch of crunch on the skin and a good thick, salty, rich sauce - requires proper kitchen skills. And this might be a good idea to talk about the titular Dominic Chapman, who I first bumped into cooking at the (now sadly departed) Royal Oak Paley Street. He then spent a good few years touring round some of the best kitchens in east Berkshire - the Beehive in White Waltham, the Crown at Burchett's Green - before finally opening this, his own place, with his own name above the door. His is a well-practiced and classically trained kitchen, and the years of experience shines through in every dish.

We were so impressed, in fact, that we decided to stick around for desserts. Both were basically fautless in that English country gastropub style, a sticky toffee pudding all gooey and syrupy, and a superb treacle tart, each served with lovely soft house ice cream. I perhaps would have liked to detect a bit more (in fact, any) advertised honeycomb in the treacle tart ice cream as it's one of my favourite things in the world, but maybe they forgot. Anyway, no real harm done.

The bill came to £94.60, which I realise isn't super cheap but then this is Henley, in rather plush surroundings, and did include a very nice glass of Rathfinny fizz (Sussex). I also notice that their website lists a £20 for two courses (£25 for three) lunch menu which we weren't offered, so this might just be weekdays. Either way, it is possible to eat here on more of a budget, just as it's equally possible to have four full courses, go HAM on the wine list and spend all day here. All approaches are valid.

However you approach your time at the Relais though - and plenty of people were just doing drinks and snacks in the courtyard, which also seemed positively encouraged - I can't imagine you're likely to come away disappointed. A kitchen as accomplished as this can, I imagine, turn their hand to more or less anything and make a success of it, but serving crowd-pleasing Fresh-British classics in lovely surroundings for a decent amount of money is a surefire way to win yourself fans, just just from the lucky residents of Henley but much further afield. They've certainly made one of me.

8/10

The Buxton, Brick Lane

Continuing a recent theme, here comes along another example of excellent restaurant pedigree producing a fantastic place to eat. The Buxton is a smart and buzzy spot halfway down Brick Lane, within trotting distance of sister restaurant the Culpeper which is also a lovely (if often wildly oversubscribed) modern British bistro with rooftop kitchen garden. The same guys also run the Green in Clerkenwell and the Duke of Cambridge in Angel, neither of which I've been to in many years but are probably still worth a look.

So, they've got the pedigree. And with that comes the ability to write an absolutely beautiful menu full of seasonal British-French delights, at prices that are scarcely believable (in a good way) in 2024. If this was a brand new restaurant in its honeymoon period, I'd have to caveat that with the possibility that after a handful of reviews came in they'd quietly bump up the prices - it happens a lot. But no, the Buxton has been open since May 2019 and has somehow survived all the way through lockdowns and facemasks and disrupted supply routes with (as a quick Instagram history check reveals) the same attitude to value.

Choosing from the chalkboard menu at the Buxton is largely an exercise in deciding which handful of dishes you can just about live without, then ordering everything else. We decided cheese croquettes with chive emulsion sounded too good to pass on and indeed they were lovely, all gooey inside and greaseless outside, the chive dressing superbly light.

Whipped cod's roe panise came as cute little square fritters of fried gram flour pastry, topped with neat folds of salty, smooth tarama. As you'll see even from the slightly murky photos (the bartop lights had a very strange orange hue which I didn't notice at the time) presentation of the dishes at Buxton went from charmingly rustic when appropriate, all the way through to exact and geometric when it made sense to do so. There was quite the range of techniques on display.

As if the chalkboard didn't contain enough joy, there were even two off-menu specials we were told about as we took our seats. This was the first of them - homemade bottarga crumbled over chalk stream trout tartare, with pickled radish, wild garlic flowers, herbs and who knows what else, so prettily and colourfully arranged it could have easily come out of a Simon Rogan kitchen. At one point in the evening I overheard one of the front of house mutter "wow, beautiful" under her breath as she picked up a plate of this from the pass. And if you can still impress someone with presentation of a dish she's probably been serving all day long, you're probably doing something right.

Asparagus - great big thick spears, nicely charred from the grill - came on a bed of brown butter sauce, best described I suppose as a kind of toasty, nutty hollandaise. We're right smack bang in the middle of asparagus season at the moment, and so of course they're on the menu everywhere but I'm still impressed with places that are finding some new way of showing them off.

I wouldn't normally have ordered tomatoes with stracciatella - I'm less forgiving of this kind of thing being on the menu absolutely everywhere than I am of asparagus, because I love asparagus - but actually this was very interesting, with a kind of sharp keffir lime dressing to liven it all up. Tomatoes were well seasoned too.

For £15 I was expecting perhaps one langoustine, or maybe two teeny ones - there's more than one restaurant I've been to in the last couple of years serving langos so small I'd questioned whether they ever should have been landed at all - but not here. Two giant beasties, with claws so big they contained more meat you'd find in a tail in some places, perfectly timed with sweet, soft flesh, came drenched in "fermented prawn butter". And if you're thinking that maybe they gave the blogger table bigger specimens than everyone else, I can assure you that our seats overlooked the kitchen and every other plate of langoustine that hit the pass was at least the same size.

Last of the savouries was a mutton chop, tender and full of flavour, with a neat little pile of pickles. It was very good, but once you've tasted the Cull Yaw from such places as Mangal 2 or Kiln, other types of mutton tend to disappoint slightly. Even so, we quite happily polished it off, and had no real complaints.

For dessert, rhubarb Paris Brest (or even "Breast" as they'd put on the menu and someone had tried to gingerly correct) which had an irresistable light, flaky texture and a good strong hit of rhubarb purée, and "croissant ice cream", apparently made by soaking croissant in water, making a kind of croissant stock, and then making ice cream from that. Maybe I've been lucky, but I can't remember being anything less than happy with any homemade ice cream in any restaurant in the last few years. And I'm pretty sure I'm not getting less fussy - places are just getting better at ice cream.

So, yes, the Buxton is good. Very good. Food in central London as well-chosen, intelligently treated and smartly served as this could - perhaps even should - cost easily double what they're charging for it. True, portion sizes are controlled, but it takes just as much skill to assemble two exquisite whipped cod's roe panise as it does four or six, and £15 for two big langoustine is vanishingly rare in the capital. It's a little tricky working out what our bill would have been as a couple of the dishes were off-menu, but if I say the food came to about £50pp, and drinks another £20pp, I don't think I'd be too far off the mark. Very reasonable indeed.

And I very much hope the team behind the Buxton don't stop there. It must have taken a heroic amount of steel and determination to survive through two years of pandemic after having been open barely a few months, but to come out of all that with an operation quite as mature and confident is an achievement indeed. I hope we see a few more tastefully updated East End boozers with a seasonal chalkboard menu and a nice cocktail list over the coming months and years, but even if they stay where they are for the moment, we've still got so much to be thankful for.

9/10

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

The Garden Museum Café, Lambeth

Beautiful 15th century Lambeth Palace is a strange London landmark - widely recognisable, with a stately position Thames-side and passed by a number of busy bus routes, it is nevertheless very rarely visited, most of the main structures off-limits as the Archbishop of Canterbury's official residence and despite the existence of an interesting little Garden Museum, the garden itself is only open to the general public two or three days a year. This spirit of reclusiveness extends to the Garden Museum Cafe, a lovely glass-box modernist annexe to the Tudor palace which, despite doing a brisk trade during the day, is open for dinner only two days a week. And yet there's something about places with weirdly restrictive opening hours (see also: Sweetings, which I'm definitely going to try one day) that makes me want to visit them even more.

So on a rainy Tuesday night, we turned up at the Garden Cafe for our usual early sitting to find it, somewhat against expectations, completely full. "Are you here for the talk?" asked the front of house; turns out there was a special early sitting for attendees of a talk about gardening happening in the museum a little later, and sure enough by 7pm or so the room had half emptied out.

Nothing seemed to affect the speed or attentiveness of the staff however, and both before and after the great gardening exodus, service was spot-on. House focaccia - chewy and salty and lovely - arrived alongside a bottle of very natural Garnacha which, admittedly, took a bit of getting used to at first but then I like a challenge. I know natural wine has its critics - and I'm sure they'd find plenty to criticise with this bottle, cloudy and funky and every other natural wine cliché - but I always get the feeling I'm doing the world, and myself, a favour by drinking it. Almost certainly rubbish, of course, but there you go.

It's a sign of a good restaurant that it can put together a strictly seasonal menu that's just as tempting in the depths of midwinter as in the middle of summer. Pumpkin minestrone had chickpeas, carrots and kale in a hearty, herby vegetable broth and was extremely enjoyable. Also excellent was a silky smooth whipped cod's roe on toast, which for some reason I forgot to take a picture of but I'm sure you can imagine what cod's roe on toast looks like. A healthy portion too, for your £8.50.

But best of the starters - and I would say that because I ordered it - was a snail and bacon salad, which had plenty of meaty snails and lots of lovely crisp bacon dressed in a nice sharp vinaigrette studded with fried croutons. Like the other dishes it was full of rustic charm, and generous of flavour.

Two pescatarian main courses demonstrated the Garden Café knows how to cook a bit of fish. Monkfish came as a butter-browned chunk of tail sliced into two, dressed with a dense, salty tapenade and on a bed of green sea beet leaves. I seem to remember there was some yellow beetroot in there too.

...and a generous fillet of plaice sat on a very buttery mash (you have failed at mash if it can't be described as "very buttery") and a genuinely lovely leek velouté, like a bonus course of posh soup. On the side, a plate of purple sprouting broccoli (PSB for those in the know) with another knockout sauce - "sauce Maltaise" which (he quickly Googles) is apparently a hollandaise made with blood orange. So now you - and I - know.

All the dessert options sounded like they had something going for them (Munster & Roquefort is a great little combo for a cheese course) but we ended up with a rhubarb craquelin choux bun, a delicate ball of pastry stuffed with cream and topped with some glorious sugary chunks of stewed rhubarb. And despite the generosity of the previous courses, it didn't last long.

It's a fun little place to be, is the Garden Café, and a great place to eat. Service, as I mentioned earlier, was completely spot-on and only added to the general atmosphere of easy conviviality. There are lots of restaurants, up and down the country, attempting to do the kind of thing the Garden Café is doing but it's notable how often "charmingly rustic" slips back to "plain and careless" - it takes real skill to make ostensibly simple and unadorned food work this well. "It costs me a lot of money", as Dolly Parton so famously said, "to look this cheap".

And speaking of cheap, the bill for three people and that bottle of natural wine came to just under £55/head, which is about as good value as you're going to find in London these days. And probably most other parts of the country too, for that matter. Lambeth Palace itself may remain stubbornly restricted, but the Garden Café is more than worthy of your attention, a popular and friendly little operation with a personality all of its own.

8/10

Lulu's, Herne Hill

Thank the lord for the lengthening days, for lifting the spirits and lightening the mood and - most importantly from my point of view - dramatically improving the quality of food photography on this blog. I'm sure Lulu's would be a lovely, cozy little spot even in the depths of winter, but in the early evening in early summer its quaint corner aspect (previously completely wasted on a hairdressers) looks out over a bright and bustling Herne Hill with gaggles of kids making their way home from school, families queuing patiently for craft ice cream in the station, and friends - and their dogs, and their dog friends - catching up at the Commercial over pints of London IPA. You feel like you're in the opening scenes of a Richard Curtis film.

Lulu's is owned by, and is an offshoot of (they share the same kitchens) the local stalwart Llewelyn's bistro next door, but is aimed at a more casual and - let's face it - younger crowd. With its loud music (inside) and enthusiastically chain-smoking clientele (outside) it may not be a place to bring your parents, but we were comfortably the oldest people in the place on Wednesday evening, and I was once called a Millennial. They also - needless to say - don't take reservations, but I made damn sure I was through the door as soon as the stool was removed from the doorway.

The menu is an intriguing mix of Italian and Catalan, with everything having something going for it so choosing from even this quite small list of dishes was quite a struggle. While you mull it over, they bring a little bowl of those matchstick fries you see so often in the supermarkets in Spain but which, for no good reason, have yet to catch on over here. They go very well with a Marmalade Martini, but then I imagine most things do.

There's a lot going on with the gildas, but this is no bad thing. With pickled rather than the more usual salted anchovies, alongside pickled onions, olives and topped with cute sweety drop chillis, they were a lovely mix of salty, sour and hot, and pretty little things too, to boot.

Soppressata, on the other hand, was anything but busy - just a generous plate of sliced salami which ate very well, particularly when you came across one with a chunk of black pepper embedded in it. Also full marks to the staff for not completely ridiculing the fact we assumed they'd misspelled sobresada, and just politely pointing out that soppressata was, actually, something quite different.

Jamon de Teruel was soft and salty and just fatty enough, and another generous portion. Perhaps we didn't quite need two plates of ham as a starter, and to their credit the front of houise did gently attempt to advise against it, but do you know what, I regret nothing.

Broad beans, preserved artichoke, piatonne beans (think sugar snaps, only huge and light in colour) all arrived draped in shavings of smoked ricotta and studded with fried breadcrumbs, and was all as lovely as that sounds. Eating broad beans (not to mention piatonne, which I'd not knowingly eaten before) is one of the best things about eating out in early summer in this country - it's a genuinely sad moment when they start disappearing from menus.

Raw scallop, cucumber and grape is a combination you may have come across before if you've ever sat down at a small plates restaurant in London in the last few years, but is popular for a reason - it's a great combination. But binding it all together was a thick, rich ajo blanco which didn't hold back on the ajo at all, and pieces of mint leaf, perched vertically on top as if carried by leafcutter ants, added a lovely extra summery note. There was also a very nice grassy olive oil.

Lastly of the savoury courses, a roll of lamb belly so ridiculously soft and tender it basically dissolved in the mouth into pure lamb stock. On top, slices of courgette and leaves of endive more summer joy but the most interesting and clever bit of this dish were the chunks of orange which worked surprisingly well with everything else on the plate, not least the lamb. It was a sign that alongside technical skill, the kitchens at Lulu's can experiment successfully when required.

Having had such a great time so far, thanks also in part to a bottle of riesling which disappeared remarkably quickly, attention turned to desserts. Rhubarb millefeuille was a very accomplished bit of pastry work, like everything before it very much of the season but cleverly put together and very enjoyable. We had it with a glass of dessert wine which I'm almost certain they described in loving detail but which I'm afraid is lost to me now.

So yes, perhaps we could have gone a bit easier on the booze but I'm not going to apologise for enjoying myself as much as I possibly could in a smart, efficiently run little neighbourhood restaurant designed to be as enjoyable as possible. Lulu's is the kind of place that every corner of London deserves but which, sadly, very few have. Like the London Shell Co. in Highgate, or the Baring in Islington, it's a brand new operation that feels already like an integral part of the community, perhaps not somewhere to kill yourself travelling across town on the offchance of snagging a table, but a place for Herne Hillians to hang out, drink, nibble and eat while normal life goes on all around. And with every seat taken on a Wednesday night, it seems it's already found its audience.

8/10