Dover Street Counter, Mayfair

First of all, apologies - to Dover Street Counter and readers of this blog alike - for the atrocious state of the photos in this post. What's strange is that I don't remember the lighting in the room being particularly subdued - each generously spaced table had a decent spotlight on it, and I could read the menu clearly enough, but for whatever reason they've all turned out looking like they were served at the bottom of the sea. Don't get me wrong, it's not like regular readers will expect world-class food photography, but they deserve better than this. Even in the one photo taken under more normal lighting conditions, of the front window signage, I've managed to capture an overflowing bin in the reflection.

So maybe the lighting might be more camera-friendly in the main long bar area, but I was actually pretty glad we ended up on our own table and not sat cheek-to-jowl with fellow punters. Sometimes I like eating at a bar but it has to come with the correct amount of personal space - if I feel in danger of being poked in the ribs when the person next to me cuts up their steak, that's not fun. Far better to have a bit of space to stretch out and relax to enjoy my ice-cold martini - no nicer way of starting a Saturday lunchtime - and a bowl of nicely seasoned homemade potato chips with a refreshing sour cream spritzed with lime juice.

Disco fries - chips with mayo and chilli and a few other toppings - veered dangerously close to the kind of thing you can order in your local 'Spoons, but were just about lifted above this level by virtue of the chips themselves being of elegant shape and perfectly crisp and greaseless.

Summer rolls - a token Vietnamese dish on an otherwise largely Italian-American menu - could in lesser hands have been a bit of a disaster, but they actually turned out very nicely. The peanut sauce was thick and salty and satisfying and the rolls themselves came with a fantastic crunch of supremely fresh coriander. Obviously they cost half the price (and are just as good) at my local Vietnamese place but this is Mayfair not Lavender Hill.

Snacks out of the way we got stuck into our mains, in my case a huge French Dip sandwich. A delicate crunchy baguette loaded with strips of nicely rare roast beef, topped with rich ragu and bound - a very clever move - with funky Taleggio cheese, it was a very satisfying Italian-American fusion affair, a real treat to eat. The accompanying gravy "dip" was perhaps a little thin and underpowered, but still just about worked - fortunately the sandwich itself was around to do most of the heavy-lifting taste-wise. And at £19, in Mayfair, for all that beef and cheese, it was something of a bargain.

I didn't try the famous Dover Street Counter cheeseburger but was told it was "very good" - it certainly looked the part, with its nice low profile for easy eating, and I could easily detect the aroma of properly charred beef.

A side of un-Discofied fries - which I did steal some of - showed that fries this good don't need messing about with; they stayed crunchy right to the bottom of the cup. Broccoli had been aggressively grilled so had a good amount of crunchy charred bits, but was otherwise fairly unremarkable. Maybe I'm just not a huge fan of broccoli but I can see why it needed to be on the menu to counteract all the cheese and meat elsewhere.

Desserts, despite being fortified by a glass of Vecchia Romagna, ended up being a bit disappointing. I've often noticed a tendency for kitchens to focus all their energies on the savoury courses and run out of interest and imagination when it comes to pudding. It occasionally also happens the other way round, when a place has a great pastry section and the mains are a bit lifeless, but this is more unusual. The Dover Street Counter apple pie may have been a cheeky tribute to the McDonald's version but needs to be a lot nicer - and prettier - to justify being five times the price, and the chocolate choux - incredible for something containing chocolate, cream and pastry - somehow conspired to be bland and boring. Cheesecake was pretty decent though, so there is that.

It's easy to see why Dover Street Counter is popular - it pulls off the same trick that Bob Bob Ricard are so good at, serving friendly, familiar comfort food done (mostly) well, in glamorous Mayfair surroundings and doesn't charge the earth for the privilege. This, of course, is to be admired. And despite my grumbling about desserts and a very slightly slow service (wine glasses left empty for long periods with the bottle squirrelled away somewhere out of sight) I can probably recommend the place, even with the caveat that, of course, Bob Bob Ricard do it better. And although we all left happy enough (and £79pp lighter, not completely unreasonably), I think if I wanted this kind of thing again I'd most likely end up there. I think they have better lighting, too.

7/10

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

The Audley, Mayfair

I ended up in the Audley, newly refurbished and reimagined gastropub in Mayfair, rather by accident on Saturday, and I'm afraid I didn't set out with my usual forensic (ha!) bloggery attitude to proceedings. I wasn't planning on having lunch out at all, but walking down Mount St on the way to the bus stop on my way from Oxford Circus I realised it was open, blessedly quiet, and absolutely bloody gorgeous. With 20 minutes before the kitchens opened I found myself ordering a Guinness and well, events progressed from there.

I always suspected I'd enjoy the place, ever since I caught a glimpse of an early menu on Instagram somewhere boasting things like smoked eel and horseradish 'toast', or London Particular and sourdough (a kind of pea and ham soup), but seeing it all up close was even more impressive, a menu of stark, poetic perfection in the St John style served at prices that for most places in London would seem very reasonable, never mind just down the road from Claridge's. With the expertly-poured pint of Guinness doing its work, I thought I needed a half dozen oysters, bowl of popcorn cockles, and a London dip beef sandwich.

And do you know what, I did need them. The oysters were expertly opened (no traces of shell), lean and fresh and served with a very nice mignionette. Popcorn cockles were cleanly-fried little nuggets of seafood which sang when doused with loads of Sarson's vinegar. And the London Dip would have been a very nice steak sandwich indeed even served without a pool of salty, rich, intensely flavoured gravy which seemed to grow in flavour with every new morsel of dipped sarnie.

The bill came to £50, which I suppose isn't cheap but then I did order more than enough for 1 person, things like oysters are never (and never should be) cheap and I can confirm it was all worth every penny. So there you go then, a little story of a nice new place to have lunch in Mayfair. Isn't it nice to have nice things?

9/10

Sarap, Mayfair

After so many *cough* (nearly 20) *cough* years living here, and nearly as many *cough* (15) *cough* writing about restaurants, it is surely something close to a miracle that London can still spring on me a genuinely new and exciting way of thinking about a particular cuisine. Filipino is one of the Cinderella foods of London - largely unsung and overlooked in the conversation about where to spend your dinner money, at least outside of a group of enthusiasts and expats, there are nevertheless a number of places doing great things. For a handy rundown of the best spots (as well as a neat summary of what Filipino Cuisine even means), I point you towards the Eater list, always a reliable place for discovering new places and/or plugging in woeful gaps in food knowledge (delete as appropriate).

I hope I'm not making too bold an assumption here but Sarap appears to be doing for the intricacies and varieties of Filipino food as Kiln does for Northern Thailand, or Lahpet for Burmese. It's a well-worn path, and one London absolutely excels at, to take authentic ingredients and traditional techniques and apply them to a modern, accessible and - dare I say it - trendy central London aesthetic. The genius of places like this - at least for the largely unitiated like myself - is that is that it doesn't matter if you know nothing about bagoong or isanal or calamansi, because the menu is shaped into a familiar arrangement of snacks, starters and mains and so you know vaguely how to order even if exactly what's going to arrive is a delightful surprise.

I was never not going to order the langoustine, and it's a pleasure to see so many of these thrusting young international bistro type places featuring their own take on the North Atlantic shellfish (see also: Kiln). At Sarap they serve theirs with aged beef fat (I mean why the hell not) and 'bagoong XO', bagoong being a fermented shrimp paste that features quite heavily in Filipino cuisine. The dressing was lovely of course, slick and satisfying with its gentle smokey beefiness and umami-rich oil, but it's worth also pointing out the langoustine itself had been timed perfectly to sweet and firm, without a hint of that mushiness or wooliness that can so easily creep in if you're not careful.

House pickles were great, especially the soft-boiled (and ever-so-gently pickled) quail's egg, an unexpectedly lovely addition which I will be looking out for on pickle selections from now onwards.

It was with the arrival of the Ensaladang Talong, though, that we realised that everything we were going to be served at Sarap would not only be exciting and unique, but thoroughly rewarding to eat. On a layer of smoked aubergine, sort of like a baba ganoush but thinner and sharper, sat a single plump slice of dark-red heritage tomato. This was topped with crumbled, salted duck egg, which not only added seasoning to the tomato and aubergine, but an extra note of creamy dairy. I don't know if the salted duck egg is a traditional Filipino thing, or something invented entirely from scratch at Heddon Street, but I do know I've not had anything like the combination before and I loved it.

I do know that pork is a mainstay of the Filipino feast and it would be a very strange thing indeed if Sarap hadn't featured it on the menu somewhere. But instead of anything as usual as roast suckling, the signature pig dish at Sarap is painstakingly boned and rolled trotter stuffed with rice and roasted to an irresistable crisp skin, the kind of thing that must involve a hundred different techniques to go exactly right at once. Sliced into neat rounds and dropped into a lovely sharp dipping sauce, this remarkable dish hit all the different pleasure points of texture and flavour contrasts, the filling of silky rice sitting next to crunchy pork rind like a kind of extra-meaty arancino, and it blew our little minds. An absolute must-order amongst must-orders.

Poussin Inasal (Inasal being a particular marinade involving lemongrass, ginger, garlic, you name it) arrived perfectly tender with a nice dark chargrilled skin, and a lick of calamansi for extra citrus. One of the more straightforward things on the Sarap menu, it still impressed with its beautifully tender flesh - and how often can you say that about restaurant chicken - and beguiling mix of herbs and spices in the marinade.

Not content with everything else, Sarap are also brilliant at cooking fish. This is turbot, neatly filleted and full of flavour, in a superb sour tomato broth studded with clams and sea vegetables.

Java Rice was ordered simply on the promise of 'mangalitsa fat', and boy it did not disappoint. On top of a mound of plump rice spiked with pickled peppers was a medallion of pork fat mixed with wild garlic. We were instructed to smush (their words) the fat into the rice so everything is coated in the herby gloss, the result being a kind of fat-washed paella (sorry just couldn't think of a better description). And yes, it was fantastic.

Not wanting the evening to end, we ordered both desserts. Burnt cassava cheesecake was our favourite, presented with macapuno (a kind of coconut as far as I can gather) whipped cream and some kind of dark green oil, maybe nasturtium. Suman, steamed glutinous rice, was interesting alright but there's something about the texture of the sticky, jellified rice that was a bit hard to get on with. But I'm sure that's just a personal thing and plenty of other people would love it.

Any even mildly curious diner could find more than enough to enjoy in Sarap, with its tastefully constructed plates of attractive ingredients, and it should easily find an audience in this part of town. But for anyone looking for something genuinely new and innovative, or for anyone who thinks London has lost its ability, post-pandemic, to take some risks and bring an often-overlooked cuisine on a new and exciting journey, Sarap is a true marvel, a unique and intelligent take on modern Filipino food that's never anything less than thrilling. I hope it has many, many bagoong-laced days ahead of it.

9/10

I was invited to Sarap and didn't see a bill, but would have been about £60/head I think

Manthan, Mayfair

Having followed chef Rohit Ghai's trajectory through London's very finest high-end Indian restaurants with intense interest, from Jamavar to Bombay Bustle to Kutir, it's fair to say that when I received an invite to his latest venture Manthan in Mayfair, I replied so quickly the PR in charge probably thought it was an out of office. In his time in charge of the aforementioned places he has probably done more than any other individual to introduce me (and many others) to the bewildering variety and sheer potential of top ingredients treated to intelligent Indian techniques.

A slightly tricky side effect to all this invention and artisinal detail, for this food blogger at least, is that figuring out what's going on in some of his extraordinary complex dishes, and subsequently writing about them, becomes an impossible task. Take these, for example, something called "Ram Laddoo". I know from reading the menu they are little bitesize spheres of fried lentils, and I can tell you they were lovely and moist and moreish, topped with pickled raddish and surrounded by a fantastic coriander chutney, but if you want any more detail, well, I'm afraid you're going to have to look elsewhere.

Buttermilk chicken skins, though, was slightly more familiar territory. Of course I couldn't tell you what into the spice mix other than pink peppercorn, curry leaf and ginger (thank you Mr. Menu) but I can tell you that they were so ridiculously addictive, greaseless and crunchy on the outside and soft within, they all disappeared in a matter of seconds.

Ghai has a particular skill with fish and "Sekwa" was three fillets of whitefish, each with a lovely crisp skin, in a spicy tomato sauce studded with sharp purple pickled onions. Anywhere else this would be a standout dish, but here it was merely another thing to coo and gurgle over before the next wonderful thing arrived.

...which were these jackfruit tacos. Now, you can believe me or not, but we didn't see a menu until halfway through the dinner (Ghai had offered on arrival to send out his favourite dishes as a kind of blind tasting, and who was I to argue with that) and I swear that when we were eating these we assumed they were pulled pork or lamb, so completely meat-like were the fatty, richly flavoured fillings. To later discover they were in fact spiced jackfruit did set off a certain amount of panicked soul-searching. If vegetarian food can taste so convincingly meaty, what's the future of actual meat? I should add, though, that although available in vegan form I believe the taco "shells" themselves involved dairy of some kind, so... phew. To be quite honest.

Fortunately, shami kebab was very definitely real meat - goat, in fact, in a thick, dark sauce of beguiling complexity and served with - hooray! - a portion of roast bone marrow. Together with a soft and flaky bundle of roti it was another completely unassailable match of flavour and technique, the soft pieces of goat melting in the mouth, loosened by the marrow.

Finally, "Osso bucco" bookended the mains, another fabulously dark and rich sauce containing slow-stewed lamb on the bone, served with a bowl of "risotto" - spicy wet rice flavoured with who knows what (curry leaf, Jaffna spices - menu). Both the lamb and the rice were of course great, but somehow even more interesting were little pancake things (I know, I know) which had an extraordinary flavour, smooth and buttery and meaty.

To describe this dessert, I am having to enlist the help of Google. That sphere on top of is the "gulab jamun", a kind of syrup-soaked spongecake (look I'm sorry if that's wrong, but I'm doing my best) and it sat on top of "srikhand", sweet strained yoghurt. Underneath that was more laddoo, here providing a protein-rich base for the dessert rather than a savoury starter. Look the point is it was all very nice, that's all you need to know.

And finally, without wanting us to leave without being completely discombobulated, we were presented with kheer ("a sweet dish and a type of wet pudding popular in the Indian subcontinent, usually made by boiling milk, sugar or jaggery, and rice") spiced with garlic, slightly although not completely as weird as it sounds, and in a very pretty little pastry casing. And I don't know about you but I'd rather be challenged than mollycoddled when it comes to rice-based desserts.

I really do apologise for my embarrassing lack of Indian food knowledge, I only hope that, as in certain other areas of my life, what I lack on detail I more than make up for in enthusiasm. The fact is, though I completely fail to do justice to the amount of effort and culinary knowledge that clearly goes into it, the results at Manthan speak for themselves - this is genuinely spectacular Indian cooking by a kitchen at the top of its game, and though I wasn't paying on this occasion, given the glittering Mayfair location the prices are pretty fair. No one dish is over £20, and you could expect to leave with a bill of around £70 a head with a couple of glasses of wine and/or a custard-based digestif.

And while Manthan is the latest and most attention-grabbing restaurant in his empire, I should remind you that Jamavar, Bombay Bustle and Kutir in Chelsea still exist and are all still brilliant. In fact next week Kutir are launching a game menu and if you're like me and will order anything with feathers that's been shot out of the sky, that's more than a reason to revisit. But mainly, just rejoice that you can eat food as good as this anywhere, and more to the point in these strange times, you can eat anywhere at all. If you want to celebrate a return to normality with some of the best Indian food in the capital, you can do hardly any better than a meal at Manthan.

9/10

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