The Cadogan Arms, Chelsea

There's no sign of a cost of living crisis on the King's Road, but then the people of Chelsea aren't known for their frugality. The Cadogan Arms is a grand old Victorian boozer - which means it has nice high ceilings, stained glass and a big carved wooden bar - but then this is also Chelsea so they can do a good cocktail and have oysters and fancy salads on the menu. The place had been on my list for years thanks to the "new" owners (this was in 2021, when the country was in full plague mode) being JKS of Gymkhana, Hoppers and Trishna fame, but also because it's not that far from my house in Battersea, and living in Battersea, believe me, a short journey home is a rare treat indeed.

It was a good thing we'd booked - the place was completely slammed on a Friday night, not at all a given in many city centre pubs I've noticed lately. Welcome cocktails (well, we welcomed ourselves with them) were very good - an El Diablo with both mezcal and tequila, and a Sticky Toffee Pudding Old Fashioned which combined buttered bourbon and PX to produce a remarkably authentic STP flavour profile. There's a definite North-American-Mexican lean to the drinks list - I also notice they sold Agua di Madre as a non-alcoholic option, and interesting range of drinks made with fermented kefir. I mean, this is Chelsea, after all.

Now, I hesitate - usually - to review a place after having just one dish (each) but this is, after all, a gastropub and we definitely weren't the only people just popping in for one dish before heading home to watch the new White Lotus. My burger was perfectly fine - a good shape and size, easily eaten with my hands so many marks for that, but unfortunately the beef was overcooked to grey and rather dry. They didn't ask me how I'd like it cooked, so maybe this is just how they want to serve it.

Much better was a £34 sirloin, a giant chunky thing cooked accurately albeit a little timidly - we'd like to have seen more of a dark crust - but it tasted great and it really was something almost approaching a bargain for your money. Both sets of chips - chunky and fries - were decent, and the bill which I completely forgot to take a photo of but we did pay honestly, was £47.88 each, about right really. I mean, we didn't leave hungry.

It's almost always the case that when a restaurant doesn't have to be good to make money - when your customer base is the captive audience of an airport terminal, for example, or a posh suburb of London where residents are independently wealthy and not very discerning - it isn't. I have had some genuinely diabolical meals in Kensington and Chelsea - and Belgravia, and Hampstead - over the years, to the extent that it almost puts you off trying anywhere in this places again. But I'm glad I challenged my prejudices at the Cadogan, and found a place that both knows its audience and tries to do things well. And such an easy journey home, too.

7/10

Cascina della Taverna, Desenzano del Garda

One of the best things about visiting food-obsessed friends in a foreign country is that - if you're lucky - you generally get taken to the best places without having to put much of an effort into the decision-making process yourself. And often, after a wonderful meal in the middle of nowhere, you get driven home without having to worry about taxis or late-night trains. This is all, clearly, to the good.

The one teeny downside, though, is that taking such a back seat on planning this meal at Cascina della Taverna, I quite shamefully a) did very little research on the place beforehand, and b) even now couldn't tell you exactly where it was on a map without cheating and using my iPhone picture history. All I knew, as we arrived at this remote farmhouse somewhere over the border to Lombardy, was that it was a family-owned restaurant that specialised in steak cooked over a wood fire. And to be quite honest, that's all I needed to know.

The first indication that this place took their steaks very, very seriously was a menu that boasted a pretty comprehensive selection of cow not just from the local area but from as far afield as Poland, Ireland and Germany. I'm don't know if you've noticed but the Italians are famously, to the very last one of them, almost psycopathically protective of their national cuisine, and for a cut of Hereford beef from Ireland to find its way onto the menu of a restaurant in Lombardy, presumably risking the ire of the locals, is quite a statement of confidence in its quality.

However, I didn't come all this way to eat Irish beef. Instead, I thought I'd start with some horse. In this case, carpaccio, lightly seasoned with salsa verde and drizzled with olive oil, with a lovely firm-but-biteable texture and an interesting gamey flavour somewhere between venison and steak. I'd eaten horse before (not least a fillet steak we cooked in Verona a few days before) but never carpaccio, and it was a genuine revelation how well it worked instead of the usual beef.

But nice though the horse was, I was here for one reason only. And that was a giant Fiorentina steak, dark and crusty on the outside and just touching room temperature in the very centre, cooked in their beautiful wood-fired hearth, in the true Italian farmhouse style. From the list of options I'd decided to go as local as possible, so this Barbina Franciacorta came from, as the name suggests, Franciacorta which is a wine making region just further north west past Brescia. And of course, it was everything I hoped it would be, a masterclass in live-fire technique matched with expert animal husbandry and the usual Italian obsession with finish and quality. Just look at the way that crust glistens, and how dark and rare the meat is next to the bone. Utterly brilliant.

We may have eaten some other things, I can hardly remember. The thing is, I was so far out of my usual blogging mindset I barely remembered to take a photo of the food at all, and would have happily just scoffed down my steak, paid up and then been led back to the car and been driven home like a slightly baffled elderly English relative on a rare trip abroad. I think there were some potatoes, and a bowl of greens, probably puntarelle as they seem to have been on every restaurant menu in Veneto that week. I'm sure they were lovely. But I had my steak and that was that.

I think the bill came to about €70 each, artifically inflated (sorry Italian friends) by my stubborn insistence on the full 3-inch thick Fiorentina rather than any lesser costata on offer. I think you can eat at this place for a lot less, or - as is probably more usual - take a few more people with you to share the Fiorentina. But bugger it, I regret nothing. It was certainly the best steak I'd eaten since Extebarri, and it was a damn sight cheaper than that, let me tell you.

There's no doubt, having stayed in Verona with a blogger friend from way back, that I had a slightly exaggeratedly wonderful experience of the food in this part of the world than would have been the case if I'd just relied on my own research or - horror of horrors - just done the usual tourist thing and eaten wherever looked decent on the day. But that said, outside of a few very dangerously glamorous spots in Verona and Venice, I very much got the impression that €20/coffee ripoff joints very much the exception, and for the most part Italian food really just is that good. And for a case in point, Cascina della Taverna, a shining embassador for one of the worlds great cuisines.

8/10

Brutto, Clerkenwell

People used to say about Polpo, the game-changing take on a Venetian bacaro founded by Russell Norman and Richard Beatty, that it was "never really about the food". You went for the carefully crafted atmosphere of a canalside Venetian bar, exciting new cocktails (at least to London) like Negronis and Aperol Spritz, and a front of house where piercings, tattoos and beards were not just tolerated but promoted, instead of as had previously always been the case, rendering their owners unemployable. People went for all that, the story goes, and the food was an afterthought.

Initially, this did indeed seem to be the case. I really did not have a good time with the food on my first visit back in 2009, and being a lot more unforgiving of teething problems from a brand new kitchen team back then, gave it a rather grumpy 4/10. However, even then there was something new and exciting about the place - a certain sense that you enjoyed being in that room and watching the rather louche Soho service do their thing, and the fact that so many others clearly thought the same (the queues very soon trailed down Beak Street) meant you felt like some kind of exclusive club, brave new adventurers in this new direction for London dining.

Russell - for he is now un-partnered from Beatty - has learned a lot in the intervening fourteen years, as you might hope he would. Brutto is his latest venture, a pitch-perfect take on a neighbourhood Tuscan trattoria (I can say with some confidence, having been there), with the same eye for interior design detail and clandestine, bustling atmosphere, but - crucially - with a kitchen that right from the start seems to be out to impress. The Negronis, as you might imagine, are a good way to start.

Tonnato is a dish that has to be completely perfect or it's completely disgusting, but fortunately this one was the former. Slices pork replaced the more usual veal, and sliced caperberries provided just enough pickle to cut through the tuna/anchovy (I assume both but who knows) sauce. It also tasted a lot better than my photo makes it look, which goes for everything else we ate that evening. Sorry, it was dark in there.

Anchovies and (lots of) butter is a combination I can always get behind, especially with anchovies as good as these - soft and melt-in-the-mouth - and of course accompanied by St John sourdough.

There's an element of the menu design at Brutto that's more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but there's nothing wrong with that. An Italian friend laughed out loud at the idea of ordering "penne con vodka" in a restaurant in 2022, but it was genuinely excellent with nice big healthy shapes in a rich tomato sauce. Photos are for illustrative purposes only.

Even more exciting was rabbit papardelle, rich and fully flavoured with mysterious herbal notes, the giant folds of pasta glistening with butter. Again my photo does not do it justice, for which I can only wholeheartedly apologise to everyone at Brutto. You sincerely deserve better.

This is not, as first appears, the Creature from the Black Lagoon but in fact (you'll have to take my word for it) an absolutely blindingly good side of puntarelle with some kind of bagna cauda, an extremely addictive combination. Almost everything on the menu is simple on paper but in some way complex and unexpectedly extra rewarding on arrival. Nothing is lazy or ordinary.

Finally, a giant plate of pink roast beef with crunchy roast potatoes. Perhaps it could have done with a sauce, but then maybe that's not the point of Italian steak - I seem to remember not getting one with my Fiorantina in Veneto a couple of weeks back. Anyway the beef was lovely, and the potatoes crunchy on the outside and full of personality.

The bill came to about £60/head, or at least would have done had they not knocked a couple of negronis off, so thanks very much for that. But either way, it seems about the right amount of money to pay for a dinner like this, pretty much equivalent to the cost per head in Polpo back in the day (adjusted for inflation) and let me tell you, this food is an order of magnitude more accomplished than that (at least in the early days).

We've come a long way, the restaurateurs and restaurant-goers of London, both. We've suffered through worldwide recessions and repeated miserable lockdowns, we've followed new directions and new concepts, mourned the closures and cheered the re-openings. But for as long as somewhere like Brutto can spring into existence, survive and thrive - and blimey it's hard to get a table - there's a chance there are, in fact, more reasons to be hopeful than not. Brutto, then, perhaps not as gamechanging as Polpo, but much more accomplished. And I know which one I prefer.

8/10

Galvin Bar & Grill at the Kimpton, Bloomsbury

In an ideal world, the grand dining room of a five star hotel in central London would guarantee a wonderful time, a special occasion destination restaurant where you forget your troubles, open your wallet and bathe in the splendour of a world-class hospitality team at the top of their game. The reality is that all too often, bogged down by large, unfocussed menus that try to be all things to all people and that require a kitchen to twist in a hundred different directions at once, hotel restaurants can be remarkably hit and miss. For every Ritz Restaurant (still the absolute peak of hotel dining in the capital) there's somewhere serving a sausagey £25 burger or over-battered fish and chips, and even some of the most respected names can still occasionally get it wrong.

When the Kimpton first opened, their flagship restaurant was the Neptune, somewhere you could order a seafood platter for a pretty-reasonable-actually £38 but which didn't really stand alongside the best places in town and didn't quite set pulses racing. They also committed the unforgivable sin (at least in my opinion) of having shells of interesting creatures like spider crabs and razor clams decorating the raw bar that weren't available to order on the menu. Anyway that's now gone, and in its place in the same glitzy room have arrived the Galvin brothers who know a thing or two about making hotel restaurants work.

And one glance at the menu is enough to reassure that you're in safe hands. The Galvin style is very much "British with a hint of French", meaning things like cottage pie and Dover sole but also their signature Tarte Tatin. Think the Ivy, only good (look, I'm sure you did have a lovely time at the Ivy but I'm also sure it wasn't anything to do with the food). Even house bread is a cut above - this lovely warm sourdough was spiked with Marmite, lending its sticky crumb a pleasant kick of umami.

Crab (from Dorset) came with a neat layer of spiced brown meat on top of a good thick amount of fresh white, and was absolutely everything you'd ever want from a crab starter. And though focussing too much on the prices at a place like this is probably a bad idea overall, I think £16 for this generous amount of hand-picked crab (I even found a teeny bit of shell, so you could tell they'd started with the full animals) isn't bad at all.

In a starter that contains salmon and caviar, why list it on the menu with the title "potato"? Because this was no ordinary potato starter. Even their description of "Warm potato pancake" only goes so far in describing what is one of the more exciting things I've eaten involving the humble spud. More accurately described maybe as a sort of potato mousse, it was so light and fluffy and deliriously richly flavoured that it absolutely lived up to its top billing - the (lovely actually) salmon and caviar and crème fraîche were merely supporting artists to an absolute star of a main ingredient. This was a really exceptional thing, an absolute must-order.

But the fun didn't end there - Dover sole was literally perfect, gently bronzed with butter and with the flesh lifting easily off the bone in solid, meaty fillets. Capers - plenty of them - lightened the load of the butter and there was a torched half of lemon to add any more citrus as required but really you didn't need any distractions from the sole itself, a breathtaking bit of fish.

I'm told the steak offering at Galvin will vary slightly with availability; on this particular evening the only one served on the bone was fillet, so that's the one I had to go for. It may be entirely psychological but I always think steak on the bone is far more interesting with a greater range of textures, and there's a huge amount of fun to be had picking at bones. This particular fillet was - as I'm sure you can tell even from my slightly murky photo - beautifully cooked, with a good dark char and fantastic grass-fed flavour. Accompaniments, including superb fries and a classy béarnaise, were also all faultless.

Tarte tatin, as is usual from a Galvin restaurant, was brilliantly crunchy and sticky and just on the right side of being so sugary you could develop some serious long term condition from taking a second bite. It came with 'clotted cream ice cream' in case you were worried pastry soaked in sugar was a little too worthy.

But best of the desserts was bread and butter pudding "Gary Rhodes", a fitting tribute to the great man as this was just wonderful. Surprisingly easy to eat given the amount of double cream and butter it must contain, with a good amount of vanilla adding an important extra layer of luxury, it was about as far from the a tinned school meal as it was possible to imagine. Genuinely brilliant.

I've been using a lot of superlatives, I know, I'm sorry. The fact is it's so nice to be out somewhere like the Kimpton and eating food like this, that it's hard not to get just a bit carried away. I'll try, though, for the sake of objectivity. Firstly yes, it's pricey - not stupidly so, but £51 is a lot to pay for a 300g steak on the bone, and I think with the obligatory glass of champagne and bottle of wine the bill for two people would be north of £100/head. You can certainly pay the same for worse, but this is not an every day spend. And secondly, and I'm really clutching at straws here thinking of anything that's much of a negative, this huge room does need quite a few people to "come alive", and earlier in the evening with only one or two tables taken it felt a bit soulless. By the time we left though it was buzzing.

And that's really all I have to complain about. Everywhere else where it counts, from the slick service to attractive, accessible menu to the mature, confident dishes themselves, Galvin Bar & Grill delivers in spades, a gleaming, grown-up operation that exudes class and style from the first jolly welcome to the final wave goodbye. Plenty have tried and failed in spaces such as these, but when it works the marriage of glamorous surroundings, attentive front of house and seriously good food is utterly beguiling, enough to make you wonder why there isn't one of these in every 5* in town. The Galvins have hit upon a formula here that puts plenty of other - in fact most other - hotel restaurants to shame, and whats more have the cheek to make the whole thing look easy. It may not, in fact, be easy, but you can let them worry about details like that. All you need to do is bring a wallet and an empty stomach, and they'll take care of the rest.

9/10

I was invited to Galvin Bar & Grill and didn't see a bill.

The Ethical Butcher at the Spurstowe Arms, London Fields

Time, they say, is the great healer, and it seems that's just as true of Covid time as it ever was. Yes, the long, cold months of the last lockdown were thoroughly miserable to live through, even to those who made it through relatively unscathed to the other side, but as the days since we emerged blinking back into the sunlight have turned into weeks and then months, it feels like the odd precious highlight - an escape to the countryside, a Zoom-set pub quiz, a delivery meal - shine that little bit brighter than the abject fear, repetition and drudgery that surrounded them.

One such rare highlight was a package from the Ethical Butcher, a company that's made its name with a completely uncompromising attitude to the meat they sell, a product of sustainable, regenerative agriculture that also (either by sheer coincidence or as a direct result of the care taken to produce it) tastes incredible. I remember the aroma that filled the room when I opened the box up, not the usual butchers stale meat smell (although there's a part of me has a soft spot for that too) but of farmland, wild meadows and open countryside. All meat tastes, and smells, of the life it's lived - and if that's been a good life, that information is generously passed on.

When I received an invite to try the Ethical Butcher's residence at the Spurstowe Arms, then, I jumped at the chance - and not just because the place is a short walk from where I'm living at the moment. It's a lovely old pub, the Spurstowe - original high-ceiling Victorian bar, nice little beer garden out back, picnic tables on the street - and having some elevated, sustainable food to go with your pint of IPA would make an unbeatable combination.

And it started very well. Their regenerative agriculture charcuterie selection, salami and Cerrunos ham, were about as good as you can get anywhere - particularly the salami which had a lovely complex flavour and a texture just the right side of firm. Even some of the bits outside of the Butcher's control were worth talking about - excellent pickled chillies which despite their fierce heat we couldn't stop eating, and some nice salty olives - but I'm afraid I'm not sure we needed the very ordinary cold toast sprinkled with salt and olive oil. Without those, the dish would have been better.

I've had a lot of tomato salads, and not many of them have been very good - I think the mistake is thinking that any tomato grown in the UK has the potential to be better than those from the Med, and that really just isn't the case. These, though, from West Sussex, were superb - an incredibly deep flavour and complemented very well by a simple dressing of walnut oil and balsamic.

So far so good, and the good news about the mains is that you could tell immediately that this was very, very good meat. They arrived on the table with that familiar smell of pasture and meadow, together with a strong beefy note of aged cow. And they tasted almost as good as that smell indicated despite, sadly, both being rather overcooked. Bavette should really only be served rare, which I did ask for, but it arrived medium-well. Thanks to the fine raw product it had no hint of chewiness or dryness, and cut remarkably like fillet, but yes it would have been nice to try it a bit bloodier as it would have been even more impressive.

Similarly the burger would have been that much nicer with a bit of pink inside, but was still an excellent example of its kind, with good crunchy salad elements, a sharp homemade relish and what tasted like proper (ie. properly rubbish) American burger cheese though I'm sure there was more to it than that. The strong, dark crust on the beef itself and the nice loose ground hinted at what could have been if it had just been cooked a little hotter for a bit less, but hey, it was still worth the effort.

Overall, though, the sheer quality of the Ethical Butcher's product shone through the odd mistake from the kitchen, and this was still a good showcase for their product. And of course, if you don't trust the Spurstowe to keep an eye on the clock I can thoroughly, wholeheartedly recommend their meat boxes - particularly now it's barbeque season - where you can try their lamb chops, steaks, burgers and so on in the comfort of your own house/garden and if you overcook it you only have yourself to blame. Besides, a week or so after my meal at the Spurstowe, it's not the mistakes I remember, but the charcuterie, that amazing tomato salad and the incredible smell of aged beef filling the room. Oh, and the cat which sat at our table. Time, you see - the great healer.

7/10

I paid for the Ethical Butcher's meat box myself, but the meal above was an invite and I didn't see a bill.

STK, Aldwych

There are lots of rubbish steakhouses in London. One of my earliest posts was of an evening at Angus Steakhouse on Coventry Street, where I suspected I was going to have a terrible time and absolutely did, but in the end of course what I or any of the readers of my blog thought about the food at that awful place was of profound insignificance. Nine years on, Angus Steakhouse, and Steak & Co., and Black and Blue, and countless other terrible tourist dive steakhouses are still with us because they don't need anything so frivolous as good food, and good reviews, to make money. They just need a highly visible West End location, a huge number of visitors naive enough to be shaken down for their tourist dollar at least once, and a gross profit per dish that would make a 5-star hotel room service menu look like a school canteen.

Yes, there are a lot of rubbish steakhouses in London, and there always will be. STK, though, is not one of them. However much it looks at first glance like a Croydon nightclub (disclaimer: I have never been to a nightclub in Croydon, but I strongly suspect a lot of them look like STK), and however much they may court the Instagram crowd in the manner of places like Sketch with their signature lighting schemes and plush décor, where it matters the food offering is considered, classy, and generally worth the money being asked for it. Which is definitely not true of Sketch, take it from me.

Anyway, to STK. The first thing I do in any steakhouse, and I recommend you do the same - it's a great control variable, is order a martini. This came in a frozen glass (tick), with a twist (tick), was not too dry (tick) and was made with Bombay Sapphire (IMMEDIATE FAIL AND DISQUALIFICATION). In a world where Beefeater exists, I will never understand why anyone's house pour should be Bombay Sapphire - it's horrid stuff. Nevertheless, it was a cold martini, so there was still something to enjoy.

The house bread at STK is this bizarre thing. It's a large brioche bun, topped with blue cheese butter, alongside a little pot of bright green chimmichurri. None of it should work together, or ever has worked together historically as far as I know, and yet, you know what, it was quite nice. Sweet brioche, salty blue cheese butter, and a little dipping pot of herb and garlic. Yeah, it's weird dipping bread and butter into oil, and there was quite a lot of different flavours going on, but none of them were jarring. And how much more interesting, in the end, than the usual white roll.

But I imagine you'll be wanting to know what the steaks were like. First up, my Dedham Vale sirloin (dry aged to 28 days apparently, which I always think is the right amount of time to dry age steak). If you're used to the super-charred Basque style then the appearance of this rather timidly-grilled specimen may come as somewhat of a disappointment. However, through pinpoint seasoning and by virtue of the fact the steak itself was clearly high quality - powerfully flavoured and with a texture just the right side of tender - that I polished the whole thing off incredibly easily. Which anyone who knows me will tell you, is a rare thing indeed. The less said about a horrid "peppercorn sauce" that tasted of sugared wallpaper paste the better, although the red wine jus was quite nice.

USDA fillet came topped with a mushroom, because you could, and why the hell not, and was similarly seasoned and cooked perfectly accurately. As expected, and desired, the USDA steak was more about buttery mouthfeel and that addictive melty texture than the more distinct flavour of grass-fed cow, but this was still a Nice Steak. You'd hope so, too, for £39 for 200g of it, but that's USDA for you. The Dedham Vale was £26, which is fantastic value and the one I'd go for if I was to return.

Sides also acquitted themselves admirably. Mac & cheese was full of the good stuff, and with a lovely golden brown crust of grilled cheese on top. To be perfectly honest I barely had a taste of this before it disappeared, but I suppose that just shows you how good it was.

Fries were great, which is always a relief - crisp and dry and nicely seasoned. And broccoli with chilli, pine nuts and pecorino was classic combo done very well. So no complaints there, either.

It feels like damning with faint praise to say STK could have been a lot worse, but I don't mean that in a cynical way. A flashy imported US chain self-consciously occupying a prominent West End location, with an equal emphasis on clubbing and cocktails than steaks and service, it could so easily have been an utter car crash, falling inbetween two conflicting priorities and pleasing nobody. That even I, a cynical steak-obsessed food blogger with an aversion to late nights and loud music so extreme I come out in hives if I'm not in bed by 10pm, managed to enjoy my evening here is a testament to, despite appearances, a kitchen team that by and large know what they're doing and service (with the usual caveat that they knew I was reviewing) that didn't put a foot wrong. Swap out the Bombay Sapphire from the martinis and rework that peppercorn sauce and I'd find even more to like. But even in its current form, STK is quite the thing.

Postscript: As I occasionally try to do on the back of a comped invite, I went back to STK for lunch to sample a bit more of the menu, in this case hoping to try their burger. Steakhouse burgers are usually fantastic things - in good steakhouses at least - using the cheaper cuts of the dry-aged animals available on the full steak menu to make a luxurious high-end sandwich. As it turns out, though, STK do not do a burger, despite what their lunch menu from January would have you believe. So I ended up with a couple of wagyu sliders, which were fine, but not at all what I was after. So I'm afraid as a steakhouse that doesn't do a steakhouse burger, they lose a point. Service was still efficient, except the bill came not only with a space for extra service to be added (despite it being included already), but the card machine tried the same trick as well. And to that I ask - for the occasional numpty you manage to con out of an extra tip or two, is it really worth the aggro caused to all your other customers? Or indeed, another dropped point in a review...

6/10

I was invited for the main meal at STK and didn't see a bill, but paid for the sliders at lunchtime myself.