My wife, MsB, had wanted for some time for us to have dinner at Belgravia’s posh pub The Thomas Cubitt in Elizabeth Street, just one stone’s throw from where Kensington & Chelsea begins. So tonight we finally made it.
We went for the ground floor bar, where the menu includes burger, pie, and fish’n’chips for roughly £15 to £16 (whereas the elegant first floor dining room has more sophisticated and expensive meals on the menu, all focused on seasonal British cuisine).
The Cubitt is very popular with the local West London set and tourists alike. It ranks a very decent #532 out of 17,837 restaurants in London on Tripadvisor, with a Certificate of Excellence thrown in on top for good measure.
The owners also run The Alfred Tennyson, The Orange, both of which we’ve been to before and liked (even though the staff at The Orange can sometimes be a bit snippy), as well as The Grazing Goat, which we still have to check out. It is named after the 19th Century master builder of Belgravia, whose statue we had walked past on our way to the pub.
Both the interior and the outside of the building are nicely decorated and you immediately feel welcome and cozy. We chose to be seated outside, and, after short deliberation, went for Lyme Bay market fish and the rib-eye steak. The fish of the day was pan-fried pollack fillet and came at £19. It was served with samphire, beans, and apple cubes. The Cardington grass-fed rib-eye for £23 came with crushed Jersey Royals, grilled cabbage, and bacon Bearnaise.
In my experience, whenever you order a medium-rare steak in England, you’re lucky if it’s just a tad under well-done, but the good people at this establishment managed to come up with a solid medium steak, which I greatly appreciated. My wife and I found the steak very flavoursome and some parts of it tender and soft, others were maybe a tiny bit rubbery. Compared with a £16 steak in Camden Town or Bermondsey, The Cubitt was doing pretty well, and you know in advance that you’ll always pay a premium for a top West London location, so all fine in our book. The cabbage and potatoes were going well with it, the sauce was ok.
The generously sized fish fillet had been pan-fried to the point and we loved the texture. The presentation was beautiful and involved what we believe might have been a ring-shaped, hand-made potato crisp consisting of little thin strings of potato (but don’t pin us down on that!) that was sitting in a vegetable-herbs based green concoction, and a dough-potato based thing that looked like a tiny Yorkshire pudding, plus a couple of edible blossoms. We enjoyed the mix of flavours of the various ingredients and sides, maybe the flavours could have been stronger.
For dessert we opted for the delicious warm cinnamon & apple donuts with Guiness caramel (£7.50) and the selection of British cheese (£11.50). The generously stocked cheese platter was absolutely marvellous and a true delight.
The quick, friendly, helpful staff really impressed us. We enjoyed our Saturday dinner at The Thomas Cubitt and will be back. We’d give it 3.75 out of 5 on the gastropub scale.
