We have just come back from Michelin-starred The Ninth in Fitzrovia, and were heavily impressed. Chef Jun Tanaka, whose, you guessed it, 9th restaurant this is, offers “simple but refined French Mediterranean-style dishes”, all made for sharing. Probably because of the rumoured recent pasta obsession of the chef (which is a very good thing, considering his immense skills making pasta!), the dishes today were mostly Italian influenced. For a very competitive £27 per person you can choose three tapas dishes each to share. Between the two of us, Ms B and I ordered 6 tapas, following the waiter’s recommendation to order the duck leg twice, because it was by far the most substantial dish and you want to get a good fill (she put it more elegantly). Besides that, we ordered (3) sea bass carpaccio, salsa verde & pickled kohlrabi; (4) pappardelle, venison ragu, hazelnut and sprouts, (5) pumpkin fregola risotto, […]
Benares Restaurant – Best Indian in Town
My wife Ms B and I have just returned from a tapas sharing platter lunch at Benares, Atul Kochhar‘s Michelin-starred Indian restaurant on Berkeley Square. The 5-dish street food sharing platter cost a mere £30 for the two of us and we topped it up with two cocktails for another £10 in total. A mind-boggingly marvellously brilliant deal. You pay more at most pubs in this town to get two portions of rubbery, battered cod with sliced, oily, deep-fried potatoes and some luke-warm IPA. Right from the moment we arrived at the ground-floor reception, the service staff were very friendly, polite, helpful, relaxed, unpretentious and knowledgeable, a true delight. The atmosphere is also very pleasant, with dimmed light, sound-absorbing décor, warm colours, a nicely decorated bar and a lounge area with a little pool where lovely gerberas were peacefully floating around. It was in the lounge area where we […]